Khiran Bhat is true to what he says he is: a “citizen of the world.” Among other things, he has authored poetry volumes in both Spanish and Mandarin, a short story collection in Portuguese, and a travel book in Kannada. He is also a speaker of Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, French, Arabic, and Russian, and has made homes from Madrid to Melbourne, from Cairo to Cuzco.
In this interview, I asked Bhat about writing across genres, self-translating from and into a myriad of languages, and being a writer who identifies as planetary, belonging to no nation—and thus, all nations at once.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a polyglot, a citizen of the world, and a writer “writing for the global,” are there authors (especially those writing in any of the twelve languages that you speak) whom you think were not translated well, and therefore deserve to be re-translated?
Kiran Bhat (KB): What an interesting question! I’m rarely asked about translation, and since I dabble in translation, I’m glad to see someone challenge me on a topic that speaks to this side of myself.
It’s a hard one to answer. I would pose that almost all books are badly translated because no one can truly capture what an author says in one language. Every work of translation, no matter how ‘faithful’ it aspires to be, is essentially an interpretation, and that interpretation is really a piece of fiction from the translator. Some people really want ‘authenticity,’ but when I read a translation, I just want something that compels me to keep reading (probably because I’m so aware of the ruse of it all).
For example, a lot of people prefer the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, but I fell in love with the Constance Garnett translation. This might have been because it’s easy to find on the Internet and I was reading it on my computer while waiting on a ferry crossing Guyana and Suriname in 2012, but Garnett’s effortless storytelling style really made me fall in love with Pierre and Natasha. I can understand why technically Pevear and Volokhonsky are truer to Tolstoy’s sentences and paragraph structures, but I feel riveted when I read the Garnett version. I want to turn the pages and find out what’s going on, and I think that’s important as a reader: to get lost and immersed in a fictional world.
Other books on my mind (that I’ve read bilingually) are Toer’s Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind) and Orham Pamuk’s Benim Adım Kırmızı (My Name Is Red), and I actually like the translations as much, if not better, than the originals. I also fell in love with reading Kafka in Spanish rather than English; something of that language works for Kafka’s concepts more.
Now to actually answer your question . . . First book that comes onto my mind is Don Quixote. It’s a wondrous book, but it’s hard to read in anything but antiquated Spanish; it’s very contextual of its time, and I just don’t know how it can be approached beyond that. Bhyrappa’s Parva is a masterpiece in Kannada but I don’t think the English version does it justice. Most poetry also fails, because poetry is very specific to language, and is hard to render in any outsider tongue.
AMMD: In translating the Mayan poet Antonio Guzman Gomez for Interim Poetics across the Japanese, English, Tzeltal Mayan, and Spanish languages, you used “cross-pollination” as a metaphor for your creative process; can you shine a light on why you chose that concept as a representative of your translation work?
KB: What I wrote about Antonio was very specific to the work he is doing: writing haikus in Spanish and then self-translating them into Mayan Tseltal. I chose to translate them into English and Kannada to mirror this exact same choice of native language and mother tongue, and so when I said cross-pollination, I was meaning the translations were a unique crossroads between Mayan, Spanish, English, and Southern Indian linguistic cultures and conventions.
That being said, I strongly believe in any act of translation being an act of interpretation, and I like taking my very specific influences and ways of seeing the world, and bringing them into my translation work. I think translation is just as much about getting to know the source author as it is the translation. It’s a very intimate process, and I think all acts of translation are ultimately a cross-pollination—of the cultures the author brings with them, and the culture(s) they are trying to connect to when they translate.
AMMD: You once said, “When I dream, any language can assault me,” further alluding to the act of traversing cultural and linguistic boundaries as going beyond one’s selves and the collective, and thus as an arrival at the limitless. In your latest poetry collection, Speaking in Tongues: Poems in Spanish, Mandarin, and Turkish (Red River, 2022), does the creative process vary per language? How so?
KB: In some ways yes and some ways no. Speaking in Tongues compiles three suites written in Spanish, Turkish, and Chinese. All three languages are completely different in how they compose thought, so my poems vary a lot in terms of syntax and structure. I also know these languages to different extents of mastery, which tends to limit or enrich what I can say.
That being said, my process in writing polylinguistic poetry is very much the same. I start out in the source language, struggling towards a complete thought. I also usually have to write some sentences in English because when one is lost in the moment, one has to write whatever is coming to one’s self. Then after I finish, I go back and re-read the poem. I try to find a suitable translation for what I had to write in English (which usually tends to be woefully wrong), and then I take out and reform obvious errors. Then I write a draft of it only in English, and send both versions to a friend of mine who is a native speaker of that language—who can also use the English self-translation in case they don’t understand what I wrote in the original. Usually my poems need a lot of work and are completely covered in edits when I get them back, but then I rewrite the whole thing again, and that poem tends to be good.
In Speaking in Tongues, both the English self-translation and the finalised version of the source language poem are printed, so native English speakers can enjoy my poems without thinking, and people who know both languages can see the amount of work I did to write something interesting in both.
AMMD: I love what you wrote here when asked about one of your latest novels, we of the forsaken world . . . (Iguana Books, 2020):
I wrote the best drafts of my novel . . . in Malindi, Kenya and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I was inspired to write poetry in Mandarin while suddenly visiting Tianjin and having a line of poetry come to me in that language.
How has this nomadic lifestyle played a role in being a polylingual writer and translator?
KB: I absolutely would not be the writer I am now if it were not for me having been a nomad. My entire vision of what art should be has been framed by living a very global lifestyle, in which I’ve moved all around the world and learned a little bit from each country I’ve lived in. I tend to not see people in the same stereotypes that ninety percent of the world works with, and I have a larger space of cultural references to draw from as I create my work. I’m also very invested in blurring boundaries and transnationalising literature, and I try to make sure every project chips a little bit away from how we create ‘nationally.’
we of the forsaken world . . .’s structure very much discombobulates purposefully as it is read. In the same way I might jump physically from three months in a Malay village, to a few weeks island-hopping the Maldives, and then spend a year in Bangalore, India, I structured my novel to shift between sixteen characters across four national perspectives—without giving the reader time to establish them as part of their national context. I want to shift the story before the labels set in; I want to blur the border before it has had time to be constructed. And that’s just in we of the forsaken world . . . . My web novel Girar is set in 365 places in the world, and emails an instalment set in another place each week to its subscribers. Speaking in Tongues very much contends with the idea of what is a foreign language and what is a mother tongue, and what is meant to be the use of one or the other.
I don’t think I would have structured my work in such a way if I just lived all my life in the United States or in India or Spain or wherever and saw that as the focal point from which I narrate myself. I narrate not from the space of one national pillar, but from the flux of stones being tossed across mountains of different shapes and colours, because that is the life I have lived, and that is the type of literature I’d like to see more of.
Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American author, traveller, and polyglot. He is known as the author of we of the forsaken world . . . (Iguana Books, 2020), but has published books in five different languages, including Early Stories (2013), Accepting My Place: The Early Journals (2017), as well Autobiografía (Letrame Editorial, 2019), a poetry collection in Spanish; 客然恼说 [Kiran Speaks] (White Elephant Press, 2019), a poetry collection in Mandarin; Tirugaatha (Chiranthana Media Solutions. 2019), a travelogue in Kannada; and Afora, Adentro (Editorial Labrador, 2020), a short story collection in Portuguese. His latest works are Girar (2021), and Speaking in Tongues: Poems in Spanish, Mandarin, and Turkish (Red River, 2022). He has had his writing published in The Caravan, The Bengaluru Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Cordite Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, 3:AM Magazine, SOFTBLOW, Asymptote, The Best Asian Short Stories, and many other places. He has been to 150 countries, lived in twenty-five cities in the world, and speaks twelve languages, but currently lives in Mumbai.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines. They’re the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine, and former editorial reader at Creative Nonfiction magazine. Their lyric essay has been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and their prose poem was selected for The Best Asian Poetry. Their latest essays, poetry, and translation appeared in BBC Radio 4, the Oxford Anthology of Translation, and in The University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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