Born in Colombo, the community organiser, translator, art curator, and spoken word artist Nedra Rodrigo immigrated to Canada during the twenty-six year Sri Lankan Civil War. Befittingly, she has since worked to delineate refugee writings and the literature of conflict: “When a cultural identity is deeply tied to a landscape through song, poetry, story, or even film, being forced to leave that place, or witness its destruction, erodes the psyche.” She has been translating contemporary literary works from the Tamil, a language spoken widely in her homeland of Eelam or Ilankai (now a part of what is colonially known as Sri Lanka) as well as in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Mauritius, and South Africa.
In a panel discussion in late October 2023 titled ‘Unsettling Borders: Translation’s Intimate Labours’, Nedra spoke from her experience as the translator of Tamil Eelam revolutionary leader Thamizhini’s memoir Oru kuurvaaLin Nizhalil (published as In the Shadow of a Sword for SAGE Yoda India in 2021): “Although weaponised, literary translation is driven by hope … that we can know one another and that our experiences can be permeable to each other through language.”
In this interview, I conversed with Nedra on tinai as the affinity of literature and land; her translations of Tamil writers; refugee-settler writings, and the literature of war and exile, among other things.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You have rendered the works of Tamil-language writers R. Cheran, V.I.S. Jayapalan, Puthuvai Ratnathurai, and Rashmy into English. I wonder about your translation process, given the variety not just of writers but also of genres, aesthetics, and modes you translate from.
Nedra Rodrigo (NR): The first few poems I translated, I did so out of necessity. I had approached a wonderful Tamil translator, Prof. Chelva Kanaganayagam, for some poems, and he pushed me to translate them myself. I entered into it with a lot of hesitancy because I was never convinced that I could bring the kind of emotion I experienced while reading the Tamil poems across into English. Once I became more confident in my capacity to reclaim the language, I could go beyond the words to think more about the contexts and genres of the poetry, and try to bring different tones and textures to the translation. The work I’ve translated is generally focused around the war in Sri Lanka, so I also see the ways in which these texts act as archives, containing forms of knowledge that the majoritarian state continues to try to erase. So, my process is often a balancing act between maintaining the aesthetics and the historical content of the source text. The more I read, the more I realise how much these texts are also often in conversation with each other, and with the literatures of other oppressed cultures.
Very few translators have the luxury of doing nothing but translate, and I often have to juggle my translation work with my paying work and community work. I try to give my headspace over to one text at a time, so I ‘live’ with one author or poet for a while. It’s a challenge of translation, that you hold meaning in your head in two languages as you weigh it back and forth. Precision means a lot to me, so I often sit with my research as well as my own memories to try to do justice to this work. I think I’ve done best when I have been able to work consistently, every day—even if it’s just a page.
AMMD: You have translated In the Shadow of a Sword (SAGE India, 2020), the memoir of Thamizhini (leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), as well as Canadian Tamil writer B. Devakanthan’s quintet, Prison of Dreams—the first two being His Sacred Army and A Time of Questions (Mawenzi House, 2021). All are works of prose by exiled Tamil figures, but how different was translating memoir from translating fiction? And as a refugee yourself, do you have this instinctual predilection to translate texts about exile, from writers who are also refugees?
NR: Thamizhini was also a poet. There’s a rich literary quality to her memoir, though she tended to adopt a more formal tone at times, no doubt because she wanted her memoir to do the work of explaining the war. The work is obviously entirely from her perspective, and she was very careful to distinguish between what she knew and hearsay, as a way of taking account of her life. The memoir was compiled from her notes, as the book was published posthumously. It therefore has an uneven quality to it; the chapters are of uneven lengths, the tone shifts from the poetic to historical accounting that is almost journalistic in its narration of facts. There is a deep struggle in her as she critiques the LTTE, a group to which she had given eighteen years of her life. I was very conscious of these shifts as I translated and had to try to be faithful to that unevenness as a way of documenting her process in her historical moment.
Translating fiction, with the Devakanthan quintet, was a lot less grueling, though it presented the almost exact opposite challenge; it is peopled by dozens of characters, and we often pass, in this beautifully unsettling style he has, from the thoughts of one into another. The war is examined from a range of perspectives, documenting both the magnitude and the minutiae of what it costs the peoples and places. In some ways, the experience of translating was still quite similar, as I became aware of the archival material these books contained. The chief difference would have to be that, with Thamizhini’s memoir, I had to learn a lot of martial terminology that entered the Tamil language because of the war. With Prison of Dreams, it’s the range of the regional terms that Devakanthan employs as he shifts the narrative from different places in India and Sri Lanka, and the characters speak slightly different types of Tamil. There are significant differences between Eelam Tamil (spoken in the north of Lanka) and Indian Tamil, but there are also minor variations between Eelam Tamil and Colombo Tamil, for instance, that are just impossible to document in a translation.
I absolutely feel the desire to translate these exiled authors (Thamizhini being forcibly displaced within Sri Lanka, and Devakanthan leaving as a refugee first to India and then to Canada), as their works are important documentations of the war that displaced me as well. I tend to be drawn to authors who have an uneasy relationship with the state, as I do. Going through the process of becoming a refugee makes you question the nature of social contracts—whom they include and whom they leave out in their guarantee of rights. So even when I translate poets who were not displaced or exiled from Sri Lanka, I am drawn more towards queer poets or dissident poets whose rights are precarious.
AMMD: The last three volumes from Prison of Dreams—Liquid Fire, A World in Ruins, and A New Testament—are forthcoming from Mawenzi House in the next few months. Are there translation practises and philosophies that you wish you had applied to the first two volumes, which you’ve made use of in translating the last three?
NR: I think as soon as your translation is published, you pick it up as a different person. You can’t help seeing all the flaws in it. I cringe at some of the stilted language in sections of the first two books (what we call translatorese), because I was so focused on accuracy that I lost track of aesthetics. I always wish I had more time to step away from my early drafts and come back to a book later, so I could rework it in some holistic fashion. I was lucky to have M.G. Vassanji as the editor on these books, as he did push me to explain my choices and challenged me when the prose was too stiff or mechanical. I did some of the work during the pandemic, while suffering from a frozen shoulder, and unfortunately I’m sure my physical pain manifested in the drafts.
The last books are very different because I had developed such affection for the characters and was then confirmed in my choices, so they flowed a lot more easily. I was also no longer in physical pain. I think that my philosophy of translation has changed quite a lot after the conversations I’ve been able to have with several wonderful translators, who have helped me see translation as a reading. To recognize that the work is not about rendering an absolute conversion of a text, but more a framing. It doesn’t mean you give up accuracy, but you move away from the literal to the literary, and that’s been such a relief.
AMMD: In your personal essay ‘Crossing Terrains: Unsettling Tinai while Translating Tamil’ from River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (trace press, 2023), you talk about tinai—which, in Tamil Sangam poetry, doubly means landscape and literary genre. “[T]he coast, the fields, the desert, the forest, and the mountains, each of which had its own flora, fauna, musical sounds, and ambient moods,” you wrote. Can you speak more about that? What do strong links with land reveal about Tamil literature?
NR: The Sangam (guild) literary corpus is dated from as far back as 150 BCE. The idea of tinai—which gave each of the aforementioned five landscapes a mood that was linked to its indigenous flora and fauna—has been carried over into contemporary literature and visual media (including Kollywood movies). Tinai also drew from economies and livelihoods associated with those landscapes. This is not to say that all Tamil literature is focused on landscape, or employs devices of tinai, but rather that the influence of tinai can be traced even in many contemporary works. I am interested in the way these relationships to land are depicted in wartime and post-war Tamil literature, as the codification of tinai allows the author to express a more nuanced relationship to land beyond a purely territorial claim. It also allows the author to articulate a relationship to the land than is ontologically Tamil, and remains distinct from state formations and erasures.
AMMD: In that same essay, the central imageries were the mango tree and the mythical vethalam—interweaving them with myth and language, memory and land. You wrote:
I do not see my translation practice as seamless or perfect. I entered it with a sense of urgency to translate works that I thought would be useful for a younger generation of Tamil scholars and artists growing up in the diaspora. I have come to accept that my practice must always contend with a ‘there’ and a ‘here’.
NR: As far as Tamils are an imagined community, we are a community that is drawn together by the ways in which we imagine our geographies as Tamils, drawing from the codification of tinai in our language, and our deep psychic relationships to land (even those that don’t appear on maps). I am fascinated by land and landscape, and how our relationships to land define us culturally and psychically. I am also interested in the way literatures of the oppressed can serve as archives, or testimonies to their experiences—like the Latin American literary genre of testimonio. As a people are erased from history or maps, they seek to express themselves in literary forms, where they can speak to their historical experiences without fear of reprisal. Tamils speaking among themselves in literature written in Tamil articulate relationships of kinship, landscape, oor (village/town). Toronto still has many active oor organizations that meet regularly for cultural events honouring their roots, because Tamil beliefs hold that a person’s being is deeply connected to the soil of their oor.
I feel a deep sympathy for young Tamil people growing up in diaspora who are cut off from these psychic relationships because they were displaced by war. I think whenever we translate, we have an audience in mind for whom we translate, and these young diasporic Tamils are the audience I imagine or think of. Very often they do not have access to the quotidian experience of homeland because their parents didn’t have the vocabulary or time to process their trauma, and they were not able to recount their stories to their children. I think about the gaps in their knowledge of the everyday that these works could fill, but also how these works could help them find a psychic way home to their oor. So, while I live here, I am trying to bring a strong sense of ‘there’, in other words a sense of homeland, to them in a complex way.
AMMD: As a refugee-settler living in Indigenous territories, translating ‘one landscape while inhabiting another’, how does your experience guide your practice as an academic, a community organiser, an artist, and more importantly, a translator?
NR: I think it disallows me to forget the ‘here’ of Indigenous territories while I translate the ‘there’ of the homelands. I take the Indigenous call of ‘Land Back’ to heart here in the process of translation, in order to remain sensitive to settler practices of erasure that have been normalised in North America. The work I do isn’t aimed towards romanticising the landscapes of homeland, but to unearth the relationships of accountability and interdependency with the land that undergirds Tamil geographies. This is especially vital when these geographies are held in the imagination by a displaced population, even while those relationships are being erased by violent sovereign states. A device I use in translation is to maintain the indigenous names of flora as best as I can. I imagine a young person speaking to their parent about a tree that may have grown in their backyard, but because the child uses the Anglicised name, the parent never recognises the tree as the one they grew up with. Retaining a Tamil name creates a bridge in this landscape. I think such moments sensitise us to erasure of Indigenous names, livelihoods, and practices in North America as well.
AMMD: Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature has been studied by scholars Minoli Salgado and Maryse Jayasuriya, but their works touch mostly on the Anglophone terrain. While there is scholarship on Tamil across generations—from V.R. Ramachandra Dikshitar to T.P. Meenakshisundaram, from J.M. Somasundaram Pillai to V. Rajesh—they are Indians concerned with Tamil-language writings from their country. The rest are Westerner Indologists. Are there Sri Lankan writers, scholars, and translators whose works have shaped your philosophy, creative-critical writings, and practice?
NR: There are several gaps in studies of Sri Lankan literature when they dwell on the Anglophone terrain, for a number of reasons. Sri Lankan Anglophone authors are predominantly of Sinhalese or Burgher descent, and they tend to come from the upper classes. Therefore, any representation of the Tamil struggle, or of the Sinhala Left, remains marginal at best; the struggle of Muslims is barely represented, and the concerns of the Indigenous peoples are noticeably absent altogether, to my knowledge. We are left with this task of having to translate Tamil texts into English in order to bring them into any kind of international critical discourse. The late Canadian academic Chelva Kanaganayagam was a huge influence on me, because he began doing the work of translation alongside some very sophisticated theoretical work as well. His collections Wilting Laughter and Uprooting the Pumpkin, R. Cheran’s collection Pathways of Dissent, and some of the work they co-edited with Darshan Ambalavanar, like New Demarcations, are vital texts to examine the political underpinnings of the Tamil literary movements in Eelam/the north of Sri Lanka. I have also found Sinhala critic Harshana Rambukwella’s The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity, Tariq Jazeel’s Sacred Modernity, Nimmi Gowrinathan’s Radicalizing Her, and Mythri Jegathesan’s Tea and Solidarity valuable in bringing added nuance to any critical readings of these Anglophone texts—not because they all deal with literature, but because they point to the range of erasures that occur in order for a particular nationalist narrative to be normalised in Sri Lankan art as a whole.
AMMD: Are there works from the Tamil, modern or from antiquity, that you think deserve another look—and retranslation?
NR: Once I fell in love with the work of translating and understood translation as interpretation in the way Derrida speaks of it, I began to feel that many of the foundational literary works that already exist in translation need to be re-translated. Even going back to early Sangam poetry, I think the position of the translator can allow for a range that uncovers the relevance of these works in the present. I don’t believe in fossilising these works in the past, as many do out of a desire to fetishise antiquity. I also feel the need to challenge some of the more prudish colonial or chauvinistic translations that have erased gender and sexuality in order to create more containable anthropological studies.
I also think we need to translate several of the lesser-known contemporary poets from Tamil (especially Muslim poets and those that speak of the border villages) rather than repeatedly translating the ones who are most prominent and well-known. There is a lot of literature written by women combatants that has remained untranslated because of difficulties in getting the rights, but also because they are often dismissed as propaganda. While there may well be some elements of propaganda (I don’t want to dismiss that out of hand), they nonetheless provide us with complex glimpses into the Tamil struggle that help us understand why some chose the path of militancy. Thamizhini’s memoir, for instance, speaks to this when she recounts her decision as a nineteen year old:
The Tigers were able to undertake some rearguard work through the student groups. A variety of tasks were given over to the students: gathering dry rations from the people, caring for the injured, and making floral garlands for the dead fighters who could not be returned to their families. At the time I was leading the school band. Our instrumental band was taken to play funeral music for the memorial services for the dead Tigers. Ordinarily, Tamil women aren’t allowed in the graveyard, but we went to the graves of the fallen. All fighters present would light the pyre for the dead warriors from the outer districts. That sight melted my heart. It gave rise to a tremendous sense of guilt, that I was a mere spectator in a time when hundreds of young men and women were giving up their lives every day. I didn’t think that I’d be able to resume further studies any time soon. The sights I saw day and night tormented me. I came to believe that if at least one person in every family went to fight, the other siblings could live in peace. I decided that I should go, rather than see my younger siblings go off to fight and face a death like this. I didn’t consider asking anyone’s advice on the matter. (trans. Rodrigo)
The passage succinctly expresses a range of emotions, from sorrow to guilt to resolve. It is also an anthropological document speaking to the traditions and gender norms of a community being eroded by war. While I love translating poetry and fiction, the experience of translating this memoir was transformative in helping me understand a critical moment in Eelam Tamil history. I think works like these are important to learn the nature of humanity, and that is why I advocate for their translation as much as I do for translating other contemporary Tamil literature.
Nedra Rodrigo (she/they), is founder of the bilingual literary series The Tam Fam Lit Jam and co-founder of the Tamil Studies Symposium at York University where she is taking her PhD. She has translated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Thamizhini’s memoir, In the Shadow of a Sword (SAGE India, 2020), as well as the first two volumes from the exiled Sri Lankan writer B. Devakanthan’s Prison of Dreams quintet, His Sacred Army and A Time of Questions, both published by Mawenzi House in 2021. Shortlisted for the 2017 Global Humanities Initiative Translation Prize for her translation of Kuna Kaviyalahan’s Tamil novel Nanjunda Kaadu (The Forest That Took Poison) and published in Canada and abroad, her essays have appeared in C Magazine, Kalam, Briarpatch, Studies in Canadian Literature, International Journal of the Humanities, and Human Rights and the Arts in Global Asia (Lexington Books, 2017). Her translations were featured in Words and Worlds, Jaggery Lit, Still We Sing: Voices on Violence Against Women (Dhauli Books, 2021), and Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala, and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas (Bloodaxe Books, 2023). Her translation of the last three novels from B. Devakanthan’s quintet—Liquid Fire, A World in Ruins, and A New Testament—are forthcoming.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: forthcoming), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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