A Fine Balance: An Interview with Keerti Ramachandra

February 17, 2022 | in Interviews | by Suhasini Patni

Isn’t that true of so many Indians? We inhabit several languages simultaneously and travel between them easily and unselfconsciously.

Keerti Ramachandra is a Katha AK Ramanujan Award-winning translator who works out of Marathi, Kannada, and Hindi. She has translated Vishwas Patil’s Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Jhadajhadati (A Dirge for the Dammed), which was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize.

This interview was conducted in two parts. I first met Ms. Ramachandra in her house on Residency Road, Bangalore, where she talked about her journey into translation. We continued the conversation over email where she discussed the various books she’s worked with, the process of collaboration, how her work as an educator and editor seeps into translation, and the state of Indian publishing.

Suhasini Patni (SP): You’ve been translating for several years now. Can you talk about how you came into translation?

Keerti Ramachandra (KR): I come from a bilingual family and a multilingual society. Every day, I would come home from school and report to my mother the events of the day in Marathi. Then repeat it all for my grandparents in Kannada, and then argue vociferously about the veracity of my stories with my brothers in English. Every now and then, our nanny used to ask me in Dakhani (her variety of Hindi): “Kya hua, bibi? Humkobhi bolo tho!” (What happened, baby? Tell us also!). And I would. Isn’t that true of so many Indians? We inhabit several languages simultaneously and travel between them easily and unselfconsciously.

Formal translation happened much later. Until 1994, I was a complete Anglophile. With a background in English literature and the extensive use of English in everyday life, I claimed English was my mother tongue.

Though we spoke all the languages at home, I had never studied Marathi, my mother’s tongue. I could read and write Kannada, my father’s tongue, since it was compulsory until matriculation, but knew only the classic “textbook” inclusions. I had better acquaintance with Hindi because it was a compulsory subject in school and college. Therefore, it seems outrageous, foolhardy, or audacious for me to get into translating Marathi literature!

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 9, 2021 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Carol Khoury and Suhasini Patni

The latest news from Palestine and India!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Palestine and India. In Palestine, the literary community has mourned the passing of the great Palestinian poet Izz al-Din Manasirah, while Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail has been nominated for the 2021 International Man Booker; and in India, feminist poet Dr Anamika has won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award for Hindi poetry for her collection Tokri Mein Digant: Theri Gatha. Read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

“I will continue the culture of resistance until my departure, either to the grave or to Palestine.” These are the words of the Palestinian poet, thinker, critic, and academic Izz al-Din Manasirah, who passed away this week in Jordan (aged seventy-five) due to COVID-19. Remaining true to his words and beliefs, he led the kind of life in exile that associated his name with the Palestinian revolution and resistance, earning him the title of “The Revolution’s Poet.”

Manasirah was one of the most prominent poets of the 1960s generation, whose texts expressed the concerns of national liberation, in addition to his critical engagement with the global, Arab, and local literature. He contributed to the development of modern Arabic poetry and the development of methodologies of cultural criticism, and was often referred to as one of the pioneers of the modern poetic movement. The media experience that he presented through cultural programs in Jordan was an important cornerstone in uncovering many talents.

Holder of several literary and academic awards, he is nonetheless best known for his poems sung by Marcel Khalife and others, most famously “Jafra” and “In Green We Coffined Him.”

With the death of Izz al-Din Manasirah, Palestinian poetry bids farewell to the last of the Great Four (along with Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), Samih al-Qasim (1939–2014), and Tawfiq Zayyad (1929–1994)).

Despite such saddening news, the Palestinian literary scene—a truly fertile one—has rather pleasing news to celebrate this week. Booker International organizers announced the 2021 longlist. Unsurprisingly, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, was on the thirteen-book list. In their statement, the jury members praised the book saying: “The first part of this devastatingly powerful book gives a laconic account of a shocking crime. In the second, decades later, a woman sets out to comprehend that crime. Set in disputed ground, this austerely beautiful novel focuses on one incident in the Palestine/Israeli conflict and casts light on ethnic conflicts, and ethnic cleansing, everywhere.” Minor Detail was Asymptote’s choice for May 2020 Book Club. In “Textual Echoes,” Jaquette talks candidly about her translation.

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters, announced its awards for outstanding literary merit for 2020 on March 12. The academy awarded its prizes in twenty languages, rather than the usual twenty-four with the awards for Malayalam, Nepali, Odia, and Rajasthani languages to be announced at a later date. READ MORE…

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Suhasini Patni

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Translation Tuesday: “Periyamma’s Words” by B. Jeyamohan

August 8, 2017 | in Translations | by Suchitra Ramachandran

I felt that manners were nothing more than knowing to say the appropriate English words at the right times.

Continuing our spotlight on Close Approximations contest winners, we present today the top entry in the fiction category, notable for being the first Asian translation to receive the top award in the history of our contest, now into its third edition. (Find the official results and citations by judges David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu here.) From 215 fiction and 128 poetry submissions, these six best emerging translators were awarded 3,000 USD in prize money, in addition to publication in our Summer 2017 edition. Judge David Bellos says: “There were several contenders for second place, but I have absolutely no doubt that the prize itself must go to the charming, wonderful, unusual story of “Periyamma’s Words” by the Tamil writer B.Jeyamohan in Suchitra Ramachandran’s translation. It is a witty and heart-warming tale illustrating the paradoxical position of translation itself, as a way of crossing boundaries and as a way of understanding what boundaries cannot be crossed.”

Come, go, stop, food, clothes, son, daughter, road, house, sky, earth, night, day—these words came rather easily to her. If I said those words in Tamil, Periyamma would reply with the corresponding English words. It was only when Periyamma jumped to say ‘cat’ before I could say poo– that I realized I was quizzing her in order. So I changed the order. But then Periyamma started saying the English words just by looking at my eyes. So I pointed at different animals and asked what they were. Periyamma said naai, poonai, kozhi in Tamil and then translated them—‘dog,’ ‘cat,’ ‘hen.’ It was only after Periyamma had mastered a hundred basic words—she would say them even before I could ask—that I moved on to concepts. That was when all hell broke loose.

Periyamma was not my periy-amma, big-mother, a name usually reserved for one’s maternal aunt. But everybody in our town called her that. Her house, they called the Big House. Situated in the town centre, that bungalow was built by Periyamma’s grandfather Thiruvadiya Pillai a hundred and fifty years ago. The word about town is that when it was built, the glass for the house sailed in from Belgium, the teak came from Burma, the marble from Italy, and the iron from England. The people who came to grind limestone for its walls stayed on permanently in our town, and as a result our town acquired a Lime Street. Our carpenters also moved in during that period. Periyamma’s wedding took place in that bungalow. That was the first time a mottaar came to our town. The newlyweds were paraded about town in that Ford motor car. Periyamma was not to step foot into that car ever again.

It has been forty years since Periyamma’s husband passed away. Her only son Arumugam Pillai had been a lawyer in Madurai, and he died there. His four sons were variously placed in Chennai and Delhi and Calcutta. None of them are alive now. A daughter of the oldest grandson is a doctor in America. She is the only person who has some semblance of a relationship to Periyamma. Periyamma went on living in that town, an ancient relic in the eyes of its fourth-generation inhabitants. In the olden days their family had six thousand acres of land to their name. Over the years, it had shrunk in various ways to a hundred acres. Those hundred acres had been neatly partitioned and sold over thirty years ago. In the end, all that was left over for Periyamma was that house, two acres of land around it, a good sum in the bank, and her jewelry. But that was more than enough for her to live in state.