Deepa Bhasthi, who made history this year as the first Indian translator to win the International Booker Prize for her translation of Banu Mushtaq’s Kannada short-story collection Heart Lamp, will be in the city tomorrow to take part in two sessions on translation, for the Kolkata Centre for Creativity's day-long River of Words fest. Bhasthi, currently one of the most sought-after voices on translation in the country, has been travelling across festivals and campuses to speak about language, craft, and the visibility of Indian literature in translation, since the announcement of the prize earlier this year.
In this chat with t2, we talk about her whirlwind year, the craft of translation, and the stories behind the success of Heart Lamp.
Congratulations on winning the International Booker Prize — a historic moment, since you are the first Indian translator to have done this. How has life changed since?
Oh my God, it's just been so busy! Things have been super, super, super busy — lots of travel, lots of talking to people, being at different events, sessions and lectures and all of that. It’s been really busy, and I’m hoping to get some downtime after, hopefully, around February or March.
I’ve been doing a lot of lectures because that’s what’s interesting to me. I enjoy speaking with students. I was in Dharwad recently, then I was in Bangalore for something else. And I think the last lit fest I was at was the Ubud one in Bali. And then I’ll be at the Bangalore Lit Fest, and then Jaipur, of course — Bhubaneswar, Chennai, a whole bunch of other ones as well, Kerala, then Sri Lanka. It’s crazy. I’m barely home! Now that the lit fest season has started, it’s pretty bad!
But you're enjoying it, aren't you?
I’m not sure! I mean, I do it because it’s part of the job, for sure. But I’m really looking forward to things quietening down and to sitting and getting back to work, getting back to writing. That’s something I haven’t had the time to do, so that’s starting to get a little frustrating!
You’ve been talking about being busy and caught up everywhere. Has this recognition changed your perspective on translation itself as a career?
So firstly, I am not a translator when it comes to my career; I don’t translate full-time. My job is as a writer. I’m a full-time writer. So for me, translation is just one of the many ways in which I choose to express myself through language.
It’s very interesting to be connected with so many wonderful translators from all over the world, because I’ve found this heightened sense of community among translators. It’s really nice to be part of, and it’s really nice to sit and talk about your language and the process and the challenges and so on.
As to how my views have changed — honestly, I think there needs to be a whole lot more translators in Kannada. Compared to Bangla, or even other South Indian languages like Malayalam and Tamil, there are barely any translators working between Kannada and English. Especially literary translators — they’re very, very, very few. So we absolutely need more translations from Kannada to English.
That’s why I enjoy speaking with students, hoping somewhere someone will get interested and maybe look at it a bit more seriously. So it’s been very interesting to see the conversations around translation itself, thanks to this prize.
You’ve mentioned previously that your first literary exposure was to Russian literature, writers like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who are very much part of the canon. What were your thoughts about reading them in translation? Did that influence your interest in translation later?
Yes, so I first came upon these stories when I was a very young child. I still remember Maxim Gorky’s Mother was the first big adult novel I read. Obviously, I didn’t understand anything of it back then, but for me it was just being with words and with language, rather than the story itself. That always got my attention. I still love the language part of literature more than the story or plot, or characters.
But it didn’t strike me until I was in my 20s that these books I was reading were actually translations. I remember seeing “translated by so-and-so” on the covers, but I didn’t really understand what that meant. I knew the original was in another language, and I was reading it in translation, but I didn’t grasp the implications. It felt natural that I was reading in the language I could read in.
But because my interest is primarily in language, I’m sure it fed into my interest in examining how language works, whether Russian or Kannada or English. I can’t quantify how it changed the way I looked at literature, but somewhere it definitely influenced me.
I’ve always been very interested in sociolinguistics — how society influences language, how groups of people use language differently. I’m not a linguist; I never studied it formally, and I’m certainly not an academic. But even when I pick up translation projects, very sparingly these days, I’m always thinking about the challenges of language. How can I best express myself and express the language in translation? So all of it is led primarily by language.
That’s not to say that pretty language overrides substance; of course, the substance matters. But I pay a little more attention to how it’s written rather than only what is written. Language is just a personal interest. Translation, for me, becomes a natural progression, getting to play with two very different language systems and cultures.
Was translating Heart Lamp an extension of that “play”, or did it bring specific challenges, especially translating something so deeply rooted in Kannada culture for non-South Indian or even non-Indian readers?
To be honest, my previous works were also similar — rooted in specific linguistic cultures. Any text is rooted in a linguistic culture, whether Kannada, Bangla, or anything else. Translation is the process of rendering it into another linguistic culture — in this case, English — as best as one can without disrupting the origins too much.
The choices I made in Heart Lamp were similar to those I made earlier. It just so happened that I articulated these choices better in Heart Lamp. I was interested in the challenges it posed for me: what I could do with the English language I was translating into.
But translation is case-by-case. I don’t know if the next book will have the same challenges. Maybe yes, maybe no. Those possibilities interest me, along with the story itself.
And about the stories — since Banu Mushtaq has written so many — how do you choose which ones to translate and compile?
There’s a whole politics of choice in translation. First and foremost, these were stories I personally enjoyed reading and thought would work well in translation — maybe because of how they treated language, or the subject matter, or other factors.
Secondly, I wanted to present a sort of career-spanning survey of her stories, instead of just picking seven or eight from her first collection. And thirdly, I was conscious about not repeating themes, because writers often revisit similar themes over the years. I didn’t want repetitions.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted all stages of girlhood and womanhood represented — the young girl, the young bride, the young mother, the older mother, the older woman. The various stages of a woman’s life are portrayed across these stories. I didn’t want five stories focusing only on a new bride’s experiences!
Do you have a favourite among your own translations in the collection?
I’m not sure! At this point, I’ve read the stories so many times that I no longer have an emotional connection to them. Mainly because, as a translator, you read them dozens of times, and you live with them for so long that you don’t want to look at them again!
But I did enjoy The Shroud. It looks at the class system within the Islamic community, which is not often discussed in stories from that community. The first time I read it, I thought, “Oh, this is interesting.” So yes, if you push me against the wall, The Shroud is my favourite.
And just to end on a lighter note — you’ll be in Calcutta on Sunday. Bengali readers are famously passionate and very opinionated about literature. What kind of conversations are you expecting?
Oh, just talking about the challenges of language and translation and reading and appreciating good literature, I suppose. Good literature is subjective — what is good for you may not be good for me — but geeking out on language and books is always fun. I hope I come back with lots of recommendations, and I hope I can give lots of recommendations so that none of us are ever short of good books on our TBR lists!