Translator Deepa Bhashthi and author Banu Mushtaq are the first duo from the Kannada language to make the International Booker Prize shortlist in the new format of the prize, which gives the award for an individual book translated into English. Heart Lamp: Selected Stories is Mushtaq’s debut appearance in English, and Bhasthi’s third published translation. They have worked together for three years to make it possible, the diligence and love evident in each story. The book has been published in the UK by And Other Stories and on the Indian subcontinent by Penguin Random House India.
Mushtaq’s voice is full of fire and wit, and she writes about the injustices against women predominantly through faith and societal structures. Bhasthi matches her author’s rhythm and designs a translation that is energetic and flavourful. She has made the English language her own.
In the shortlist announcement, the jury said about Bhasthi’s translation, “The tight-gauged texture of the intricate translation creates a most invigorating reading experience, rare nowadays in English-language fiction.”
Heart Lamp is not only a big achievement for Kannada literature, but also a gift to a global readership. It gestures to the fabulous possibilities in Indian language fiction, the remarkable wealth of voices, and the richness of the short fiction form, which has so often been undermined.
Besides translating, Bhasthi also writes fiction, and her cultural criticism, essays, columns and journalism have been published in more than 40 national and international publications. Last month, Pratham Books published her book Champi and the Fig Tree, which she wrote and translated for children.
In a conversation with Scroll, Bhasthi spoke about her collaboration with Mushtaq, her translation philosophy, and how the stories in Heart Lamp reminded her that we are all “same-same.”
Deepa, first and foremost. A huge congratulations on being on the shortlist. A first for you and Kannada. But before the Booker, there was the English PEN and Paris Review. When you were doing the sample and the proposal for the book, what kind of Kannada literature did you want to introduce to a global audience? And why did Banu Mushtaq feel like the right choice?
Thank you, Sayari. To be honest, I was hardly thinking of a potential global audience when I started working on the sample. I think it was only after the PEN Presents list was out that I realised that these stories could appeal to a far wider readership than I had initially thought. I think it is also important to note that Mushtaq’s stories have assumed a sharper, more urgent edge now that we live in these terrible times. That said, there is so little Kannada literature that gets translated at all into English. I am particularly interested in the works of Kannada authors from the mid to late 20th century, which is when there was a lot of churning happening in Kannada culture and society, and I hope my next projects reflect this.
A translator’s association with the author starts long before there’s a book in the picture. We work with them for grants and funds, online submissions, etc. How long have Mushtaq and you worked together? How did you two decide on the 12 stories you wanted to put in the book?
It will be three years, almost to the date, from the first time Mushtaq and I spoke to now, when the book is out. Of course, it is not that I spent this period working on just this one book. There were long gaps when applications and pitches were sent out, and I was waiting to hear back. I like to translate in very intense bursts, and then I put the text aside, do something else and return to my drafts – I like to take my time with every project. I read all the stories Mushtaq had published and made my choices depending on what I personally liked, what I thought might work well in translation, keeping in mind variety in thematic focus as well. There was some back and forth with Mushtaq, of course, but we came to a final list pretty quickly.
What was your first impression of Mushtaq’s fiction? Did you fit into her voice with ease, or did it take some time?
I enjoyed how funny some of the stories were! I don’t suppose the practice of translation is very enjoyable if one does not enjoy the source text in the first place, because you end up living with another writer’s voice in your ear for months, years at a time. Her language itself was not really difficult to get into, in fact, the multilinguistic worlds she taps into are familiar to many of us south Indians because we inhabit many language cultures in our everyday lives. But what took me some time to feel confident about were the “invisible forcefields” (as the International Booker winning translator Daisy Rockwell so succinctly called them) that inhabit her stories. I immersed myself in the culture of her community and breathed in everything from highly addictive Pakistani dramas to old favourite musicians like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ali Sethi, etc, to Andaleeb Wajid’s romances, many of which are set in Muslim households.
I took a great Urdu script learning class with the wonderful Akshita Nagpal and brushed up on the sparse Arabic I learnt some years ago. Given that it was a world so different from mine, I wanted to be extra careful, and just being in touch with these cultural forms, I believe, helped me get under the skin of Mushtaq’s characters. It was also a great excuse, I told myself, to spend months listening to great music and watching fun TV!
Before Mushtaq, you translated Kodagina Gouramma and Kota Shivarama Karanth. Neither is alive. Was translating an author who is alive and writes for contemporary times a big shift from what you were used to? Did it feel (more) daunting in any way?
I’ve asked myself this question several times over the past few years and tried out different answers for it. What I have concluded, for now at least, is this: among the authors I have translated so far, I didn’t find working with a living author too different from those who have passed. Sure, it does help if you want to ask the author questions about the text. But again, I believe it helps immensely to read as much of an author’s other works as possible, so her/his literary voice is already in your head when you start translating a text. My practice of translation is very instinctive in that sense.
Back to the book – in the Translator’s Note, you write that Mushtaq does not write in the “prestige dialect” of Kannada. There’s a lot of tart in her voice, it almost stings. You have been able to retain the astringent quality in your translation. And then we find out she’s fluent in several languages. How does one compress this world into the English language? I ask you this because you have done it without flattening her voice – there are contours, and swells, and dips in your English which immediately indicate to the reader that Mushtaq writes in a different kind of Kannada. And then, as a reader, we feel mighty pleased for realising it even before reading your Note!
Thank you! I appreciate the close reading. I think it is important to remember that many Indians, or at least many of us in the southern states that I can somewhat speak for, are familiar with many languages. In fact, some of the most famous writers in Karnataka, especially in the 20th century, wrote in Kannada, led their professional lives in English and counted another language as their mother tongue, and used yet another for conducting routine lives in the places they lived in. Without getting into the complexity of languages in India, especially the politics around it at the moment, I think this bi- or multi-lingual space is something we here inhabit very easily.
I speak six languages fluently myself, and have passable comprehension in two more, and at some point or the other, at least a couple of these languages slip into everyday speech. It could be by way of cultural references, or stray words, a proverb, such like. Which is to say that yes, Mushtaq’s Kannada is different, but it is a kind of Kannada very familiar to me, so juggling many language cultures and compressing them into English did not seem as much an unsurmountable challenge as a need for balance to be achieved regarding how much of these swells and dips to maintain and what idiosyncrasies to let go off.
In my review, I wrote there are “small awkward bumps” of the more “literal translations”. Upon introspection, I get a feeling that perhaps these bumps were intentional. You wanted the reader to be slightly taken aback by encountering new phrases in English, of seeing words being literally translated. You seem to be saying that this is my English, and I’ll do with it as I please. Is my suspicion right?
Absolutely. Every literal translation and every Kannada/Arabic/Urdu word or phrase that I retained was a very conscious decision. I’ve written elsewhere that the aim of translation, especially in former colonies like ours where English is acquired along with a complicated baggage, should never be to write in “proper” English. When one translates, the aim is to introduce the reader to new words, in this case, Kannada or to new thoughts that come loaded with the hum of another language. I call it translating with an accent, which reminds the reader that they are reading a work set in another culture, without exoticising it, of course. So the English in Heart Lamp is an English with a very deliberate Kannada hum to it.
That’s a wonderful way to put it.
Then, of course, there’s a whole dilemma whether the upper-caste Hindu translator can do right by her Muslim author. I have two questions here: a) how much does one’s identity informs one’s role as a translator; and b) does this awareness ever become an impediment to the work you’re trying to do?
A Muslim translator would likely have done a much better job than I have at translating Mushtaq’s stories. But then, even as I write this, I wonder if the outsider’s eye is what brings out nuances in the stories that someone from the community might miss because they are too close to it. Ideally, the religious and caste identity of a translator should not get in the way of the translation. But we live in times when identity politics is used and abused to various ends, so I suppose it is important to be aware of one’s identity and be a little extra sensitive while at work. As for whether this became an impediment, no. It did take me a while to make peace with the fact that there would be things I would miss because I did not inhabit the worlds in Mushtaq’s stories, but ultimately, I felt that one leads with the text in question, with the language at play, and tells the other voices in the background to, well, shush!
Mushtaq is the second woman author you have translated. What are some of the key differences between translating a male and a female author?
The immediate relatability! Of course, the particulars are very different, but there is so much of the female experience that all of us who identify as women share. We fight the same fights, we access the same sisterhood and we plod on, falling back regularly on humour and our generational resilience to live our best lives. This is what makes women’s writing so easy to just get. Though they are both from such different worlds, Gouramma and Mushtaq’s stories felt instantly familiar, as if these were an aunt’s story, or a friend’s or someone else’s that you distantly know or have heard of.
Now that Heart Lamp has been released in India, I think we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that Mushtaq might ruffle a few feathers in the English-speaking world, just as she has in Kannada. As an equal contributor this time, are you slightly nervous? Conversely, what are the conversations that you hope these stories will start?
I am not exactly nervous about ruffled feathers, but I am bracing for the inevitable communal comments that will come our way. There already have been a few predictable whataboutery comments on some social media posts, I am told. That said, I hope these stories, more than anything else, remind readers that at the end of the day, irrespective of social class, religion and the water-tight politics of identity we are encouraged to box ourselves in these days, we are different, yes, but mostly, we are all same-same.
Note: In the older format, the Man Booker International Prize – which recognised one writer for their achievement in fiction every two years – UR Ananthamurthy, who wrote his fiction in Kannada, was shortlisted in 2013.
Also read:
‘Heart Lamp’: Banu Mushtaq’s International Booker Prize-longlisted book is charged by women’s anger
International Booker Prize shortlist: From Banu Mushtaq’s ‘Heart Lamp’, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
