‘Thank god for the translator’: This is the first thought that occurs to me as I read Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s poignant short story, The Walls. When I put down Perumal Murugan’s Pyre with an aching heart (the ending is such), I send out a silent ‘thank you’ to the translator. Wouldn’t life be less meaningful without these men and women? How else would a non-Malayalam reader appreciate the brilliance of Basheer? Or a non-Tamil reader enjoy R Chudamani? Which is why a translated work of writing is precious; its pages are the result of the toil of two people — the writer and the translator. “Translation is like entering a film theatre. You know that the moving images and sounds are not real. So a translated text is a fantasy we all agree to engage in,” says Mini Krishnan, Consultant, Oxford University Press (OUP). Krishnan has brought out several notable translations. These include the Oxford Novellas — “There are 10 of them from seven languages,” explains Krishnan. “The series features established writers like La Sa Ramamritham and Nabaneeta Dev Sen, and young writers like KR Meera.” Two of them, Chellappa’s Vaadivaasal and Na D’Souza’s Dweepa, are prescribed reading, she adds. OUP’s mammoth work-in-progress is the translation of writer Joe D’Cruz’s Tamil novel Aazhi Sool Ulagu. The novel, which revolves around the lives of the fisherfolk of Uvari in Tirunelveli district, is being translated by G Geetha, and is in its final stages of completion. “This passage is excellent,” D’Cruz tells Geetha, flipping through the manuscript of the translation. We join the two at the last of their meetings to discuss the work — he has marked suggestions for Geetha, who has spent over two years translating it. In fact, the novel was written in around six months. What makes translating from Tamil to English challenging is that Tamil is fluid; vernacular Tamil changes with every district. Geetha says that Aazhi... has been written in the Thoothukudi dialect. “It has about 40 names of fish,” she says. The local terms for winds, and water currents, the parts of a boat, the proverbs that are used in the region’s everyday conversation... “I had to be very careful about bringing about the quirks and vagaries of the language of the region,” says Geetha. “Each word has to be socially and culturally accurate.” Aniruddhan Vasudevan has played a key role in introducing to the world of English readers the genius of writer Perumal Murugan. The former’s translation of the writer’s Tamil novel Madhorubagan as One Part Woman, and Pookuzhi as Pyre, takes us through the Kongu landscape and its caste politics that Murugan describes. A writer and poet himself, Vasudevan sees translation as a “dense space” that has to be tread with “humility and responsibility”. He says that he is in a place of “productive discomfort” while translating. The beauty of translations is the words retained from the original, that shine with the pride of having retained their position. Some words are such; they’re better off being left without the burden of taking on a flat, ‘transliteration’. For instance, how else does one describe the ‘chombu’? — Lakshmi Holstrom keeps the word in her translation of Ambai’s novella Wrestling. Vasudevan retains the endearment ‘pilla’ in Pyre, which brings a smile to the faces of those who know the original language. He says that such decisions are a result of constant dialogue with his editors. He pays close attention to the “dhwani” or the tone. “It should sound right to my ears,” he says. He is currently translating Ambai’s short stories. It’s Prabha Sridevan, a writer and retired Judge of the Madras High Court, who introduced R Chudamani to the present generation of English-speaking readers. “She is really of all times,” says Sridevan, speaking of Chudamani. She has translated a collection of the writer’s short stories as Seeing in the Dark, for OUP. Sridevan has also translated writer Vaasanthi’s Trishanku and three short stories by Seetha Ravi on the musical trinity, that have been published in The Hindu. Sridevan says that during the process of translating, “you are actually there. You can feel all that the writer felt.” She adds that several great works of fiction, such as those by Orhan Pamuk and Gabriel García Márquez, are out there for a majority of us to enjoy because of some excellent translators. Despite this, translators are seldom recognised for their work. Sridevan feels that they must get their due, for they are like the people who dub for superstars in films. In the end, it’s the voice that matters.

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