"What really matters to me is my work."

A conversation with writer and translator N. Kalyan Raman

Sep 30, 2023

India is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world, and translation has long played a significant part in the literary tradition of India. In the last decade or so, translation from Indian languages into English his becoming increasingly centre-stage and translators are emerging from the anonymity which has traditionally been their lot.

Today, on International Translation Day, I have the pleasure and privilege of sharing excerpts from a conversation I had last week with N. Kalyan Raman, poet, writer, translator, and winner of the 2022 Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize (English) for his lyrical and luminescent translation of Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi.

Kalyan Raman translates modern and contemporary Tamil fiction and poetry into English. His other translations include The Colours of Evil, a collection of short stories by the celebrated Tamil writer, Ashokamitran, published in 1998. Since then, he has published fourteen more volumes of translated fiction by eminent Tamil writers including Ashokamitran, Si Su Chellappa, Vaasanthi, Poomani, Devibharathi, Perumal Murugan, and Salma. Over the years, he has also contributed book reviews, essays and articles on literature, cinema and politics to a variety of print and online platforms in India.

Here are excerpts from our conversation, which I share with his permission. Many thanks to him for his time and the generosity with which he has shared his experiences as a translator.

RC: How did you get into translation?

NKR: I am an alumnus of IIT Madras and IIM Calcutta—I passed through those institutions many years ago! Along with my academic pursuits, I also nurtured a love for and an abiding interest in literature, as a result of which I read extensively—in Tamil and English. At some point in my life, it all came together and I started translating, just one of those happy accidents of circumstance. A friend of mine was editing an anthology of translated short stories from all the four major southern languages—the anthology was commissioned by Katha—and she was seeking my views on some of the writers who were under consideration for inclusion. We were having a casual conversation and suddenly she said, ‘Why don’t you translate one of these stories?’ I agreed to do it, one thing led to another, and here we are!

RC: I see that you have translated many of Ashokamitran’s stories. What in his work appeals so much to you?

NKR: I started reading Ashokamitran when I had just passed out of school. He was already making his mark, and came out with his first short story collection around the time I joined IIT.

And it wasn’t just me, but my mother and my siblings as well—we read Ashokamitran together. I discovered him first and told them about it, and we became avid readers of this remarkable writer. What appealed to us most in his writing was that it made us feel, in some way, that he was writing about the life that we were living. Urban, lower-middle class lives. We saw the life around us reflected in his stories—this appealed to us very much, and moved us too.

During my college years, I wrote a few short stories, in Tamil, for a small magazine that Ashokamitran was editing. The magazine was being run from Delhi, but he was the Resident Editor in Madras. I wrote to him, he wrote back, and then we met. I was perhaps 18 years old then, but he made time for me, and we got to know each other somewhat. Then I went off to Calcutta. But I kept in touch with him and had a very live connection to his work throughout, right up to the time I started translating it. I had the feeling, even when I first started reading him, that I should take some of his work to readers in other languages, but I didn’t know how to do so at that point. Translation into English was not a very visible practice in those days. I had to wait for this whole translation movement to take off to be able to do it, and then, in the early ‘90s, it happened, finally. My engagement with his work was quite deep—not so much through my personal engagement with him, since I only met him sporadically—and that’s how I ended up translating him. To me, he was by far the most important living writer in Tamil.

The first collection of his stories in my translation, The Colours of Evil, was published in 1998, and it was quite a big hit. It was Ashokamitran’s first collection of short stories in translation from a commercial publisher. It was published by East West Press, Madras, which is now Westland. People outside Tamil Nadu knew of Ashokamitran through Sahitya Akademi conferences and publications, but it was the first time they were able to read a book-length collection of his short stories in English (one of his novels, Water, was translated earlier by Lakshmi Holmström). My translation turned out to be a success. Even Ashokamitran, who was not normally generous with praise, thought so too. It was reviewed widely in the Indian press, largely on account of the author’s reputation. The book was also picked up as a text by the University of Pittsburgh in the US. Understandably, I thought I had a future in this business! (Laughs)

RC: It's interesting that you say that it was picked up as a text by the University of Pittsburgh. Do you see the same engagement with your translations in India as you do abroad?

NKR: When The Colours of Evil was published, it was the high noon of Indian writing in English. Arundhati Roy had just published The God of Small Things, and Indian writers writing in English had become the face of Indian literature. They had a natural inclination to look down on people who were not creative writers in English, didn’t produce literary texts in English. It was as though they assumed that we couldn’t write proper sentences—in spite of evidence to the contrary! They also had resources pouring in globally, and whatever resources were available from the cultural institutions in the country were being channelled into promoting and discoursing on this relatively new branch of literature. So it was a very difficult time for translations. But Ashokamitran was eminent in his own right. He was also connected to the Sahitya Akademi and to other eminent writers and poets—like Sunil Gangopadhyay, Nirmal Verma, and Dilip Chitre. Therefore the book that I translated received a certain degree of attention—but not from the Indian-writing-in-English community.

RC: You were in communication with Ashokamitran while you were translating his work, you also met him on and off on your visits to Chennai. You were translating a living writer who was still writing. How was that experience, that interaction?

NKR: Ashokamitran was very clear that a translation is the creation of the translator— he was gracious enough to call it that—and therefore he never got in the way.

You know, there are two ways of looking at a translation: one, that the text, in all its forms, belongs to the author and the translator is only an instrument; and the other, that the translator writes the text in English. I am inclined to take the latter view because I think it is closer to, and does justice to, the process and the effort the translator puts in.

Ashokamitran adopted the second approach as well. He was widely experienced and internationally known. He didn’t think that he had to control the translation or needed to approve it. He had the sophisticated point of view that there could be many translations of the same text. If I translate a text to a certain standard, someone else may come along and do it better (or worse). That is also Walter Benjamin’s idea of translation, that all translations are provisional, and Ashokamitran had a similar view. It was a privilege to have someone as enlightened and as educated as Ashokamitran as my first author.

RC: So yes, as you say, there are two ways of looking at a translator—as an instrument or as a creator. And there are two schools of thought—that a translator must stay as close to the original as possible, translating word for word, line by line, or that he must keep to the spirit of the text and that’s all that really matters. These two points of view sometimes manifest as extremes. I have read translations which are so completely different from the source text that it is a struggle to recognise the original. And then there are translations so clumsy that they are unreadable, only because they are trying so hard to stick to the original. How do you achieve the balance between these two extremes?

NKR: My own ethical code as a translator is not to deviate from what the writer is saying. So I don’t embellish, and I don’t truncate or modify the original. I try to translate a text as it is written. But the requirements of it being intelligible and pleasurable to the reader in the target language—those may compel some modification. And that is the extent to which I would be willing to modify the text. Otherwise, I like to be true to the narrative voice of the author.

Fortunately, most of the authors I have chosen to translate are very accomplished writers, it’s not as if the translator has to improve on what they have written. I stick close to the text, and it usually works out. I don’t need to modify a great deal. Except when the writer himself or herself slips up a bit—and that has happened only a very few times.

RC: I notice that you translate only modern Tamil works—fiction, poetry, short stories. You have not translated pre-modern or ancient texts. Is this a conscious choice? A preference?

NKR: It’s just that I am deeply engaged with the present. I know there is a lot to be learned from the past—in Tamil we have the anthologies Sangam poetry, for instance—but I would rather not spend too much energy reproducing those texts. I do read them, for enlightenment and pleasure. I can understand people retelling the Mahabharata and the Ramayana with a sensibility that may appeal to contemporary readers, and it can be of tremendous value. For me, there are so many frontiers to be crossed in modern literature itself, considering how new its forms—novel, short story, free verse, and so on—are to our literary tradition.

My sense of literature, as indeed of everything, is sociopolitical. So I don’t see much point in working to an ancient or medieval text. Yes, they are beautiful works, I enjoy them. There ARE important truths to be unearthed from the old texts which are of contemporary relevance. But they require an altogether different orientation, scholarship and training—those who have translated classical or medieval Tamil poetry into English are ALL academics. So I don’t see someone like me—who is by profession, education and training, closely tied to the modern—translating these texts.

RC: You have translated short stories, novels, poetry. You have a variety here. So of these, is there any particular form that appeals more to you than the others?

NKR: I like all those forms. If you are a translator, you immerse yourself in a particular text and then try to write it in another language. If the text is so good that you CAN immerse yourself in it, that is enough for me.

I have no preference for one form over another. Each requires a different kind of engagement obviously—with a novel, the canvas is wider, the narrative is structured differently, the devices used are different. A short story is something on the lines of ‘eternity in a moment’. It is a shard which reflects certain aspects of reality. A translator needs to have a handle on all the different forms and how they work.

RC: And poetry?

NKR: I like translating poetry because, as Edith Grossman says, the translated poem is a ‘wholly new utterance’, because it gives the translator more space to become a creator.

The translated poem in English is very different, in structure and cadence, from the original. It must work as a poem in English and take its place in the corpus of poetry in that language.

With prose you can follow the author’s style, and if you do it right, the style of your translation will automatically fall into place. Translating poetry it is very different. Poets and their voices can be very diverse—as diverse, say, as Gerald Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, for example—so when translating, you need to choose a tone and style that fits your poet. In prose, you simply construct sentence after sentence after sentence—you don’t have the problem of replicating the ineffable, so to speak.

I have translated and published more than 300 poems, but I am not known as a poetry translator. The anthologists get in touch with me and choose my translations, but nobody has acknowledged that I translate poetry. As a remedial measure, I have just finished translating a book-length collection by Perundevi. I am on the verge of sending it out. Let’s see what happens!

RC: On another tack—over the last few years there has been a huge uptake on MFAS and degrees in translation studies. There are universities in India and abroad offering these programs. Young people are queuing up to join them, hoping to write a bestseller once they have the degree. Are these programs useful for aspiring writers? Do you think creativity—writing, translation—can be learnt in the classroom?

An important factor to be considered is the milieu—is the said MFA operating in the Indian milieu or foreign milieus? I think, in America, if you have an MFA, it doesn’t follow that you are privileged. But in India it would seem you are. I am not qualified to judge what can and cannot be taught in a classroom, but MFA as a marker of privilege is something that doesn’t appeal to me. I feel that literature—as indeed society itself—is better shaped by wide participation and democratic access than by privilege and gatekeeping.

English has been constructed as a hegemonic language in India, like Sanskrit once was, and many Indian Anglophones who think they are on the frontiers of liberal politics seem quite unaware of the game that they are playing. That is something I have seen all my life and it is rather tiresome.

RC: Hmm. I agree, a good command over English is not enough. One’s cultural moorings are equally, if not even more important…

NKR: Yes, absolutely. For instance, I am engaged with the Tamil literary milieu. I know how it works with all its flaws. I am rooted in the language and its literature. I am not a person who comes from nowhere, who has learnt English but knows little of what is important or not in the literary milieu of the language I translate. This keeps me grounded.

RC: Most translators, at some point or another in their careers, face the lack of public recognition and the acknowledgment of their work by their peers. How important is that to you?

NKR: Had I been vulnerable to or susceptible to the degree of response I got from the Indian literary milieu, I would have stopped translating a long time ago. It is a very flawed set up, and therefore, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter all that much even if you are acknowledged by it. So I have always kept at it, regardless. Now, after all these years, I seem to have won a certain degree of recognition, and that’s ok too. But what really matters to me is my work.

RC: Yes, I agree, the work is all that really matters. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights. You have validated many of my own opinions and experiences!

It was a privilege to chat with N. Kalyan Raman. More information on his writings and translations is available on his website HERE.

Did you enjoy this conversation? Do write in with comments and questions. It is pleasure to here from you.

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