Searching for the right word: Award-winning translators share their experience

CHENNAI: Two Sahitya Akademi award-winning translators from Tamil Nadu, ML Thangappa and G Nanjundan, talk about the challenges they faced.

ML Thangappa is 79, but he still feels he has a lot to do. Thangappa, a poet and scholar whose "Love Stands Alone: Selections from Tamil Sangam Poetry" won him the Sahitya Akademi's translation prize in 2012, said it was a challenging job to translate Tamil Sangam poetry into English.

"It was in the 1990s I first started translating from the Akam and Puram poetry of the Sangam age. When I had done more than 80 per cent of the work, my friend suggested that I must publish them. I published a small volume titled 'Hues and Harmonies from an Ancient Land'," said Thangappa. But it was after twenty years, a revised edition with more poems titled 'Love Stands Alone' was published.

"It was all due to the interest shown by a researcher friend AR Venkatachalapathy who took the script to a well-known publisher with a new title 'Love Stands Alone'. He even wrote an elaborate introduction which helped even non-Tamil scholars take a serious interest in my translation," said Thangappa.

Akam in Tamil literature means inner life. Akam poetry is concerned with love in its varied forms. Puram deals with the poems of outer life. With 160 poems from the Sangam literature, 'Love Stands Alone' is considered a significant contribution to Indian poetry in English.

After 'Love Stands Alone,' Penguin has also published another translation by Thangappa. "It was a beautiful Tamil poetic work called 'Muthollayiram' titled in English as 'Red Lilies and Frightened Birds.' With more than 900 poems, 'Muthollayiram' praises the three Tamil kings of Chera, Chola and Pandya without specifying their names. Since the book is about the three kings, it is called 'Muthollayiram.'

Thangappa says he is not a full-time translator, but he takes the award seriously. "The recognition given to me as a translator through the award may bias me towards giving more time and attention to translation than I have actually intended," he said.

Born in Tirunelveli in 1934, Thangappa has published collections of poetry in Tamil and English. Thangappa's 'Cholakkolai Bommai' won him the Bal Sahitya Puraskar of Sahitya Akademi.

G Nanjundan, who won the award for his book 'Akka,' a Tamil translation of short stories by Kannada women writers, has a different story to tell.

Although his mother tongue was Kannada, he did not learn to read and write in that language. "The Kannada which we speak at home in Salem has a stronger impact of Tamil. Since my education was in Tamil, I always felt that I was a Tamil. I started writing in Tamil during my college days," said Nanjundan. But he wanted to learn Kannada. "I joined Bangalore University in 1986. While travelling from Wilson Garden to Jnanabharathi on the university bus, where I always got a window seat, I compared the English and the Kannada names written on the name boards of shops. Soon Kannada alphabets got into my mind," he said.

A couple of years of hard work helped him handle Kannada fluently. He then selected one short story each of UR Ananthamurthy, Radhavendra Kashaneesa, P Lankesh, Shanthinath Desai and Poornachandra Tejasvi and translated into Tamil. The anthology, 'Ugadi', got good reviews. His second translated book from Kannada into Tamil was UR Anathamurthy's novel 'Bhava.' It was published in 2001 by Kalachuvadu as 'Pirappu'.

The award-winning anthology titled 'Akka' contains the short stories of Kannada women writers in translation. "When I thought of a title for the anthology of short stories by women, the first name that flashed to me was Akka Mahadevi, popularly known as Akka, a poetess of Kannada Veerashaiva movement who lived in the 12th century. There can be no other icon to represent the womanhood of Kannada culture other than Akka," he said. The ten stories in the collection are by Veena Shantheshwara, Sara Aboobacker, BT Janhavi, Vaidehi, MS Veda, H Nagavani, Bhanu Mustaq, Nemichandra, Sumangala and Sunandha Prakash Kadame.

It may be difficult to find an appropriate word in the target language for an often used word of the source language, according to Nanjundan. "UR Ananthamurthy frequently used 'geluvu' in his stories. For so many years, I could not get a proper word for 'geluvu' in Tamil. Similarly, there are some Kannada words for which even now I have not found equivalents. Some words are cultural. Equivalents may not exist in the target language. So the translator has to wait and search for a right word with lots of patience," he said.

Born in 1962 in Salem, Nanjundan has published his collections of poetry and short stories. He teaches at the Department of Statistics, Bangalore University.