Interview/ Deepa Bhasthi, translator
Banu Mushtaq’s International Booker Prize-winning Heart Lamp is bold, impactful, and radical. Equally radical is the work of Deepa Bhasthi, who selected Mushtaq’s 12 stories which comprise the book and translated them from Kannada to English, but with an accent. “Translating with an accent is very important to me because I don’t believe in revering western centricity at all,” she tells The WEEK. So “roti” doesn’t become flatbread as “pizza, burger, or pasta was never explained to us.”
In her translator’s note ‘Against Italics’, Bhasthi further makes the case for not using italics as they “serve to not only distract visually, but more importantly, they announce words as imported from another language, exoticising them and keeping them alien to English”. And regarding footnotes— “there are none”, she writes.
In an interview with THE WEEK, Bhasthi talks about the collaboration with Mushtaq, the challenges of translating Heart Lamp, and her views on pushing the boundaries of English. Excerpts:
Q. How did your collaboration with Banu Mushtaq happen?
A. I didn’t know Banu until three years ago. She got in touch with me through a mutual friend and asked if I’d be interested in translating her stories. Although I had read a few of her stories, it was then that I started reading everything that she had written. And her stories struck me, how universal their themes were, and their greater relevance across communities, religions, castes and even nationalities.
Q. How did you narrow down the stories to the 12 that comprise Heart Lamp?
A. There were multiple factors that went into choosing the 12 stories—those that moved me personally, those that showcased well the kind of themes she has been writing about, and then those I thought would work well in English.
Q. What was challenging about translating Banu’s work?
A. Getting the cultural context was challenging as I don’t belong to her community or religion. There were several nuances of the Islamic society that were, initially, challenging to understand. For that, I read a lot of literature, watched Urdu TV shows and listened to music to get used to the mannerisms, voices and her community’s thought process.
And translating itself is a tough job as you’re trying to think in two languages simultaneously and getting under the skin of the other person’s thoughts.
Q. The International Booker jury called Heart Lamp “a radical translation”. You clearly pushed the contours of English by introducing Kannada tonality. How do you view this style of translation with an accent?
A. Translating with an accent is very important for me because I don’t believe in revering western centricity at all. For decades, we’ve been trying to translate in a way to make it easier for the western readers. Meanwhile, we have been made to understand their culture without italics or any footnotes. So pizza, burger, or pasta was never italicised or explained to us, so I don’t see why we’ve to explain roti as flatbread. Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the interest or the intelligence of readers and dumb down the text just because they might not be familiar with some words or phrases.
So I wanted to retain that, because it’s also important to be aware that I was not trying to translate into British or American English, and the way characters speak in English in the stories is the way we speak English in India. So I didn’t see why we needed to reject that and cater to a readership that wanted everything easy. I was trying to push the boundaries of English and the language is very capable of being bent and twisted. It’s not a rigid language by any sense.
Q. Despite having a rich literary culture, Kannada has remained among the lesser-represented languages in translation.
A. We have a glorious unbroken literary history of about 1,000 years and there are extraordinary works in Kannada. I hope this win sparks some interest in both reading in Kannada and translating from the Kannada language.
Q. In India, language can be a sensitive issue, with concerns over imposition of Hindi or English. How do you think translations fit into this conversation?
A. From the south Indian perspective, there’s a greater concern over the imposition of Hindi compared with English, for several reasons. And it’s very simple: what one doesn’t know, one fears. The more we read literature from each other’s languages, the more we realise that human beings are the same everywhere, whether they eat different foods or speak different languages. So, it is important for languages to be in conversation with each other, because then we get familiar with each other’s stories and that fosters a greater sense of understanding than anything else.