Vanamala Viswanatha interview: ‘Translating Kuvempu’s masterpiece was a joyous challenge’

Though there is a gap of 30 years between the two novels in terms of their publication and temporal setting, there are vital connections between the two. Both have a wide canvas, involve numerous characters and are authentic records of the rural life of Karnataka’s Malnad region in the last decades of the 19th century and early decades of the 20th. Apart from being works of great realism, they reveal patterns of experience and thought which have a universal validity.

A tangled mesh of three love stories in Malnad

Malegalalli Madumagalu revolves around the social situations that prevailed in Malnad around the end of the 19th century. The novel also depicts how the Malnad region opened itself to newer social changes such as the advent of English education, alleged conversion by Christian missionaries, and the introduction of new-age inventions such as bicycles. An analogy can be drawn between the bride who is about to enter into a marriage and the Malnad of the 19th century exposed to newer social forces.

According to renowned writer of Karnataka, Devanoora Mahadeva, Malegalli Madumagalu is undoubtedly the novel of the century. Likening the novel to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Mahadeva notes: “I often feel that among the great works of the world, War and Peace figures next only to the grand epic, the Mahabharata, which bloomed in the soil of Asia. Malegalalli Madumagalu is a work that has its place in this tradition. Only such a perspective can make us eligible to receive a truly immense creation as this.”

Also read: Kuvempu’s novel, Bride in the Hills, limns his cosmic vision of universal man

G S Amur, one of the most important writer and critic and the recipient of Kendra Sahitya Akademi award, observed in ‘Kuvempu: The Bard of Unfettered Spirit,’ published in Essays on Modern Kannada Literature (published by Karnataka Sahitya Academy) that “the inner pattern of Malegalalli Madumagalu is radically different from that of Kanuru Heggaditi. It derives its unity from the parallel lives of young couples, Gutti and Thimmi, who belong to an untouchable caste, and Mukundayya and Chinnamma who are placed much higher on the social scale. Kuvempu’s central concern in the novel is to explore the relationship between Prakriti (Nature) and Sanskriti (Refinement). To sum up: what puts Kuvempu’s enormous literary output together is his inclusive vision. Throughout his life, he strove to reconcile the great opposites — body and spirit, nature and refinement, sublimity and ordinariness, metaphysics and science, life and art”.

Amur argues that “the greatness of Kuvempu has been widely acknowledged, but a full understanding of his genius and a proper assessment of his contribution to Kannada culture are tasks reserved for future generations, free from the colonial burden of alien thought and modes of perception”.

Over the past five decades, critics and litterateurs have revisited Malegalalli Madumagalu — a dense, 712-page epic work. The text is astounding with its vivid description of people, their relationships, trials and tribulations. Malegalalli Madumagalu is a tangled mesh of three love stories in feudal Malnad, delineating the problems of caste, gender, and social hierarchies. One of the main concerns of his work was caste inequalities.

Multiple translations: ‘A sign of its relevance’

The visionary expectations of Amur have become a reality decades after publishing of Kuvempu’s two novels, which are being widely discussed in the literary and performance spaces in recent years. While eminent filmmaker Girish Karnad made a film on this novel with the same title — Kanuru Heggaditi — in 1999, theatre practitioner C Basavalingaiah adapted Malegalalli Madumagalu and through his nine-and-a-half hour, all-night stage-spectacle at Rangayana Mysuru, in 2010, he took connoisseurs of theatre on a journey into the life of Malnad (rainy region) of Western Ghats. In 2020, Rashtrakavi Kuvempu Pratishtana published a translation of Malegalalli Madumagalu by K M Srinivasa Gowda and G K Srikanta Murthy as The Bride in the Rainy Mountains. After four years, a new English translation of Malegalalli Madumagalu titled Bride in the Hills by Vanamala Viswanatha (Penguin Random House), a scholar of Translation Studies, releases this year.

Vanamala Viswanatha has taught English language and literature during the last 40 years. She is an award-winning translator who works with Kannada and English. She has served as Honorary Director of the Centre for Translation at Sahitya Akademi, Bengaluru, and a member of the Advisory Committee, National Translation Mission. Vanamala has also translated Raghavanka’s medieval epic Harischandra Kavyam for the Murty Classical Library of India, which has been translating the greatest literary works of India from the past two millennia for larger readership in the world.

To mark the 120th birth anniversary of Kuvempu, the Bangalore International Centre has organised a panel discussion on Bride in the Hills on November 8. Scholars and writers, including Amit Chaudhuri, Rajendra Chenni, Arvind Narrain and translator Vanamala Vishwanatha are participating in the discussion.

So, what compelled Vanamala to take up the translation of Malegalalli Madumagalu, which was translated into English by K M Srinivasa Gowda and G K Srikanta Murthy in 2020? Vanamala tells The Federal: “Classics the world over have been celebrated by translating them many times over. Now the time has come to celebrate this all-time Kannada classic through multiple translations. Kuvempu’s text had to wait for 53 years before it was translated into English for the first time by Gowda and Murthy. It is a sign of its relevance to see two translations of the work being published just four years apart.”

Close attention to aesthetics

It took about two-and-a-half years for Vanamala to complete the translation of Madumagalu. “Translating Kuvempu’s masterpiece meant dwelling in the homes and hearts of diverse characters in order to discover anew our common humanity. Negotiating the narrative involved moving among the many worlds it simultaneously straddles — nature and culture, tradition and modernity, men and women, the oppressor and oppressed, this life and the lives before and after; in short, the utterly mundane in their rich multiplicity and the supremely sublime in their cosmic unity. It demanded close attention to Kuvempu’s aesthetics, his literary craft in putting together the novel. It entailed tough choices about making English malleable to articulate the life-world of the Malnad region. A joyous challenge; a challenge as true for the translator as it is for the reader,” says Vanamala.

In her Translator’s Note, she quotes Ramachandra Sharma, the well-known translator who translated Kanuru Heggaditi: “You come closest to a text not when you read it, nor when you write about it, but, when you translate the text”. Translating Kuvempu’s masterpiece affords a peek into the magic of the imagination that creates a social world moored in all its complex materiality and transposes it right before your eyes to realms beyond the material”.

Kuvempu’s credo of inclusiveness

Vanamala is of the opinion that two important issues raised by the novel speak to readers today with a tremendous sense of urgency: the relevance of Kuvempu’s bio-centric vision for our world traumatised by issues of climate change, and his inclusivity that lights up the elaborate architecture of the work. Kuvempu’s worldview provides a bedrock of resistance and reason, hope and audacity upon which an individual’s aspiration for emancipation and self-transformation can flourish. This is indeed inspirational, especially for the youth today. “The epigraph to Malegalalli Madumagalu declares at the outset ‘Here, no one is important; no one is unimportant; nothing is insignificant’. This mission statement offers the readers an entry point to this expansive and peopled narrative, laying bare Kuvempu’s credo of inclusiveness,” Vanamala notes.

Also read: Karnataka HC resolves two decades of discord over state anthem, written by Kuvempu

How different is it for translators to translate from Kannada into English, compared to translating from English to Kannada? Vanamala says, “The question demands a thesis as answer. In a nutshell, the two enterprises are different in every possible way — the purpose, the choice of structure and style, the readership, the life worlds represented by the two linguistic experiences, the cultures of reception and reach and power of the two languages.”

A labour of love

What attracted Vanamala to translation? “If I have to sum up, my life has been all about living in Kannada and working in English. One is the language of the hand and the heart; the other is the language of the head. All three — hand, head and heart — come together, in the act of translation, making me whole. That should explain my passion for translation. My growth as a translator fortunately, also coincided with the growth of an interest in matters of translation in India, contributing immensely to the discipline of Translation Studies. I have thus been a happy teacher, an engaged researcher, and a busy practitioner of Translation Studies since the 1990s.”

In recent years, translation has been increasingly recognised as a deeply creative act, akin to writing. It is also being argued that translators should receive due credit for their intellectual and linguistic labour as they navigate complex cultural and language barriers. But translators often feel undermined by the way the literary eco-system overlooks their contribution. Vanamala also acknowledges this view of the translating community. “Yes. It is still true that, by and large, translation is seen as a derivative activity sponging on original creation. To the extent that the text has a material presence in another language, it bears witness to the translator’s agency in this process of co-creation. It is only recently that important awards such as the International Booker Prize, the DSC and the JCB have started giving equal credit to both the writer and translator. This is a long journey in the history of Indian translations, which until not too long ago, did not even carry the name of the translator. Of course, literary translation continues to be an economically unviable proposition. If translators did not see it as a labour of love, our cultural scene would have been considerably diminished. Excessively focused on fault-finding, as one would with a new daughter-in-law, our reception of translations has largely done a disservice to translators who make so much happen for and between languages,” says Vanamala.

Skewed power politics?

While Vanamala is elated over Kannada writers and translators getting more recognition in recent years, she is amused by the way classics are being neglected. “It is absolutely fabulous and culturally empowering to see our stories travelling out of their dwellings to take their deserving and rightful place in the larger ecosystem of World Literature. Kudos to writers like Jayant Kaikini and Vivek Shanbhag, and translators like Tejaswini Niranjana and Srinath Perur, who have brought global attention to Kannada through their work. But I was amused to find out the other day that none of these awards are given to classics as they are not considered ‘contemporary’. One is not talking of a 10th century classic by Pampa, but even Kuvempu’s 1967 work is considered irrelevant, irrespective of their bang-on-target relevance and gravitas. So, the moral of the story is, ‘Don’t translate classics, if you want awards!’ This is the skewed power politics of English publishing.”

Nevertheless, answering our perfunctory question of what was she translating next, a classic or modern literary work, Vanamala says: “Two works are in the pipeline. One, Vaddaradhane, an Old Kannada work from the Jain tradition for the Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press. Two, the translation of Bharatayatre, L Tolpadi’s 2018 book of essays on the Mahabharata, for Ashoka University, to be published by Penguin Random House.”