The Writer’s Corner: The expert translator bringing the classics of modern Kannada literature to new audiences

One of the major pieces of literature that Vanamala Vishwanatha translated was the medieval Kannada poetic work ‘The Life of Raja Harishchandra’, which was published by the Harvard University Press for the Murty Classical Library of India. She had also retired from Azim Premji University as a Professor of English studies.

Looking back on her connection to Bengaluru, Vanamala Viswanatha said, “I moved to Bangalore 51 years ago for my postgraduate course in English… the big cities provide you a certain anonymity, while the smaller cities provide their own sense of warmth. Bangalore was a mega city for me after smaller towns like Mandya and Mysore. The exposure that Bangalore offered to a larger world enabled several things. It was not the internet age, where you could sit in a village and still access the world. Working in premier institutions such IISc… and the Regional Institute of English, both these places provided a lot of exposure. There were always interesting events in Kannada as well where I felt rooted.”

On her journey into translation, Vanamala Viswanatha recalled, “We had a whole tradition of bilingual scholars who were English teachers but working in Kannada through the last century – perhaps it is only now that the two paths have diverged… it used to be very syncretic. The Karnataka Sahitya Academy and so on used to bring out a journal in translation. Dr B C Ramachandra Sharma was one of the editors. Now and then he would give me a short piece to translate, largely prose. That was in the mid-80s. The turning point was in 1990 when Ramachandra Sharma, K V Subbanna, and K V Tirumalesh came together to run an intensive 10-day workshop for translators. We became more conscious about the process and its politics… that year, I moved to Bangalore University where I could teach Translation Studies as a paper.” By 2000, she had already published several translations.

Vanamala Viswanatha

Before her most recent translation of Kuvempu’s work, Viswanatha had already translated some of his literature – a couple of short stories, an essay, some poems, and songs such as “Doni Saagali Munde Hogali”. On Malegalalli Madumagalu, she said, “This particular work was so huge, and the gravitas it had – it is somewhat forbidding to translators… around 2019, after I finished a novel translation for Oxford University Press, I wanted to do something ambitious… a couple of publishers thought it was too big for their bandwidth. But Penguin showed interest. The Kuvempu Pratishthana offered support by way of helping me acquire copyright material and other support.”

On the unique aspects of translating Kuvempu’s work, she said, “Kuvempu had centuries of Kannada at his fingertips and was able to bring it into a layered text with all these characters speaking their dialects which are very typical of their location. The language of the narrative itself is Modern Kannada, along with the authorial comment since it is written from an omniscient perspective – and this comes with a lot of Sanskrit words.”

To anyone looking to translate Indian literature, Vanamala Viswanatha has this to say, “It is important to like what you do. Otherwise, it is drudgery. Once you enjoy the process – no compromises there… we are at a time when translations are coming into their own and receiving a lot of attention. The publishing industry is also more open to it. Earlier people would go around with manuscripts and find a publisher for translations. These days you can find a publisher first and interest them in what you want to do… when you have a contract in hand there is an edge to it that helps keep up your enthusiasm and discipline. A translator also has to disseminate – because there is such an explosion of information in all media today, the reading culture is losing its original base. Unless people know you have done this work, it may quietly go away.”