It is an old joke in Kerala that the finest writer in Malayalam is Marquez. While many of us read Marquez in English translation (by Gregory Rabassa or Edith Grossman), thousands in Kerala read One Hundred Years of Solitude in Malayalam, as translated by Dr. S. Velayudhan (‘Ekanthathayude Nooru Varshangal’) in 1984.
I am not sure if the translation was made from the original Spanish or the English; it would have made a difference from a cultural point of view. Good translators do not just translate the text, they convey the context.
Which is why Srinath Perur’s translations of Vivek Shanbhag’s novels are so special. Ghachar Ghochar reads like it was originally written in English, which is the hallmark of a great translation. So too does the recent Sakina’s Kiss. Occasionally, the translator introduces a sentence not in the original but in its spirit. Shanbhag is fond of quoting a Perur original – about a ‘chemical warfare’ against pests – that he thought captured this.
