A (family secret) memory: Late February nights. Final exams are either underway, or it must be revision holidays. An old jammkhana, a thick carpet once popular as wedding seating, long out of fashion now and lying moth-eaten in an old trunk, is laid out on the terrace under a warm-ish night in the hills. Our small town’s faded lights are far away, and the sky yields a grand view of stars. A notebook, a textbook or two laid out, open to various pages on the jammkhana of bright primary coloured stripes. Amma turns a page and reads out the passages. I listen, my eyes turned up to the stars and to the outline of Stone Hill, the only marker of permanence, my point zero. As the night wears on, she dozes off now and then. I hasten to spit out a sharp “Amma!” when the words she is reading aloud begin to trip over each other, stumbling like one’s feet jumbling up a busy railway station’s many narrow steps. She awakens, drones on. 

She is reading my Kannada textbook/s aloud, because I can only string the letters along slowly, too slowly to finish revising the chapters in time for my fateful exams. Kannada is the language of my attic, my home, the streets I walk on, of my backyard and my front yard– although in school it is compulsory to speak in English. I have studied Kannada all through my school career. It is my “mother tongue,” though not quite my mother’s tongue. I have heard it around me from the day I was born. 

This burden of a shameful memory.

*

Another (much shared in writing) memory: My grandfather, dead just over six months before my birth, had fought for freedom. Post ’47, he had held many of the unfashionable political isms of the time close. And collected a library, among other baubles in a full life. By sheer chance, I inherited the books, as also, much to my family’s collective distaste and horror, his liberal politics. 

(There in their stables, a black-black sheep.)

The books – I ignored the ones in Kannada, few as they were – mostly from Raduga, Progress Publishers, FLHP, such others that the then USSR sent India’s way, flooding two to three generations of readers who became familiar with Volgas and Sashas and snow in Serbia and the tundra landscape. Only just the other day did it sink in that these were all books in translation. Tolstoy, Gorky, Dostoyevsky, all of them. Some of the very first big-people-books I read were literature in translation. It took me decades to realize it, even though I was writing, talking about this period in Indo-Russian cultural history here and there too often, to the point of repetition-fatigue. This inhaling of books in other languages, is this where my bumpy, meandering path toward languages takes its genesis from? I have begun to wonder.

*

Present – Practice – Process: From that starry night from long ago to here, to now has been a process. What do we learn when we learn a language that we have always had coursing through our colonised bodies? One could easily list a number of reasons for why those of us with access to English medium education and urbanity thereafter cannot bear to be moved by literature of the soil, the tongues, the colours, the tastes of Here versus everything supposedly better There. But these passages are not about that. These words are thoughts thinking aloud, words pronounced in various cadences and with rhythms long pushed down, down to where they are not just erased, but also wiped clean like a dirty slate in an afternoon at kindergarten. The words vibrate on the tongue, like something from deep memory, a food taste perhaps, a forgotten verse, a term unused during the years spent wandering. It tastes like a story. 

I started translating from the Kannada to English accidentally, many years ago, less for the love of language and really for the miniscule portion of my bills it paid for a brief while. But slowly, almost involuntarily, a process of re-education later (the term ‘decolonisation’ somehow takes the sharp edge off of the long, traumatic process of un- and re-learning, I’ve come to feel) I stand in a landscape of discomfort. Ideas are unpaved as yet. In translating from Kannada to English, a blood to a given language, an inherited language to literally, the language of my bread, I learn the two languages again. The Kannada I read and that which is source, is not the Kannada of my internal life, nor that which we speak at home, street or yard. Neither is the English that I primarily work in, for the practice of translation and otherwise. These familiar life languages feel at once alien and a return to home long yearned for. 

Jhumpa Lahiri writes of how she was a translator almost by birth, in how the language of the indoors was different from the language of the world outside, how she was constantly translating her experiences and her feelings between the Bangla of her upbringing and the English of the world she grew up in. In that sense, we, those of us whose work takes us to the English (or any other) language, by way of business or culture or just as bridges between two ways of being, we are all translators. 

Not quite about the hows: One likes to imagine a freedom of choice. But really, I cannot quite lay out the logic of how I have chosen to translate the books that I have worked on and those that are work-in-progress. I suppose most times, if not always, it has been a selfish endeavour. With translating the short stories of Kodagina Gouramma, one of the earliest feminist writers in Kannada in the early 20^th century, it came from a place of wanting to take this relatively unknown voice to not just a widely read language, but really even just out of Kodagu, the tiny district where she lived, where I live. Choices are hard; some of her stories do not stand the test of time. Not the point, of course. With Dr Kota Shivarama Karanth, the polymath genius Kannada writer, a talent extraordinaire, it was barely a choice, because handed the chance to work with his novel, little-known among his masterpieces as it was, who was I to say no?

I suppose it has taken me these two books to even begin to imagine how I might make my choices in the future. Writers who identify as women. That’s where I would start, that is how I see the two (or more) projects that currently live in my head and in the drafts of chaotic folders on my laptop. That could also somewhat align with my personal politics. But then, do you choose the book? Isn’t it the book that chooses her translator and deems her worthy?

I think of word choices and the first to come to mind is ಅಂತೆ (anthe) – a seemingly innocuous place-filler of a word. ಅಂತೆ quite literally might mean ‘it seems’ or ‘apparently.’ But ಅಂತೆ, we Kannada speakers will tell you, means a lot more, like an emotion can. It can be ‘they said.’ It can mean ‘I heard’ or ‘that’s how it is’ or really, many times, just the way one ends a sentence, a reported speech, a hearsay. It is a wonderful word that means not much, yet carries within its two syllables the entirety of so much that cannot be carried out from one language to another. 

It is too early for me to analyse the whys of my process. But there is one pleasure that I have come to savour in the torturous practice of making choices and eliminations between the two languages – a language I could once barely read and a language that was once my chief mediator for experiences of the world. It is that I feel closer to Kannada decades after being deprived of its proximity, of being allowed to belong to it and establish a sense of kinship with it. The disallowance not by migration or exile, but by the commonplace, mostly unprocessed trauma of a colonialised education where English medium schools insisted that we never speak in the languages of our heart, else face scolding, censure, mockery even. This has made generations of Indians like myself – upper caste, urbanised, privileged lot of us – able to dream in English, but unable to hold a conversation in our mother/father tongues without having to rush back to English to look for words we never got to learn in our own languages. 

Coming (back) to Kannada has been a rush of adrenaline over waves of feelings, of facing the process by which the language was not erased from my mind, not at all, but its position as the life skill I’d need to comprehend and explain this world was diminished to a discardable substitute. 

But one (re)learns, recalibrates. Lahiri again, “To translate is to alter one’s linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile.”