India Uncut

I've always thought of Jerry Rao as one of the best political commentators around, but he's pretty good when he writes about literature as well. Read this piece by him on the Tamil writer, Jayakantan. It's a lovely tribute that gives us insight into both the man and his work. For instance, he writes:

My friend Radhakrishnan who teaches literature and criticism in California today, remarks somewhere that Jayakantan once told him “Saar, why do you ask me if I have read Sartre. Has Sartre read my work?” Only a person with a secure weltanschauung and a clear-eyed sense of humour could have come up with that priceless quote. In the late ’60s, Radha and I visited Jayakantan a couple of times in his Mylapore home. I still remember an entrancing discussion where he told us that “music is a natural human instinct... drama is an unnatural artificial construct”. He went on to explain: “people sing spontaneously while taking a shower; if a person were to act in front of a mirror, you can only call him or her a lunatic”. Jayakantan’s insights into the universal human condition are almost always like this gem — brilliant to the point of incandescence, clothed deliberately in the vocabulary of extremism, simultaneously provocative and heady.

What a pity I can't read Tamil. Where are the translators? Maybe somewhere in our vernacular literature there are Marquezs waiting to be discovered, but lost to the world for lack of initiative on a publisher's part.

Update: Kalyan Raman writes in to berate me for my question, "where are the translators"? He is a translator himself, and he writes:

There has been a steady output of translation titles coming out of Katha, Orient Longman, EastWest Books, Indialog, MacMillan and so on, at least where Tamil is concerned. Penguin India has a formidable list of translated works - Nirmal Varma, Sunil Gangopadhyay, MT Vasudevan Nair, Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, Indira Goswami, Sundara Ramswamy and many others. Of course, translations of Mahasweta Devi's work - published mostly by Seagull of Kolkata - are a flourishing industry. There are even a couple of Jayakantan's novels available in English. Sahitya Akademi, of course, publishes translations of award-winning authors, not just in English, but in all the major Indian languages.

There is also a lot of interesting non-fiction being published in translation - Sharankumar Limbale, Ashapurna Devi et al. [snip.] Given this, your lament ("where are the translators?") is somewhat out of place. Seek and ye shall find, as the Bible said.

However, he writes, "most publishing houses do not do any kind of marketing at all for translated works. As a translator myself, I find always disappointing that my work is simply not available easily in major bookshops or online stores, in spite of decent critical reception."

Meanwhile, Chenthil Nathan writes in to share this anecdote:

The note about Sartre reminds me of one more incident I read [about]. Jayakantan was a chief guest at a College function in Madurai, and a student asked "Sir, since Draupadi lived with 5 men, was she not a prostitute?". No answer was expected as this was just to rile up the writer. But Jayakantan is no ordinary man, he replied "In the eyes of one born to a chaste woman, Draupadi is a chaste woman. In the eye of one born to a prostitute, Draupadi is a prostitute".

Chenthil also sends in this link to a couple of translations of Jayakantan's work.