For polyglot Lakshmana Iyer Rama Swamy, popularly known as L.R. Swamy, winning Central Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize 2015 is the crowning glory of a literary career which he began with a one-act play in Malayalam in 1960. He was in Class X when the play won first prize in a ‘Matrubhoomi’ competition.
After 55 years, his translation of a novel by K.P. Raman Unni from Malayalam as ‘Sufi Cheppina Kadha’ won him the coveted award.
The original, published in 1993, is the narration by a Sufi of the bridge between two cultures in the past and speaks about common human legacy, according to Mr. Swamy.
It was translated into Hindi, English, French, Tamil and Kannada. He took up the translation after he met the author at a multilingual poetry programme in Kerala.
‘Sufi Cheppina Kadha’ was published by Kalpana Rentala of the US-based Saaranga Books, who was impressed by his earlier translation “Pandavapuram.”
Though Tamil is his mother tongue, with his early education in Malayalam medium he continued writing in that language and published 100 poems in local meter as distinct from Sanskrit meter, says 71-year-old Mr. Swamy.
With a Masters Degree in chemistry and an MBA in financial management, Mr. Swamy continued his passionate pursuit of literature after he joined Coromandel Fertilizers in 1967 here. “I used to debate with the others on the Telugu stories that won prizes,” he recalls. He had learnt Telugu by himself and writing in it. His first Telugu story “Javabuleni Prasna” won the first prize in 1988 Ugadi competitions in ‘Andhrajyothi’ weekly that had the venerable Puranam Subrahmnaya Sarma as editor. “I got encouragement from him when he wrote a letter lauding the story,” Mr. Swamy said. He wrote 200 stories and they were published in leading periodicals and brought out five anthologies. He translated 150 stories from Malayalam to Telugu.
He has 17 translations from Telugu to his credit and barring one from Tamil all are from Malayalam. They include ‘Malayala Janapadageyalu,’ his first in 2002 and ‘Sareeram Oka Nagaram’ a translation of K. Sachidanandan’s poems. Mr. Swamy has published 28 books.
Winning Central Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize is the crowning glory of Swamy’s literary career
