Vivek Shanbhag and the unbearable lightness of being Premium

Good translators do not just translate the text, they convey the context and transmit nuance

Sakina’s Kiss book by Vivek Shanbhag. | Photo Credit: cueapi

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. 

In Sakina’s Kiss, Perur demonstrates another of the translator’s gifts: the ability to transmit nuance. The novel’s narrator might be unreliable, but the author is not. The result is another stunning effort by Shanbhag which tells us beneath the surface of the story that perhaps we are all unreliable narrators of our own stories. That not all questions deserve answers or indeed need them. That we may not be the person we think we are, liberal, tolerant or progressive. 

We might love these labels but one incident, one unexpected turn, even a casual glance at a politician on television can bring everything crashing. 

Shanbhag holds up a mirror to the middle class to reflect warped images. But it is not the mirror that distorts, it is the inner life of the people that is twisted. 

We read some of the greatest of world literature in translation. From Cervantes and Dante to Kafka and Kundera. The best Indian novels recently have been translations. Shanbhag is among the greatest novelists writing in India today – something the non-Kannada world might not have known but for the translations. 

When two unsavoury characters knock on Venkataramana’s door in Sakina’s Kiss and ask to meet his daughter, we anticipate the possibilities: this could be a thriller, a ‘social’ drama (as some movies of the past liked to label themselves), a political spectacle. It is tangentially all of these, but it is much, much more. The essence is subtle and nuanced and more powerful for that. The apparently simple carries the weight of complexities. 

How do you say matters of such seriousness and contemporary relevance with such a light touch? The emotions are in the interstices of the narration, what is unsaid is crucial. How Sakina and the kiss came to be is both sombre and funny in this generational saga which is just over 150 pages. 

Shanbhag is a man of few words but a provoker of a kaleidoscope of emotions from sympathy to terror. And that is the triumph of Sakina’s Kiss.