‘I describe myself as a smuggler, border-crosser across languages’: Translator J Devika

Academic and feminist J Devika’s politics is central to the job of translation, and she is never apologetic about it. Her recent translation of Manoj Kuroor’s novel The Day the Earth Bloomed won the Crossword Book Award for Translation, and the inaugural Kerala Literature Festival Book of the Year (Fiction) in 2025. In a conversation with Scroll, J Devika discussed the book and other aspects of her translation. Excerpts from the interview:

What made you gravitate towards Manoj Kuroor’s novel, and what helped you translate the sensibilities of the Sangam era literature into English?
The answer to the first is also the answer to the second. Kuroor’s novel was remarkable for many reasons. First, I’ve always loved Sangam poetry, and I’ve read both Akananuru and Purananuru. Not in Malayalam, though there are several good translations in Malayalam by many poets. But when I read these poetry collections in my teenage years, the poets who had translated these works used Sanskritic idioms, which is why these translations didn’t sound – or read – like Tamil at all. So, I could see that something was amiss, because Sanskrit has a different emotional register. I quite enjoyed and loved reading AK Ramanujan’s translations because there’s a remarkable avoidance of excessive abstraction, which is a quality that I suppose I needed to recreate while translating this novel.

When I learnt about Kuroor’s novel, I ran to get it. Reading it, I found this kind of sensuality, a direct connection with nature, which didn’t turn – or attempt to turn – it into an abstraction. Sangam Tamil has the great ability to experience nature without reducing it into a certain number of abstractions, and in reading translated works, I’m always curious if any translator manages to avoid that pitfall. Kuroor made this conscious decision to avoid Sanskrit, so his Malayalam doesn’t have a single word with its root in Sanskrit.

That was the big hype about his novel when it came out, that it doesn’t use any Sanskritised Malayalam. This projection did create a kind of curiosity, but I could see that it was natural, which is why the translation of Sangam poetry in Malayalam feels flawed. I’ve discussed this in the Translator’s Note to this novel.

Malayalam itself is a kind of schizophrenic language. It’s spoken like Tamil, and written like Sanskrit. We’re trained to use Sanskrit rather than Tamil, so one tends to gravitate towards Sanskrit, but if you do that when working on something related to the Sangam era, you lose its essence.

The second reason is that Kuroor raises crucial questions about culture, power, and political power, depicting how the performance of culture is dependent on royal power, and what the consequences are. That’s very poignant in the book. Whether it’s the local chieftain having to negotiate things in the hierarchy of culture, or how select poets, like Kapilar, in the novel, a Brahmin, who’s close to power, has access to kings and performers, while the traditional performers, whose social organisation is more tribal than settled, live the life of romance with their art forms. And that’s one of the fascinating themes in Sangam poetry; that’s the kind of framework within which it produced itself. Kuroor has managed to sketch these relationships between royal power and singers with considerable skill, which is why I thought this beautiful novel deserved to be translated with that sensibility in mind.

The third reason is that I often describe myself as a smuggler, border-crosser across languages, which is what a translator essentially is, and when I see a book that crosses any such borders, I’m drawn to it. Be it KR Meera’s Aarachaar, which I translated as Hangwoman: Everyone Loves a Good Hanging. Or Kuroor’s Nilam Poothu Malarnna Naal.

When we were scheduling this interview, you noted that this novel “translated itself”. This reminded me of Geetanjali Shree’s first sentence in Daisy Rockwell’s translation, Tomb of Sand: “A tale tells itself”. Usually, one has witnessed writers saying this, but, certainly to my mind, no translator has offered this submission for their labour.
I said this because it was quite effortless to translate Kuroor’s book. I mean, the tiredness was physical, not mental. Often when your mind feels tired, you stop because otherwise you end up constantly thinking about the right words that can catch the affect, rather than just the meaning, of what has been said in a book, but it wasn’t the case with this one.

Would you believe that it was translated in a moon cycle, 28 days straight? I kept sending drafts to Kuroor and to our friends, who read the book carefully. The editing was minimal, really.

So, while translating the book, I felt, “Oh, it’s just flowing through the pen.” If I could in some way find another body and connect my mind to that body, it’d go on writing itself, so it didn’t look effortful to me. Also, Kuroor’s style is very musical. His Malayalam has these tempo changes, a slow one in the beginning, in the first part, then there’s this middle, then a really fast one at the end, so it’s probably that musicality that helped me a lot. I’m very conscious of sounds when I translate; I try to preserve them.

In some of the early short stories of KR Meera’s, there are these tiny little sentences, which are like shards of glass; they make you bleed. Likewise, in this book, the tempo was distinct for each segment, and I think Kuroor was very conscious of it while writing them. As a translator, once you catch the music, you’re well-positioned to translate the book. That’s why I feel it’s not enough for a translation to just be adequate; it must be pitch-perfect. That’s one of the problems I find in several translations from Malayalam. They’re “okay” jobs, not pitch-perfect ones. To me, the perfection of that pitch is very necessary to retain the original in the translation. Actually, that’s the whole thing – when you translate, you’re preserving the experience, the affect, and not just the meaning.

I’ll give you an example. I was reviewing a translation of a work in Malayalam that I’ve read. The original is a feminist text in which the author doesn’t shy away from using words that refer to bodily desires and sexual acts as they are. Though the meaning is preserved in the translation, the sheer knockout power of sexually-explicit language, which is the political punch the writing delivers, sadly vanishes in translation.

Because you mentioned the musicality of Kuroor’s prose, I must admit that I was listening to Arooj Aftab’s Aaye Na Balam ft Anoushka Shankar while reading this book, and reading the three parts of the book, felt as if they were mimicking the three transitions one can witness listening to the song. It also burns slowly, reaches a middle, and towards the end, gains a ferocious velocity.
I think you’re quite right. One of the reasons why I said that this book translated itself was because it’s really like listening to a three-part musical composition – there’s a lower taal in it, the madhyam, and the fast tempo, drut.

Kuroor is a trained percussionist, so that explains it. He’s a polyglot. Proficient in Tamil, Sanskrit, and Malayalam. He teaches Malayalam too. Composes lyrics for songs. He’s so humble, and I think that’s a quality in people who have this surfeit of knowledge; they don’t show it. He knows music way too well, and that shows in this book.

There’s feminist politics at play in the book. For example, in the first part, when Chithira thinks about whether there’s a song for Maruti, who dies in that love story. You can say it’s a curious child asking a question, but she’s thinking of the erasure of a woman’s story.
That was the case with so many women poets of the time. Chithira is one of those who wonders if you can survive by patronage, especially when the king is an evil man, who’s driven by the desire to conquer and kill. In the example you mentioned, she’s exiting the situation to be with a senior woman poet, treading very carefully, for she sees the consequences of having to deal with power, and at the same time keeping yourself independent. In a way, I feel she sees this as a source of power; the fact that she will not submit to power empowers her, allowing her to retain her independence at par with political power.

And yet this conflict appears so contemporary.
Absolutely. In Kerala, we’re witnessing a time when there is a huge capitulation of culture to power, so that the independence that’s demanded of culture is being compromised. I think that’s something the novel posits: this question of interdependence at play, when there’s an inequality in place already, how do you negotiate the world of performative arts?

The poets enjoy a degree of independence in this novel. What they don’t do is compromise themselves. They don’t give up their minds. They don’t serve the ruler. Though the poets are in a completely unequal relationship with the ruler, they walk the tightrope between servility and independence by making themselves indispensable to power by tempering it. They guide the ruler. They function as their conscience, establishing a kind of relationship with the ruler’s business, which is to rule morally. And when the ruler refuses to take them seriously, they leave, so there’s this sense that when it’s demanded of the actor, they throw off the powerful when they’re no longer listening. They are wanderers anyway; they don’t have a fixed home, so they simply leave.

Its contemporary equivalent is the market trying to fix your place as the last word in cosmopolitanism. Or the last word in feminism. Or anti-caste writing. If you end up being affixed to that position, you’ll end up making all kinds of compromises. The same happens when the writer and artist cling to power and turn out justifications for its exercise and acceptability instead of being the moral voice that guides it.

But we’ve had artists who didn’t compromise. You know when singers were expected to sing praises for Indira Gandhi, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi sang this, “Jis nagri mein daya dharam nahin, us nagri mein rehna kya.” Why should one stay when there’s no dharma anymore? That’s the thing, you’re telling the power, “Look, I’m beyond you.” Then, when Faiz Ahmed Faiz was denied paper to write in prison, he composed four-line verses, shorter ones, q’itas (quatrains) and memorised them. That’s the kind of role cultural figures have played historically vis-à-vis the times we’re living in, when literary and cultural gatherings are the cushiest possible, which artists are finding difficult to forego.

There’s this sentence in the book, “What you collect from the eyes and ears – does it amount to knowledge.” One can’t help but wonder how high culture tends to dictate what can be considered knowledgeable. What are your thoughts on this legitimisation of knowledge?
It’s an interesting meditation – what constitutes experience and what constitutes the knowledge of it; how do you convert that experience into a discourse?

Kolumban is immersed in this experience of his craft, and that’s good enough for him. As the novel moves forward, we find Kolumban’s son, Mayilan, who’s such an ambitious guy, breaking away from the realm of experience and becoming calculative in the context of the emergent network of royal power and commercial economy. So, there is little abstraction in the first part – Kolumban’s part, then calculation in Mayilan’s part.

In real life, it’s difficult to succeed with calculation because you can never really calculate the number of factors that enter into a system. And society is an open system. At what point will a variety of inputs intersect with this system can never be fully captured; one of these inputs can change the whole expected outcome, so calculation can work only minimally, but you can predict. Which, of course, isn’t accurate often, so outcomes may not be what you think they’ll be. That’s one reason why Buddhism and other philosophies criticise enlightenment rationality; they tell you that what matters is the moment. Don’t calculate much. Or stop calculating beyond a point. Be ready to face whatever you have at the moment.

And that’s a good moment to talk about what you’re working on next.
I’m working on this fabulous book called The Red Badge. It will be published by HarperCollins India. It’s a memoir by Rajesh Varma, who’s based in the US. It’s a book about a young, upper-caste boy – a Malayali Kshatriya by birth – who has a lot of catching up to do in this English-medium school, for he comes from the Malayalam medium, and in this new school, he sees this non-Malayali Brahmin boy who always comes first in the class as his competition.

It’s set in the ’70s, presenting an alternate Indian history and geography. Because the right-wing had come to power for the first time, this majoritarian, militarised group of power (Vibhasis) comes down south, while one group initially fights them but eventually gives in, the other manages to put up a huge resistance. As you read the book, you end up thinking as if you’re reading about Nazi Germany. It’s a terrifying story, told honestly.

The other one that I’m negotiating with a publication house as of now is called Root. By Mini PC. It’s a delightful book about three women with Adivasi roots. The very opposite of a victim story; it’s about “beyond-ing” really. If “beyond” can be turned into a verb.

Then, there’s one called Dechoma and the Women of Mahé by Fathi Salim. It’s again a wonderful book. It’s based in Mahé, and its hopscotch structure helps drive this story about a young girl, about 12, who’s transitioning from childhood. Sivapriya R, who has an eye for different, amazing things, is the publisher at Bloomsbury India with whom I’m working on this book, so it’s in the pipeline.

How do you feel about winning multiple awards for The Day the Earth Bloomed?
I hardly think about awards, really, because for me, this – translation – is political. And it’s partly why I tell authors I work with is that though my translation will sell, it may not win you any award, if you’re aspiring to that.

Unless you portray yourself as a neutral party, publishers don’t see any point in sending an overtly political book for an award. Then, the jury itself will have its own biases. But the reason this book won prizes is that it doesn’t look like a political book; it appears to be a statement on culture. But I really don’t know if that’s the case. I’m glad it won these awards because Kuroor deserves this attention, so I thank the respective juries for being very generous.

But if you ask me this larger question about awards, I’d say that I started publishing my translations on my website, Swatantryavaadini, because the market wasn’t interested in it. I started translating as an academic, and I continue to do so, and such works are never in the likelihood of winning prizes.

Having been reviewing books for a few years now, and I don’t exclude myself from this observation, one finds translations being reviewed in this language: “deftly, wonderfully, beautifully translated”. I’m unsure if that’s the case beyond the book-reviewing circuit in English; perhaps it’s different in literary criticism in other languages. What are your views on this limited reading of a translation’s efforts?
I know, it’s as if translation is some mechanical activity, so we speak about it as if we’re talking about a machine working well enough or not. The problem with this approach is that bad translations don’t get caught at all.

For example, a friend of mine who’s into organic farming called to check with me where they grow wheat in Kerala. As far as I’m concerned, being a social scientist, I have a fair sense of what grows where in Kerala, so I told her there’s no mass cultivation of wheat in Kerala. But I asked what piqued her curiosity. So, this woman is a Malayali but doesn’t read in Malayalam. She told me that she read it in the much-acclaimed English translation of a Malayalam novel. I checked the translation, and yes, it did appear as though wheat fields existed in highland Kerala. So, I looked at the Malayalam version only to realise that the scene is an allusion to the Bible, the Old Testament. Of course, translators are human, too, and can make mistakes. The point I’m making is that often these things get missed, which is why I think there should be multiple translations of the same book.

But that idea doesn’t seem to find enough purchase in the publishing industry.
I think it’s partly about copyright. Nobody wants a rival. But it’s really about the market, and nothing to do with knowledge or aesthetics.

But I also find myself extremely constrained by authors’ readings of their books. Whenever I’m working on a book, I share with the author my findings, telling them that it’s my reading of the book that’s going to be predominant in the translation. It’s still very much the author’s text, but sometimes they can’t see the many layers, shades to it. Of course, if the author is alive, you can partner with them; they can contest your views, and you can work your way out. But the problem is, because we are all hooked on authenticity, a translator’s reading of a book isn’t given any independent standing in commercial publishing. Mainstream publishing doesn’t want to hear from the translator, but in academic publishing, I get to write whole essays introducing authors’ work, clearly stating that the author is being read in a particular way.

What I feel can happen is a constant dialogue with the author, telling them that this is how I read your book, and is that okay with you? I had talked about Mini’s book earlier. It’s a serialised book, so there’s enough material in it that we can do without, and I told her that part of the book reads like some anthropological text, informing her of the gem that’s lying inside this flab of content. She told me to cut mercilessly and ruthlessly. But then, she happened to write a couple of chapters afresh, so the translator’s reading had the author end up rewriting the book.

Now we’re not sure whether to call this a translation, because we have reworked it together.