From long-form feature writing to travelogues and translations, Srinath Perur has had a diverse career as an author. Fans of celebrated Kannada author Vivek Shanbag may also recognise Perur as the hand behind the excellent English translations of Ghachar Ghochar and Sakina’s Kiss.
Perur’s career in literature has its roots in his youth in Bangalore of the 1980s, a hotspot for bibliophiles of every stripe. As he recalls, “That was a period when you had many circulating libraries in the residential areas with three or four on my road. I would end up going there during my school days and flipping through books… There was also my school library and the British Council library. That’s one place where I developed a literary sensibility of some sort.”
He started with short stories about his neighbourhood and youth. While these were not published, Perur said, “I learned how the material of life is converted into writing and spent a lot of time on the craft of writing. This has been useful as a translator as well, because you do have to write fiction even if you are translating.”
Meeting Vivek Shanbag
Soon after Perur published his first book, a travelogue titled If Its Monday It Must be Madurai, he happened to speak to Shanbag at a Ninasam event in Heggodu (Ninasam is a Karnataka-based organisation dealing with arts such as theatre and literature).
He adds, “One of the things that troubled me was that the language I was writing in (English) was not my mother tongue. There was some feeling of inauthenticity that I wanted to address somehow, a project that involved Kannada. Vivek mentioned that he had a novel he would like translated into Kannada. I had never done any translation before that.” That novel was Ghachar Ghochar.
Contrary to what one unfamiliar with the craft might think, starting his translating career with a book like this was not a major barrier for Perur. He said, “It was not intimidating. I was very clear that this was a process of me engaging with Kannada, and so it was a pleasure. I wrote and rewrote the first pages in English until I got a voice that I thought would support the book. After that, it was quite smooth.”
Decoding the heart of translation
Recreating the intangible feel of a writer’s work is at the heart of translation – not a verbatim transition from one definition to another. Perur explained, “You have to create a kind of voice in the received language which allows you to convey what the author of the original is trying to convey….” According to him, the unit of translation does not need to be a single word. He added, “You often come across these lists of untranslatable words. They are not really untranslatable if you use more than one word. It’s not about finding exact correspondences for words and phrases.”
Story continues below this ad
Another project that he took up was the translation of playwright Girish Karnad’s memoirs, This Life at Play in 2021. Karnad had translated a couple of chapters and reached out to Srinath Perur to take over. Perur, in turn, suggested that the translation could be collaborative, with each of them working on different chapters. But it was not to be. Karnad, who had been ill for some time, passed away and Perur ended up completing the work alone.
The writer has not only been working on the craft of translation. Among his works is a National Geographic report on Asian elephants in 2023. Much of his own writing takes the form of essays and feature translation. One that will be familiar to children of the 1980s is an essay that will be coming out in an anthology later this year – on reggae group Boney M’s popularity in India.