Kerala Literature Festival 2023: authors discuss the rise and appeal of Malayalam translations

The availability of their works in English has vastly added to the appeal of their books, say Kerala’s writers

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things directed the literary world’s attention to Kerala, and the language of its people. The novel was written in English, enticingly beautiful English, to be precise, but it could easily have been in Malayalam, so rooted is it in the society, culture and psyche of God’s Own Country.

So much so that Benyamin, one of the most-widely read Malayalam writers of his generation, called it a Malayalam novel written in English during an interesting discussion at the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) in Kozhikode last week. Not that writers from the State were unknown beyond its borders before Roy; on the contrary, they were recognised mainly through translations.

Benyamin brings up an anecdote from 2015 when he attended the Karachi Literature Festival. “The first thing people asked me when they realised I was a Malayali was if I had met Vaikom Muhammad Basheer,” he says. “I found out that Basheer is hugely popular in Pakistan through the translation of his works in Urdu.”

Like Basheer, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, another colossus of Malayalam literature, too has admirers outside the language. In fact, some of his works, including his masterpiece  Randamoozham, have had several translations in English.

But there have also been instances, as Benyamin points out, when some rather popular Malayalam books — Malayattoor Ramakrishnan’s  Yanthram, for instance — have had to wait for years for the English translation to find a publisher.

Things are changing, however, and publishing houses today are always on the lookout for the latest Malayalam translations. The popularity of the current generation of authors such as Benyamin and K.R. Meera is a testament to this.

The quality of translation has also improved, according to author M. Mukundan. “I remember being disappointed by the French translation of Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s  Chemmeen,” he says. “The English equivalent of its French title was  An Indian Love Story and it seemed more like a translation from  Chemmeen’s film version than the book.”