Anthe: On Translating Kannada
Drawing by Deepa Bhasthi.
Anthe (ಅಂತೆ) is one of my favorite words in the Kannada language. Somewhat meaningless by itself, it adds so much nuance and emotion when appended to a sentence that we Kannadigas cannot carry on a conversation without using it. Depending on the context and the speaker’s tone, anthe can convey an expression of surprise or the understanding that gossip is being shared. It could mean “so it happened,” “that’s how it is,” “apparently,” or “it seems.” The latter comes closest to a direct translation, but is a frustratingly simple choice. Anthe will only ever half-heartedly migrate to English.
Banu Mushtaq, whose short stories I have been translating recently, and whose “Red Lungi” appears in the Summer 2024 issue of The Paris Review, employs anthe generously. Mushtaq’s characters use anthe when reporting something someone said verbatim or when guessing how something might have happened. In another instance, she uses echo words with anthe, another common characteristic of the Kannada language: one character utters anthe-kanthe to refer to hearsay. There are also a whole lot of ellipses in Mushtaq’s stories … her sentences often trail off … like so … She mixes up her tenses here and there. It is always deliberate, this nod to the idea that time is not linear. The awareness that we inhabit different time zones and dimensions and live in stories within stories is commonplace in India. These narrative tools give Mushtaq’s work a sense of orality, as if she is sitting across from you and telling you the story.
Whenever Mushtaq and I do talk in real life, she is narrating, she is reporting, she is discussing the oppressive political scene in India, she is going back to her youth, laughing about that one time there was a fatwa issued against her for a story—they wanted her to stop writing, she told them to go to hell—she is constantly relaying anecdotes and thinking out loud and living through stories. There is more anthe in her urgency to convey everything all at once than I can hope to store in my notes.
My favorite function of the word is how its repetition in every other sentence, each differently intoned, allows a musicality to slip into daily speech. It gives everyday Kannada its impu, or melody.
Kannada belongs to the Dravidian family of languages native to southern India, and it is spoken by an estimated fifty to sixty million people around the world. It is the official language of the state of Karnataka. Kannada literature has been published continuously, without any lapse, for fifteen hundred years. Poets have described Sirigannadam, or “rich-Kannada,” as a river of honey, as milk rain, as being as sweet as nectar, as truth, as an eternal language. As old and celebrated as it is, Kannada is just one of India’s hundreds of languages (estimates vary between 780 and 1,600, in addition to thousands of dialects). An aphorism in the Khari Boli language best expresses the country’s mind-boggling linguistic diversity: Kos-kos par badle paani, chaar kos par baani, meaning that the water in India changes every two miles, and language every eight miles.
Mushtaq’s mother tongue is not Kannada, and strictly speaking, neither is it mine. Hers is Dakhni, a fascinating mix of Persian, Dehlavi, Marathi, Kannada, and Telugu that is often wrongly called a dialect of Urdu. It is spoken in parts of southern India predominantly, though not exclusively, by the Muslim community. My mother tongue is Havyaka, a dialect that harks back to Old Kannada (a parental language that dominated from the ninth to the eleventh century C.E.) and is spoken by a small community of upper-caste brahmins along the Arabian coast as well as by a similar community in central Karnataka. (The two versions differ and are mutually unintelligible.) However, for various sociogeographical reasons, what I grew up with was a mix of Kannada varieties common to the Mysore region and coastal Mangalore. Both Mushtaq and I live in small towns where we regularly speak at least three or four languages and a number of dialects. This use of numerous sociolinguistic systems is, for a very large number of Indians, par for the course, and is certainly not just a function of class, caste, education, or intellectual leanings. I know a grocer in my town who speaks thirteen languages fluently.
Mushtaq’s decision to write in Kannada is hardly unusual today. The second half of the twentieth century saw many eminent multilingual writers choose to work in Kannada, the dominant language spoken on the streets, even though their mother tongues were Konkani, Telugu, Tamil, Tulu, or others, and they conducted their professional lives in English. Such multilingual proficiency is much rarer now—thanks to the colonial-era Macaulayism that continues to drive India’s English-forward education system, most of us might speak many languages but be proficient only in English.
Banu Mushtaq sprinkles her Kannada with Dakhni, Urdu, and scant Arabic. Each of these languages is also further influenced by local distinctions specific to Bayalu Seeme, a region of Karnataka characterized by open plains, where she lives. What enriches my translations, I like to believe, is a complete immersion in the culture of the text I am working with. I had an easier time translating my first two books, as they were in languages and from regions I was very familiar with. Mushtaq’s stories are set within India’s Muslim community, though her work is not from and for Islamic culture alone. Still, her references are a world apart from my own lived experiences. In trying to bridge the gap in my understanding, I found myself reaching for culture that shared linguistic, social, and aesthetic influences with the milieu of her stories. Somehow, this kind of immersion seemed to help me be better attuned to the subtleties in her text. I was introduced to the all-consuming world of Pakistani TV dramas, a vast subculture that overflows with intrigue, suspense, romance, and high-octane drama that thrills most desi hearts. I rediscovered Qawwali music, falling irrevocably back in love with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, Arooj Aftab, Ali Sethi, their ilk. Alongside my everyday dosage of Kannada-ness, I read about Islam. Reopened my Arabic notes from the lessons I once received from a maulvi saheb. Enrolled in a Nastaliq script-writing class in which we studied talaffuz (pronunciation) via Hindi films and poetry. I cannot say where and how this research helped my translation practice. But it has enriched my years like anything, as we say in India.
Any practice of writing and translation in this social terrain can become very political very quickly. The politics of language in India are, as one might expect, a source of severe passion and violence. While attention to the most prominent language in any state—Kannada in Karnataka, for instance—comes at the cost of the prominence, public usage, and funding for the instruction of several others, perhaps the greatest threat to linguistic diversity across India comes from the imposition of Hindi. Spoken mostly in parts of northern India, central government policy has historically forced the language upon other states, where it has often been violently rejected, especially in the southern states. These language wars have killed people, and emotions around imposition of one language at the cost of others, whether Hindi or a regionally dominant language, are always simmering below the surface. Why translate at all, in the face of so many complexities? This is a question we can no longer afford to ask. The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls translation “the common language of languages.” In India, linguistic hegemony is just one of the many dangers of the homogenizing policies of a far-right-wing-led government since 2014. When engaging with another language culture, one experiences, in learning a new word or phrase, a glimpse of a different world, however ephemeral.
In the hierarchy of who gets to translate, who gets to be translated, who gets funding for new translations … Kannada does not fare too well. Barely a handful of literary translations in the Kannada-English pairing is published in a year. This is miles behind literatures written in, say, Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, or Hindi. To translate at all, and then to translate from an underrepresented language, and finally to translate into English, with all its baggage, is riddled with layers of questions for which there can never be simple answers. I reach back for anthe, trying to see how complexities can often remain unresolved. Anthe refuses to let itself be easily carried out of Kannada, which in turn reminds me that it is okay not to have all the answers about translation and its politics.
One delightful side effect of all the language cultures we live with in India is how often we toggle between two or three languages when conversing. This reduces language to its basic function, as a tool to communicate with whatever words are within reach, stripping the need for “proper” articulation, throwing out all the rules. We alternate this pared-down approach with hyperbole and exaggeration, with repetitions of a word for a sense of emphasis— “I’ve told you a thousand times,” “small-small,” “round-round,” “two-two times …” This interplay of the utilitarian and the embellished, the functional and the ornamental, is also where I find the uniqueness of Kannada when I translate. It is important for me to retain these qualities—for instance anthe rendered as the inadequate “it seems,” which I’m sometimes told is not quite elegant enough English, because carrying these nuances is like speaking English with an accent. It reminds the reader that the text is from another culture. In translation, these expressions stretch the elasticity of the English language. In turn, Kannada gains another reader.
Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and critic who translates Kannada-language literature.