BooksBarbecue
Back Pyre Save as PDF
Chapters (24)
  1. Pyre
  2. Also by Perumal Murugan
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Pyre
  6. ONE
  7. TWO
  8. THREE
  9. FOUR
  10. FIVE
  11. SIX
  12. SEVEN
  13. EIGHT
  14. NINE
  15. TEN
  16. ELEVEN
  17. TWELVE
  18. THIRTEEN
  19. FOURTEEN
  20. FIFTEEN
  21. SIXTEEN
  22. GLOSSARY
  23. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
  24. Back Cover

Samba A small-grained variety of rice grown during the second, long Samba crop season, between August and November, in Tamil Nadu.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

I am delighted to have been able to translate yet another of Perumal Murugan’s novels. Translating Maadhorubaagan, which came out in English as One Part Woman, was a tremendous experience. It was a diffuse moment that extended over months as I took up the work in breaks between other tasks—breaks that were meditative, joyous, and humbling. The response to that translation, too, has been intense, not least because of the tide of intolerance and nasty political manoeuvring in the throes of which both the novel and its author were caught.

Translating Pookkuzhi—Pyre, in English—has been a somewhat different experience. In some ways, it has been more challenging despite the fact that this novel’s storyline is more contemporary than that of Maadhorubaagan, and it does not dwell so much on mythical and temple narratives. I think the difficulty is because there is more direct speech involved in Pookkuzhi; the characters speak a lot and their streams of thought too bear the distinct mark of regional speech patterns. In the Tamil text, Kumaresan’s and Saroja’s people speak differently; their speech is marked by rural and semi-urban variations. It has been difficult to sustain that difference in translation. Perhaps this is an instance where specificity of language use resists translatability.

In the Tamil text, Perumal Murugan employs a narrative style in which repetitions of phrases or words for the sake of emphasis, and small abrupt shifts back and forth in time without explicit discourse markers are very common. These are aspects of narration that native speakers are, perhaps, accustomed to. But in my translation to English, these sounded unclear and a little confusing, especially given the various ways in which time works in the novel: the psychological time of the characters, especially Saroja’s; the past that emerges through memory and reminiscences; her recollections of events that have occurred just a few days ago after her arrival at Kumaresan’s village; the time in which stories of Kumaresan’s family’s past are set, etc. Moreover, since I have developed this habit of producing a very idiomatic translation, there was a good deal of work involved in making the language of translation supple. It could not have happened without the excellent and kind work done by Ambar Sahil Chatterjee, my editor at Penguin India, and Shatarupa Ghoshal, whose copyediting work was meticulous.