Author Carlos Tamilavan has translated Gita Rajan’s Tamil book Warsavil Oru Kadavul. The Kolkata Mail correspondent Priyanka Dutta caught up with Carlos Tamilavan about the book Our Man In Warsaw. Excerpts.

You have portrayed the eternal conflict that happens to many people when they go to other Countries. Do you have any personal experience that has helped in writing more about this?

Carlos Tamilavan- Regarding the conflicts in my novel, Our Man in Warsaw, the main character Chandran goes to Poland, a European Country in the heart of Europe. There, he was haunted by his own story, his mother, his wife, and his family. As a child abandoned, his mother with her Mangolian features was picked up during the Second World War in the the North Eastern parts India when fleeing Burma by Chandran’s grand-parents. She was brought up in South India in a Tamil-speaking family as their daughter and married to a Tamil-speaking man. She had some abnormal faculties like the capacity to sense the occurrence of fire in the vicinity.  Chandran’s wife also died in the fire. Chandran, a computer engineer, meets a lot of Polish characters with unusual problems in Poland, a country destroyed by the Second World War. Thus, the effects of the Second World War on the Eastern and Western fronts are brought to play their violent roles in the novel with telling effect. The irreconcilable conflicts ridden history of Poland,  Chandran feels, looks to the East for a spiritual solution, represented by a Hindu Indian, Sivanesan, married to a Polish Citizen,  who, in the end of the novel, true to the half-magical style of the novel, predicts unusual occurrences of some prominent Polish citizens and assumes the status of a Devine man. The story of the novel is set in the vast canvas of the effects of the Second World War on Eastern and Western societies and their people, which reverberates in different chapters of this novel.

I went to Poland in 2001 as a Visiting Professor to teach in the Department of Indology carrying the legacies of being born in a South Indian village near Kannyakumari, a two language speaking area. Then, I migrated to Bangalore to teach in a University where I had to do research on South Indian Folk Culture under a Kannada Professor who was a well known Kannada Language protester. Having been tutored in the multifarious conflicts of South India after India attained Independence, and experiencing the political changes of the slowly emerging Hindu assertion, I drew a comparison with Poland. As a Catholic Country Poland showed similar trends after the Stalinist politics was over thrown in th eighties  and the religion forming a backdrop thereafter. This enabled  Poland to look to the East for cultural and spiritual solution as I could meet people who were devotees of Ramana Maharishi.

The conflicts involving humans, be them Eastern or Western is the theme of my novel.   But I don’t seek simplistic answers and this was the lesson I wanted to tell  when probing the  artistic terrain of the theme of the novel. I have been thinking that simplifying human predicament for the sake of writing a novel  is wrong as some writers are guilty of. My readers can understand this.

What according to you are the problems of Globalization?

Carlos Tamilavan- As for as this novel is concerned a Polish character says, ‘you Indians burn a woman after marriage if you don’t like her, we Europeans instead divorce the woman. Likewise after Donald Trump is elected in the US election , there are criticisms that America, the citadel of democracy is destroying it by electing a man who was, before the election, described by the Democratic Candidate Kamala Harris as a fascist. The discussion of religion as a cultural expression of politics brings forth local ethos towards the mainstream economic problem and thus the expression. Glocalization, instead of Globalization gains currency. The depiction of Indian politics in my novel through the character of Amala, a female friend of questionable style of living of both the main character of the novel, Chandran, and another villainous politician of the novel, reminds our present dilemma of democracy and personal morality. The characters unable to face the hard reality take the shape of the supernatural manifestation of events and situations. One character of the novel flies through the roof of a Lodge where he stays.  

Many readers feel that when they read a translated work, some meaning gets lost, in translation. Do you also think the same?

Carlos Tamilavan- As an academic also along with writing fiction in Tamil for the last forty years, who has been teaching the technique of translation in Bangalore University. I think, in translation meaning is lost as well as gained. Both are useful for translation as it is a field where words are dancing in many directions enabling many levels of meaning. A good translator imbibes many layers of literary depths of the target language; if it is meant for the foreign English readers of the West, he / she  has to bring in a new piece of writing in translation and for that they need talent.. This is what happens when the recent South Korean novelist Han Kang  gets Nobel Prize for her Korean language novels in English translation.

In the Indian context, when a Bengali novel or Hindi novel gets translated the scenario is different; we have an Indian English context where Indian translation sensibility is established between the regional language literature and English. This area, I think, is not probed enough by research students of Indian Universities.

Let us take another example. The universally noted first sentence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude goes like this: ‘Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonial Aureliano Buendia  was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice’. The structure of this sentence could be rendered in many ways in Indian Languages starting with ‘As he faced the firing squad…..etc. What matters is the possibility of evoking different emotions in the reader’s mind by choosing the right structure of sentence.

Translation is an act of intellectual play where the translator is going deep into the mind of the writer to recreate another piece of literature in translation. That way, I feel, I am lucky to have a good translator in Gita Rajan and equally efficient editors, Keerthi Ramachandra and Shirsha Ghose.

The Kannada translation of this novel received  the Karnataka Sahitya Academy award. Now it is releasing in English. What kind of reception do you expect?

Carlos Tamilavan- The Indian Literary scene is diverse as its culture is diverse. Kannada received as many as eight Jnanapit awards and its literary scene is very vibrant. Though Tamil literature has a long history of two thousand years, its modern literary scene faces problems. Only Tamil little magazines are enriching its modern literature. But in Kannada they have a fertile field of creative writing and so I was happy to receive the Karnataka Sahitya Academy award. A Kannada literary critic H.S. Raghavendra Rao described this novel as representing  the best of Kannada and Tamil novels that have been published so far. Now I will come to the English translation of my novel published recently by Niyogi Books. When the details of this translation appeared in media many readers from many countries called me. So I hope this translation will receive good response from readers as the style of novel cuts across the realist and magical realist mode of writings.

What kind of books do you like to read?

Carlos Tamilavan- I follow literary books of all genres in Kannada, Tamil Malayalam in their originals and in English, ie. novels, short stories, plays, poetry and literary criticism.

My literary taste is developed by reading Indian and other authors. I like Latin American writers starting from Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, to  Bolona. I also like the American short story writer Raymond Carver, German writer Kafka, Russian writer Dostoevsky and Malayalam writers such as Benyamine, T.S. Ramakrishnan and in Kannada U.R. Anandamurthy .

What tips will you give to young writers?

Carlos Tamilavan- Being a University teacher and very close to young people of different languages. I know  young people are very sensitive to minute feelings. Stages of life be it love, taking a decision to choose their partners, they are left with new challenges. I had the experience of going with some young people  to court to settle the divorce of some of them without each destroying the other’s life. These people are if they choose to be writers they can write well as they have lots of experience. Some young writers want to become famous very soon and sometimes choose to do literary politics. There are some selfish writers in all languages. These selfish authors who trap these youths by praising them superficially without understanding the inner voice of their writing.  Some youths start writing well when they are young. While some others have to wait and get matured. They have to listen to their Muse.

As for as Tamil is concerned its literary scene is divided as the onslaught of film script writers and magazine serial writers. They are  posing as great writers  and it has done irreparable damage to the twentieth century literary genres. The young people are very often lured by these popular film script writers of no substance. This is a very difficult situation for young writers. They have to come out of this temptation of becoming famous through short cuts.  I would prefer to advise these youths to take a decision knowing literature is a field which is not always locally structured or determined. Instead, it is a broad field of international discourse where T.S. Eliot of the modernist period, Borges, Raymond Carver, and Salmon Rushdie of the Postmodernist period contribute.

What is the next project that you are working on?

Carlos Tamilavan- My practice is to read, unstoppably different internationally noted authors for over a year or two. Then, some themes and images settle in my mind, taking a lot of cues from my own experience of living in my village where my first 16 years, without visiting any city, took root. Then, automatically, a novel emerges in my mind. I am in that process now.