ஜெயமோகன்
Illustration by Emma Roulette
Listen to the text in the original Tamil read by the author:
Translating Jeyamohan’s “Periyamma’s Words” was both a challenge and a joy, because it is, at its heart, a story about language and translation. It examines the relationship between stories, words, meaning, and culture, and offers glimpses of rare moments when linguistic boundaries are transcended. It is also a minute examination of how English, as a foreign language, is received in the native Tamil milieu, through the eyes of a young man with a perfunctory degree in English and an unlettered old woman, confined to her linguistic locale and steeped in her traditional lore.
Though a significant percentage of young Indians learn English in school, and consume English media, their relationship with English is a difficult one; they feel stranded between two linguistic and cultural universes like Trishanku, as a recent essay in Asymptote so aptly put it. The narrator in “Periyamma's Words” is a representative of this phenomenon. He has a “correspondence” degree in English literature—a distance-learning degree that labels him “educated,” and allows him to stay on in his hometown, working odd jobs like teaching Periyamma English. However, his English-learning seems to distance him from the old-worldly wisdom and composure that Periyamma embodies.
Periyamma is his antithesis—a woman of many names, a character who may have very well stepped in from the world of the epics into the modern world. Her rustic and provincial Kumari Tamil is full of delightful expressions and evocative cusswords, which were extremely difficult to translate. It is through their conversations and the stories they trade that the two of them re-examine the nature of words and meaning, managing to peep behind the veil of words that obscures meaning and experience something akin to “love”—a word that Periyamma, incidentally, is suspicious of till the end.
Translating “Periyamma's Words,” a story about translation, was challenging, but ultimately led to a greater understanding of my own relationship with the two languages and my own practice of translation. The story reminded me that translation is not simply the act of transposing one word for another in the target language, but the act of creating a “native” evocation in the “foreign” mind; about simultaneously realising and transcending cultural particularities for a universal understanding. “Periyamma's Words” achieves this, quite simply, by trading stories. To communicate to a non-Tamil, non-Indian reader, not just the stories that shaped the evolution of words, but also the cultural undercurrents that shape those concepts (like Seethai or karpu, or pathini, or thendredam) was hard, but I hope that, like Periyamma, the stories from the epics manage to strike a chord with the reader's heart and like Periyamma, offer them a glimpse of that rare moment of transcendence beyond words and meanings.
The themes in this story—universality, sublime understanding, the creative potential of stories, and feminine wisdom—are representative of Jeyamohan's oeuvre. I am delighted that “Periyamma's Words” was awarded the Asymptote Close Approximations Fiction Prize for 2017, and I hope that it will be widely read and enjoyed.
Though a significant percentage of young Indians learn English in school, and consume English media, their relationship with English is a difficult one; they feel stranded between two linguistic and cultural universes like Trishanku, as a recent essay in Asymptote so aptly put it. The narrator in “Periyamma's Words” is a representative of this phenomenon. He has a “correspondence” degree in English literature—a distance-learning degree that labels him “educated,” and allows him to stay on in his hometown, working odd jobs like teaching Periyamma English. However, his English-learning seems to distance him from the old-worldly wisdom and composure that Periyamma embodies.
Periyamma is his antithesis—a woman of many names, a character who may have very well stepped in from the world of the epics into the modern world. Her rustic and provincial Kumari Tamil is full of delightful expressions and evocative cusswords, which were extremely difficult to translate. It is through their conversations and the stories they trade that the two of them re-examine the nature of words and meaning, managing to peep behind the veil of words that obscures meaning and experience something akin to “love”—a word that Periyamma, incidentally, is suspicious of till the end.
Translating “Periyamma's Words,” a story about translation, was challenging, but ultimately led to a greater understanding of my own relationship with the two languages and my own practice of translation. The story reminded me that translation is not simply the act of transposing one word for another in the target language, but the act of creating a “native” evocation in the “foreign” mind; about simultaneously realising and transcending cultural particularities for a universal understanding. “Periyamma's Words” achieves this, quite simply, by trading stories. To communicate to a non-Tamil, non-Indian reader, not just the stories that shaped the evolution of words, but also the cultural undercurrents that shape those concepts (like Seethai or karpu, or pathini, or thendredam) was hard, but I hope that, like Periyamma, the stories from the epics manage to strike a chord with the reader's heart and like Periyamma, offer them a glimpse of that rare moment of transcendence beyond words and meanings.
The themes in this story—universality, sublime understanding, the creative potential of stories, and feminine wisdom—are representative of Jeyamohan's oeuvre. I am delighted that “Periyamma's Words” was awarded the Asymptote Close Approximations Fiction Prize for 2017, and I hope that it will be widely read and enjoyed.
B. Jeyamohan (b. 1962) is a Tamil writer and literary critic based in Nagarcoil, India. One of India's finest authors writing today, he has travelled the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent, and his work examines and reinterprets India’s rich literary and classical traditions. His best-known, critically acclaimed novel, Vishnupuram (1997), is an epic fantasy that layers history, myth-making, and philosophy. His works of fiction include the novels Pin Thodarum Nizhalin Kural (1999), Kaadu (2003), Kottravai (2005), and Vellai Yaanai (2013), and explore diverse themes ranging from ideological anguish following the collapse of Soviet Russia to the symbol of the mother goddess in Tamil cultural history to the great famine of Madras in 1876-78. A prolific writer, his output includes multiple novels, short stories, volumes of literary criticism, writer biographies, introductory texts to Indian and Western literature, books on philosophy, and numerous other translations and collections. At present, he is working on an ongoing serialised retelling of the Indian epic Mahabharata called Venmurasu (The White Drum), with thirteen volumes published so far, and the fourteenth in progress. When completed, this would be one of the longest novels in the world. His website can be found here.
Suchitra Ramachandran is a twenty-nine-year-old translator from Madurai, India. She primarily translates between Tamil and English. She spent her childhood in towns all over India, “drinking the waters of many rivers,” as the Tamil phrase goes. Her early exposure to a variety of linguistic and cultural milieus, both within and outside her native Tamil land, shaped her literary outlook and inspired her to take up literary translation. She has published a limited-edition volume of illustrated English translations of Tamil Sangam-era poems (Kuruntokai—Love, Loss, Landscapes, Mulligatawny Books, Chennai, 2016). Suchitra has a doctoral degree in biological sciences from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, and is currently a post-doctoral neuroscientist based in Basel, Switzerland.
