‘I’m partial to books with child protagonists’
Maria, Just Maria
Sandhya Mary’s Maria, Just Maria, translated from the Malayalam by the award-winning Jayasree Kalathil, is a witty and insightful investigation into contemporary society’s binary ideas such as normal and abnormal. A moving and humorous novel written from the perspective of a child, it is the story of a girl born in Kerala, into a Syrian Christian family. Sharing her experience of translating this book, Kalathil delves into ideas of storytelling, writing children’s points-of-view, and the experiences of women in society. Edited excerpts:
Question: What inspired you to translate Maria, Just Maria?
Answer: I usually only translate books I like as a reader myself. I don’t go by literary importance, or if the writer is well-known. The books that I like must also sit well with my personal politics. When it came to Maria, Just Maria, I’m quite partial to books that have children as the protagonists. I like books narrated from their point-of-view, or books that have one or two children as the main characters. In the hands of good writers, I think that does something to the way in which you can write a book. It’s about writers who don’t condescend children or writers who don’t see children as lesser human beings.
Q: The humour in Maria, Just Maria is particularly tender, witty, and endearing. How did you work through that in the translation?
A: Sandhya Mary has a very speci c kind of humour. As it is, humour is dicult to translate. But the positive thing for me as a translator is that I get Sandhya’s humour. It’s the kind of humour that I like and one that makes sense to me. That helped. I did have to pay attention to the fact that I didn’t lose that humour through the translation.
Q: As a translator, how do you preserve powerful dialogues spoken by the characters?
A: The dialogues are reective of what we’ve gone through as women in my generation. They also denote a certain time in history. The story, while being about Maria, is also set in context to the land, the history, and the social and political aspects of that time.
The power that’s in the original somehow has to be conveyed in a translation. You can’t lose the intensity. Sometimes, you must work carefully to bring that intensity into the story. It helps that the time the story is set in is one I connect with completely. It is our generation; it is our childhood in some ways, and that really comes through.
Read the full interview on magazine.thehindu.com