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From Mother Tongue to Other Tongue - Jayasree Kalathil

From Mother Tongue to Other Tongue: Negotiating the Cultural Politics of Literary Translation This seminar took place on Wednesday 31 May 2023. In this seminar, taking off from her personal experience and practice, Jayasree Kalathil explores questions around racialisation and minoritisation in the context of literary translation. Jayasree translates from Malayalam – the language of Kerala, the southern-most state of India. In the context of India, Malayalam is one of the twenty-two official languages, and is spoken by over 35 million people. In the UK, it is a minority language even within the South Asian languages spoken here. As a migrant living in the country of our erstwhile colonizer, Jayasree is acutely aware of how her mother tongue disappears into insignificance, faced with the demands of that other tongue – English. As migrants, we are ‘selves in translation,’ or as translator Madhu Kaza puts it, selves living ‘in the silence between languages.’ Thinking about the question of translatability and of the racial, gendered, casteist and classist nature of languages have a direct impact on how we engage in translation. What does it mean to render the diversity and idiosyncrasy of a language into English, a language with a long history of colonialism and erasure of cultures and identities? How does one negotiate the conflicting demands for foreignization or domestication, or the calls to italicize otherness? How do we work towards translations that embody difference, otherness, unease? The seminar addresses these questions.