A book of my own

This would have sounded unbelievable to me some months back…but a book of my own is going to be published soon…

In a couple of posts written long back I talked about a modest translation project that I had taken up on my own…I started to translate an early Kannada novel (written in 1900), Chandramukhiya Ghatavu, into English…I selected this novel mainly because, one, it was a small novel, and I selected this small novel because this was the first time I was translating and did not want to take up something big that would overwhelm me with its size…this translation of a small novel was going to be a test case for me…a trial run kind of…and the other compelling reason was, though small, this novel's narrative structure was remarkably different and experimental from the early social novels that were being published around that time...

It took me around six months to complete translating this small novel of only 28 pages!!! Satisfactorily, I mean…that is, a sensible draft which I was satisfied with… I also discovered that I enjoyed this process of translation…that was a big positive for me…

Now that I was satisfied, I decided to show the English version to a couple of friends and some like-minded scholars who are working with Kannada literature and translation studies. A few changes were suggested by some, but generally they said the translation was good and that I should try and get it published. My friend Dunkin Jalki even cited a small excerpt from the translated Kannada ‘preface’ in his Ph.D. thesis, citing the source as ‘unpublished translation!!’ This pepped me up a bit…

Anyway, the translation was completed sometime during the middle of 2009 and it lay with me and I kept looking at it to see if I could do anything more…I also enquired with a couple of publishers (big ones) and described my book and they told me that the novel was too slim and that it wouldn’t be a viable proposition (read ‘financially unviable’)!!

Then, last year I visited my hometown Shimoga during summer and whenever I visit Shimoga, I visit the homes of my English teachers who taught me when I was doing my BA there. This time when I met Prof Nanjundaiah, I told him about my translated novel and told him that its size was getting in the way of its publication… I was stunned when he told, ‘I will publish it…’ I asked him how he was going to make it viable…he tossed around a few ideas and then he wondered if it was possible to publish a bilingual edition…the original Kannada and the English translation side by side…that was a very good idea, I said, but then getting permissions and the logistics worried me…he assured me that he knew the editor of the Kannada edition (who discovered the Kannada original in 1994 in British Museum, London), and that he’d speak with him and get his permission…

This was some months back and then one day he called me up and told me that he has got the permission and that he is proceeding with the page setting and other pre-printing essentials…and then in the last month he sent me the proofs online for proof-reading and editing…I could now see the book in its pre-print avatar and I was thrilled…Sir had even managed to get a kind of introductory note from the editor of the Kannada edition…

I proof-read and made some small changes in the proofs and sent it back and am waiting with bated breath for the book to come out…a book of my own…