Sridevi Hariharan

on translating Suguthakumari

Translating this poem was not an easy task. First came the challenge of even finding a poem to translate at all. I did not know many famous Malayalam poets, although I knew there were many, but I did not initially have many resources online or know where to start. Thankfully, my parents, having grown up speaking Malayalam, gave me some names: O.N.V Kurup and Suguthakumari, among others. I had to search up their bios and find some of their works in books and Malayalam poetry blogs. I realized that some works had already been translated into English, but many had not, so I thought I would try to translate those.

Next came the challenge of actually translating. Translation of Malayalam poetry is hard, even for native speakers sometimes, because much of the language in poetry is not used in casual settings. It is more literature-based, often using flowery and archaic vocabulary and grammar. Reading the script is hard sometimes for a reader like me, not only due to the curvy shape of letters, but because Malayalam words can run on and be extremely long. Due to the concept of sandhi, where the forms of words can change when combined (example: the word രാ മൻ (“Raman”) combined with ആയി രി ക്കുക (“was/were”) becomes രാ മാ യി രി ക്കുക (“Raamaayirikkuka”), which can be hard to understand at first glance when reading). Being a bilingual speaker, it was easy for me to pick up on words being spoken that had sandhi, but reading them was a completely different monster to deal with. Many problems I had with translating involved sandhi and grammar, while others also included vocabulary and pacing of the verses. I didn’t have many dictionaries to go off of whenever I came across a word I didn’t understand. Mainly, I had some Malayalam apps, online websites, and Hermann Gundert’s dictionary to help, along with the occasional correction by my parents and my Malayalam professor at UT who reviewed my full translation. My professor and classmates also debated about the numerous ways to write the same concept in multiple different ways in a sentence that would make sense in English. Syntax and sentence/word order is something I have been studying as a linguistics major, and I really had to put my knowledge to use here. Many lines in the poem would turn out to be part of the same sentence, so I was at first unsure on how to properly lay out the structure of my translation. Now, I don’t think my translation is perfect and I can always work to make it better, but I think I put in the right effort to make it polished for understanding. I now have a better idea on how to translate Malayalam poetry than before. It’s funny how Malayalam has a high literacy rate in the state of Kerala, but it’s only one language of hundreds within India. I think it is a difficult language to write poetry in and respect the poets’ efforts very much. Overall, translation took more than a month and was a harsh, grueling process, but I found it equally fulfilling, and the poems’ meanings were very beautiful once I was able to attain a better essence of them.