Shanbhag is excellent on the inner logic of families, and of language, how even the most innocent phrases come freighted with history. In the book’s funniest set piece, the narrator’s mother tells him she’s cooking him a special breakfast. He recognizes her announcement for what it is — a declaration of war — and flees the house.

His mother has chosen to make this particular dish because the smell of it nauseates Anita. Anita takes the bait, the narrator’s sister is drawn into the quarrel, then his father. The powder keg explodes. “Ghachar Ghochar” is one of the first books written in Kannada — a language with around 40 million speakers — to be published in America.

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And much about its provenance and its passage into English is distinct — it’s the product of a true collaboration between Shanbhag and Perur, a first-time translator whose interest in this kind of work came not from his closeness to the language but his distance. He felt divorced from his mother tongue, he told me, and hoped translation would help him find his way back. For 18 months, author and translator worked on the 119-page book, taking it apart in Kannada and putting it back together in English — lightly editing it here and there, even adding a scene or two. Advertisement The actual translation wasn’t the tricky part, even though Kannada is a very different language — looser, more permissive about repetition. In fact, the translation brought certain elements into sharper focus. To establish the past tense in Kannada requires some elaborate grammatical framing.

But English is efficient and allows the action of the book to move as a mind moves, to leap between present and past. If anything, translating the book from Kannada into Indian English (for a version published in India last year) proved less complicated than the subsequent jump from Indian to American English; small turns of phrase evocative to the Indian reader — “washing vessels” for washing dishes, “iron box” for iron — had to be tweaked. Perur did retain one lovely local detail. The family is accused of using umbrellas to shelter them from moonlight. In the village, where no one can afford umbrellas or knows what they are, the nouveau riche put them to absurd uses. The real work of translation is always in carrying over the unsaid — never more important than in a book like “Ghachar Ghochar,” where the characters are impelled by forces within themselves, their families and their communities that feel so furtive, even unspeakable. For Perur it was a matter of establishing a voice that could be convincingly savvy and blind.

He wrote and rewrote the early pages until he settled on a tone he believed could carry the novel. The book in our hands is elegant, lean, balletic — but how can we know if the essence of the original has been communicated? When this question has been put to Vivek Shanbhag, who has himself also worked as a translator, he has recalled one particular passage from the novel. It is, notably, one of the scenes he added specifically for the translation.

The narrator’s wife has gone out of town and he is idly rifling through her closet, touching her clothes, her jewelry. He catches scent of her suddenly.

He presses his face into her saris to smell more, but the closer he gets, the more the smell retreats. “Whatever fragrance the whole wardrobe had was missing in the individual clothes it held. The more keenly I sought it, the further it receded. A strange mixture of feelings I could not quite grasp — love, fear, entitlement, desire, frustration — flooded through me until it seemed like I would break.” The essence of a novel, Shanbhag seems to imply, floats like fragrance through the book. It is the emanation of the sum of its parts and cannot be isolated. And perhaps any attempt to single it out is beside the point.

Duane Eddy Midi Files. Translation isn’t merely an act of transportation, after all, of carrying something over. It’s asymptotic (“the more keenly I sought it, the further it receded”), a kind of contented yearning and act of ardor every bit as mysterious as the narrator’s efforts to find his beloved among her belongings.

Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ) The Kannada alphabet (ಕನ್ನಡ ಲಿಪಿ) developed from the Kadamba and Cālukya scripts, descendents of which were used between the 5th and 7th centuries AD. These scripts developed into the Old Kannada script, which by about 1500 had morphed into the Kannada and Telugu scripts. Under the influence of Christian missionary organizations, Kannada and Telugu scripts were standardized at the beginning of the 19th century. Notable features • Type of writing system: alphasyllabary in which all consonants have an inherent vowel.

Other vowels are indicated with diacritics, which can appear above, below, before or after the consonants. • When they appear the the beginning of a syllable, vowels are written as independent letters. • When consonants appear together without intervening vowels, the second consonant is written as a special conjunt symbol, usually below the first. • Direction of writing: left to right in horizontal lines Used to write: Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ) or Canarese, the official language of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Kannada is a Dravidian language spoken by about 44 million people in the Indian states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. (कोंकणी / Konknni / ಕೊಂಕಣಿ / കൊങ്കണി / كونكڼى), an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Indian states of Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra by about 2.5 million people. (ಸಂಕೇತಿ), a dialect of Tamil spoken in the Indian state of Karnataka.

(ತುಳು ಬಾಸೆ), a Southern Dravidian language spoken mainly in the Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala by between 3 and 5 million people. Kannada alphabet Vowels and vowel diacritics with ka Consonants A selection of conjunct consonants Numerals (Excel) Sample text in Kannada Transliteration Ellā mānavarū svatantrarāgiyē janisiddāre.

Hāgū ghanate mattu hakku gaḷalli samānarāgiddāre. Vivēka mattu antaḥkaraṇagaḷannu paḍedavarāddarinda avaru paraspara sahōdara bhāvadinda vartisabēku. Translation All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) Thanks to Arvind Iyengar for providing the sample text. Sample video in Kannada Links Information about the Kannada language Information about the Kannada alphabet Online Kannada lessons Kannada phrases Online Kannada dictionary Free Kannada fonts Online news in Kannada Languages written with the Kannada alphabet.