I always translate my own plays, says Girish Karnad

Lekhana has always been for people who like to read and write. Of course, we'd like to reach younger audiences, but perhaps the issues and themes we deal with are not interesting to them. But that's alright. We can't cater to everyone and still remain true to what we believe is important for the times in which we live,” says Arshia Sattar, founder of Lekhana.

Noted playwright Girish Karnad, said as he discussed the intricacies of translating plays to different languages, that "Indians excel at literary English but fall with spoken language"

"A translator of poetry, for instance, is different from one who translates plays. In the 1960s, when my plays were being translated to other languages, I found a paucity of good translators. Even my friend AK Ramanujan, who was adept at poetric deliverance and could gather the essence of a poem with all its structural intricacies, could not translate plays, which are about oral deliverance," Karnad said." The dichotomy exists because we go home and speak our mother tongues," he noted.

 Karnad, whose first play was staged in Kannada just as he was setting out to Oxford University, harbouring dreams of being an Eliot or Yeats now believes "one must write for an audience with whom you have a cultural connection." Karnad, who was born in Maharashtra and raised in Dharwad, Karnataka, says Indians are multinlingual. "The question of translation in India begins from birth, from speaking in Kannada with one's neighbours to speaking Konkani at home," he said.

  His plays in Kannada received great acclaim, in part because of the establishment of the National School of Drama in the 1960s. Karnad, who does his own English translations, said, "Their popularity initiated the need for English and Hindi translations. I found that some nuances are lost in translation, also because of cultural differences. One of my plays, Agni, revolves around the concept of fire sacrifice. Agni, however is a sacred fire, the same word is not used to refer to a house being burned down. This establishes a contrast between the sacred and the profane! I can't do this in English!"

‘Use tech to bridge gaps’
The ‘Mother Tongue’, a language of familial relationship, is dangerously on the wane. “Young people don’t wish to speak their local language and are, in the process, losing out on a rich culture,” said Telegu poet and writer P. Lalitha Kumari or Volga, as she is popular known. She was speaking at a panel comprising Rohini Nilekani, Charleson Ong, Chandan Gowda and Buddha Kyab, moderated by Arshia Sattar. “As a population, we believe that conversing in a common language is more likely to bring us opportunities, as opposed to learning only our regional tongue,” said Kyag. Technology is the answer,” said philanthropist Rohini Nilekani. “We can use informative methods to break limitations and reintroduce ethinicity and regional languages that are hardly spoken today.”