Chennai: Sahitya Akademi award winning literary translator and eminent English professor, K Chellappan, passed away in Chennai on Monday at the age of 88, leaving behind hordes of mourning students, scholars and literary personalities.
Though he won the Sahitya Akademi award for translating Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali work, ‘Gora,’ into Tamil in 2021, he has also translated many Tamil books, including those written by former Chief Minister M Karunanidhi, into English.
Chief Minister M K Stalin, in a condolence message issued from Chicago in the US, said Chellapan’s death was a great loss for both the Tamil and English literary worlds. He had rendered in English three literary works of Karunanidhi, Kuraloviyyim, Then Pandi Singam and Meesai Mulaitha Vayathil, Stalin recalled.
Chellappan, who had also translated into English classical Tamil works like the poems of Bharathiyar and Bharathidasan and made a comparative study of Shakespeare and Ilango Adigal, was honoured by the State department for Tamil Development with a Bharathidasan award in 2006 and the best translator prize in 2016, he said
As an English teacher, Chellappan started his career at Rajah’s College in Pudukkottai and then worked in several institutions earning the respect of several generations of students who fondly remembered him on social media soon after the news of his passing spread.
Apart from paying glowing tributes, some of his admirers, like publisher G Olivananan, even changed their profile pictures with their old photographs taken with the eminent scholar in Comparative Studies in Literature.
