KOCHI: When Bhaskar was a little boy, his uncle would recite to him Ezhuthachan’s Adyatma Ramayana. Then he would explain the meaning of each sloka in his mother tongue of Konkani. With the passage of time, those recital sessions stayed deeply within Bhaskar. It ultimately honed the writer in him.
If recognitions are counted by the number of awards, the Konkani writer R S Bhaskar may not have had many to his credit. But the Kendra Sahithya Akademi award in 2003 for his Mhaja ajak eki hassti assili - the Konkani translation of Vaikom Mohammed Basheer’s Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu shows that those recital sessions was worth it. “The award was unexpected,” says the author.
Eleven years ago when he took up the translation work of Basheer’s book, there were many who discouraged him. The first and foremost bottleneck was the difficulty in finding appropriate words to match the Basheerean style. “This particular work was rich in it,” says Bhaskar. “It could have been a big hurdle. But the love for labour was too intense that the hurdles never blocked my way.”
Bhaskar points out that translation work helped him to find different layers of meaning in each word or phrase. He would read one sentence several times to get a clear picture of what that sentence implied. “Besides, the flexibility of Konkani helped me a great deal,” he says.
One would wonder why a man who wanted to be a writer became a translator first. “It was not a conscious decision,” he says. “I was concentrating on creative works by writing poems. But when the Kendra Sahithya Akademi came up with the proposal of translating Basheer’s work, I could not resist,” he says.
Ask him about the nuances of translation, he says, “The translation should never be a word-to-word process. But one must dig deep into the actual meaning of a word. The translator should be able to understand the author,” Bhaskar says. “I would read one sentence several times to get a clear picture of what that sentence implies.”
Now Bhaskar has come up with another book called Brahmarshi Sree Narayana Guru, a biography which includes slokas of the guru. This has been published by the Kendra Sahithya Akademi.
But he says that the treatment meted out to him during the release of this book by the Kerala Konkani Sahitya academy saddened him. “I finished the work one month prior to the stipulated time,” he says. “It was then that the Kerala Konkani Sahitya academy decided to release it in Kochi. And as far as my knowledge goes, when a book is released, the author should be present. But I was not invited to the stage and had to sit at one corner.” This is not the first time he had to experience such demoralising acts. “But I will move on,” he says.
Bhaskaran has published three volumes of poetry: Akshar, Nakshatra and Akshat. Akshar received the Konkani Bhasha Prachar Sabha Sahitya Puraskar from Kerala. He has also won the Tharabai Vishnu Mhapxencar Bharati Puraskar from Goa for his contributions to Konkani language and literature. The traveller of transforming times, an English translation of his Konkani poems, by R S Srinivas will be published soon.