Pragati K.B. (an interestingly odd byline) writes for the NY Times (archived) about the latest International Booker winner:
Banu Mushtaq’s book “Heart Lamp” last week became the first story collection to win the International Booker Prize. It was also the first work translated from Kannada, a southern Indian language, to receive the award. But “Heart Lamp” is unusual for another reason. It is not a translation of an existing book. Instead, Ms. Mushtaq’s translator, Deepa Bhasthi, selected the stories that make up “Heart Lamp” from among Ms. Mushtaq’s oeuvre of more than 60 stories written over three decades and first published in Kannada-language journals.
The collaboration that won the two women the world’s most prestigious award for fiction translated into English represents an extraordinary empowerment of Ms. Bhasthi in the author-translator relationship. […] Ms. Bhasthi, in a brief separate interview, said that she had chosen the stories in “Heart Lamp” for their varied themes and because they were the ones she “enjoyed reading and knew would work well in English.”
Ms. Mushtaq said she had given Ms. Bhasthi “a free hand and never meddled with her translation.” But consultation was sometimes necessary, Ms. Mushtaq said, because she had used colloquial words and phrases that “people in my community used every day while talking.”
Finding translations for such vernacular language can be a challenge, Ms. Bhasthi, who has translated two other works from Kannada, wrote in The Paris Review. Some words, she wrote, “only ever halfheartedly migrate to English.” But that migration can be an act of creation. In the brief interview, Ms. Bhasthi said that her translation of “Heart Lamp” was like “speaking English with an accent.” That quality was especially lauded by the Booker jury. […]
Kannada, the language of Ms. Mushtaq’s original stories, is spoken by the people of Karnataka, whose capital is Bengaluru, India’s technology center. There are about 50 million native speakers of Kannada. In 2013, a Kannada literary giant, U.R. Ananthamurthy, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
In the past decade, books by Vivek Shanbhag, translated into English by Srinath Perur, have popularized Kannada literature among non-Kannada domestic and international readers. One of his books, “Ghachar Ghochar,” was listed among the top books of 2017 by critics at The New York Times. Unlike Ms. Mushtaq and Ms. Bhasthi, this author-translator team engaged in a “lot of back-and-forth” to “bring out what was flowing beneath the original text while ensuring the translation remained as close to the original as possible,” Mr. Shanbhag said.
In her acceptance speech for the Booker award, Ms. Bhasthi expressed hope that it would lead to greater interest in Kannada literature.
I posted about Kannada here and here; the first thread is chock-full of people posting comments like “No language can match KANNADA, the true classical language of India,” and the second barely exists. (I confess I still think of Bengaluru as Bangalore, and doubtless always will.)
Is it really “unusual” for an English-translation collection of short stories not written in English not to duplicate the contents of a specific volume of collected stories in the source language? I would expect that to be fairly widespread, especially if you want to introduce a previously untranslated author with “greatest hits.” Or if the way in which the stories were originally disseminated to their original readership as magazine pieces or whatever meant that the economics weren’t there to republish them all in book-collection format.
I took the unusualness to refer more specifically to the prize rather than all books. OTOH I can’t be bothered calculating what fraction of previous nominees were short story collections and what fraction of those were translations of greatest hits rather than of a single volume, and I am not sure Pragati K.B. will have done so either.
Re “interestingly odd byline” My guess is that “Pragati K.B.” would be “K.B. Pragati” in India but reversed it for a global readership to show that Pragati is a given name not a surname?
Is it really “unusual” for an English-translation collection of short stories not written in English not to duplicate the contents of a specific volume of collected stories in the source language?
No, but like mollymooly I took that to be context-limited (though since this is the first story collection to win the prize, I’m not sure how that works). But the more important consideration is that journos grasp at anything they can possibly describe as unusual or, even better, unique. Boredom is to be feared above all things!
My guess is that “Pragati K.B.” would be “K.B. Pragati” in India but reversed it for a global readership to show that Pragati is a given name not a surname?
Maybe, but that doesn’t remove the oddity; what is “K.B.”?
The R and K in R. K. Narayan were his grandfather and father
She uses “Pragati K.B.” in The Hindu as well.
I know, and I can’t find any expansion anywhere — not that she’s obliged to provide one, of course!
There are also places in India where the two initials are for your father and the village you’re from. And so on and so forth…
Even within the same family, people from India may make different choices about which name they use as if it were a surname in English. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (Nobel Prize in physics, 1930) used one of his personal names, Raman. His nephew, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Nobel Prize in physics, 1983) used the family name instead.
Kusaasi speaking English or French use their actual Kusaal personal names like surnames, and go by Christian baptismal names or formal Arabic-derived given names if they’re Muslim. Or just by an English or French personal name they happened to like, in the (commoner) event that they are neither Christian nor Muslim.
People involved in long-distance travel, like professional drivers, often have a Muslim alter ego they can adopt for business purposes, along with a suitable name to go with it, even if they are not noticeably Muslim off the clock. (There’s nothing feigned or hypocritical about this: it’s just taken for granted that people are not pigeonholed into just one single neat social role.)
There was a (Christian) outpatient nurse in our department called Muhammad, who used to get exasperated by people asking him when he was going to change his name, it being generally assumed that he naturally would. I’m glad to say he was still standing firm when I last saw him. Maverick …
But the common thread, I suppose, is that none of these English or French or Arabic names is your real name. That one, you don’t get to change.
(People always know what clan they belong to, but Kusaasi don’t use clan names as surnames, unlike the Mossi. Or parents’ or grandparents’ names, though I imagine that may yet happen with the children of English or French speakers.)
> Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (Nobel Prize in physics, 1930) used one of his personal names, Raman
I play soccer in an old-timers pickup game with someone I’ve assumed is a member of the famous physics clan, maybe a grandson, a physics prof who goes by Venkat.
He has a move where he’s got the ball at his feet, but he’s not looking at it, and then he’ll look down and the ball’s trajectory will change in one of two unpredictable ways. Impossible to defend against both. It’s a move called Schroedinger’s Venkat.
Really nice guy.
The current chief minister of Karnataka (where Kannada is the dominant local language) is the apparently mononymous Siddaramaiah. His predecessor-but-one had the initials pattern, viz. B.S. Yediyurappa, with a wikipedia explanation that Yediyurappa is the given name but you shouldn’t treat either the B. (Bookanakere, a “toponymic surname”) or the S. (Siddalingappa, a patronymic) as a “family name” and should just use the given name as the short form. That said, the X.Y. GIVENNAME pattern does seem more common in a number of Indian naming traditions than the GIVENNAME X.Y. pattern used by this journalist. The politics of neighboring Tamil Nadu are of course adorned by the strikingly named M.K. Stalin, given the foreign-origin “first name” by his father, who was a fan.
Somewhat hilariously, you can find wikipedia citations to works authored by Pragati K.B. that give her name as K.B., Pragati. Why not K., Pragati B., I wonder.
@hat
If you want to know what K.B is, the following link gives a (NY times) email contact, as well as Instagram and X. Dunno if she would reply (or direct you to some FAQ page she has created).
https://www.nytimes.com/by/pragati-k-b
Oh, I’m not *that* obsessed — I suspect she would find such a query an unwelcome intrusion. Just mildly curious, more about the phenomenon than her specific initials.
I would have assumed that K.B. is an anglicised abbreviation of some lengthy Indian surname. Similarly, K.C. is a very common surname in Nepal.
B.S. Yediyurappa, with a wikipedia explanation that Yediyurappa is the given name
Wikipedia’s template system facilitates reverse-searching for such explanations. Among the hundreds of articles were a few with name format “Foo X. Y.”, including chess players Shyam Sundar M., Thejkumar M. S., Visakh N. R., Venkatesh M. R., and Pranesh M; race driver Aravind K.P.; and actor Shiju AR.
Also interesting was M. Ct. M. Chidambaram Chettiar, a member of the M. Ct. family “formerly known as the S. Rm. M. M. Ct. family”.
Pragati Krishnapuradoddi Byregowda has a few by-lines in the NYT.
Thanks!
I once knew a Sri Lankan who always went by just two of the ten syllables in his name.