Girish Karnad

Kannada

Baba Amte

Pu La Deshpande

Guru Dutt

Virupax

Belgaum

Maharashtra

Shivarama Karanth

Mookajjiya Kanasugalu

Mookajji

Mai-Managala Suliyalli

Agni Shridhar

They are the reason Marathi readers have access to the likes of, URA and Shivarama Karanth; andbook lovers are reading biographies ofand, and Arun Khopkar’s masterpiece on cinema legendIn 1970, when 19-year-old Uma’s wedding was arranged withKulkarni, an engineer 10 years her senior, she was not happy. Both their families hailed from Belagavi (formerly), but hers spoke Marathi and his, Kannada. “I had said I won’t marry a Kannadiga”, recalls Uma. The contentious border dispute betweenand Karnataka had split the speakers of Marathi and Kannada languages in Belagavi.However, her family decided that the electrical engineer with a central government job in Pune was too good a match to pass. The reluctant bride married and moved to Pune to become a homemaker. She passed her BA exams, majoring in Marathi, just two months after the wedding.The couple had no way of knowing that, a decade later, their linguistic differences would give them a common ground in literary translation. By then Uma had picked up spoken Kannada from Virupax so that she could fit into her new married home. Virupax had been learning Marathi ever since he moved to Pune in 1963 to work at the High Explosive Factory in Khadki.In 1978, the well-known Kannada writer and intellectualwon the Jnanpith Award for his novel,(The Dreams of). Uma wanted to read the novel set in a village named Mooduru with an aging widow as the central character. Virupax read it aloud to his wife, who could understand Kannada but could not read the script. Out of interest and not with a view to publish, Uma began translating the novel into Marathi.This exercise became the glue that sealed them together for the next four decades. Karanth’s prize-winning novel was eventually published in Marathi, translated by Meena Vanjikar. However, Uma got the chance to show Karanth her manuscript when he visited Pune. An impressed Karanth encouraged her to translate more. So she translated(Tana Manaachyaa Bhovaryaat), which was published in 1982.Uma woke up early every morning to prepare breakfast, after which Virupax would read out a portion, which she would then work on and refine. Like this, the couple translated important works of modern and postmodern Kannada writers into Marathi. After Karanth, Uma translated renowned writers such as Dr SL Bhyrappa, Triveni,UR Ananthamurthy, Shantinath Desai, Poornachandra Tejasvi, Girish Karnad, Vaidehi and Chandrashekhara Kambara. Recent authors such as Sudha Murty andhave also been translated by the couple. A total of 56 books are to her credit by now, which include novels, short stories, dramas, biographies and criticism. She has received several awards for her work, including the Central Sahitya Akademi Award for translating Bhyrappa’s Vamshavruksha.In all this, her loyal collaborator has been integral to the process. “From reading aloud, I started taping into a recorder. It made it easier for her to work,” says Virupax. “He is the filter. Only after he reads do I begin to translate,” says Uma. “The important thing is that readers have accepted these translations. Almost each book has been reprinted twice or thrice. Bhyrappa’s translations have gone into 10–12 reprints, while Sudha Murty’s typically go beyond 15,” she says. An autobiography focusing on Uma’s experiences in literary translation will be published soon.Virupax too started translating, from Marathi into Kannada. He became more active after taking voluntary retirement from the High Explosive Factory in 1990, where he had set up the department for instrumentation engineering. “However, I faced a strategic disadvantage,” says Virupax. “Being far from Karnataka made it difficult to find publishers and obtain permissions from authors. So I preferred to work on texts when commissioned.”He has translated into Kannada critical and biographical works by researchers and scholars, on personalities such as Pu La Deshpande, Baba Amte and philosophers such as Dynaneshwar, Tukaram and Narayana Maharaj. For the Sahitya Akademi he translated VD Savarkar’s Mazi Janmathep. He was inspired to translate Sunita Deshpande’s autobiography, Aahe Manohara Tari, and got it published with difficulty. Virupax was asked to translate half a volume from the collected works of Dr BR Ambedkar when it was published in Kannada. He translated from Prof GP Pradhan’s Marathi original of Letters to Tolstoy and Jyotsna Deodhar’s novel Kalyani. More recently, he worked on scholar Vishvanath Khaire’s book on Indian myths, and brought filmmaker Arun Khopkar’s tome on Guru Dutt to Kannada readers.While the translator duo continues to work on multiple forthcoming projects, they are also kept busy addressing queries on translation and with invitations to seminars, workshops and conferences. Uma writes and translates scripts for radio and television, lectures to students and also chairs literary sessions. Virupax is called on to translate advertisements and documents. Uma has recently rediscovered her love for painting. She obtained an MA in Art and Painting in 1983 and later a PhD on Dravidian temple architecture and its aesthetics. Solo exhibitions of her paintings were held early this year, in Pune, Kolhapur and Belagavi.Neither Uma nor Virupaxa had imagined that literary work would occupy the greater part of their lives. “I am a housewife who became a translator,” she says. “Translation is my second career, after engineering” says he. But, the confluence that the two have created through their work has rippled wide to benefit two distinct literary cultures.