HELLO! India Exclusive: Translating with Deepa Bhasthi

HELLO! India: You’re leading the Translations by Siyahi Writers’ Residency in Jaipur at a particularly exciting moment in your career. What drew you to this opportunity? And what are some of the most important skills or perspectives you hope participants take away from this programme?

Deepa Bhasthi: I enjoy teaching immensely. More importantly, I enjoy learning alongside colleagues and potential translators. It’s just great fun to nerd out on language and translation, and that’s what drew me to this opportunity. I really hope participants take away a renewed interest in thinking and writing about language.

HELLO! India: Translation is often described as a solitary practice. What can a residency environment offer that working alone cannot?

Deepa Bhasthi: Yes, translation can be a solitary practice, but I found that it’s far more a community exercise than just writing something of your own. There’s a wonderful feeling of community among translators, which is not something you see often within a group of writers. So, I think a residency environment can really sharpen what skills translators already have and introduce new ways of looking at how one can use language and think about translation practices. 

HELLO! India: Take us back to the moment your name was announced alongside Banu Mushtaq’s for the 2025 International Booker  Prize. How did you react? Since the win, have you had a moment to fully absorb the scale of what this achievement means? Not just personally, but for translation from Indian languages.

Deepa Bhasthi: Of course, it was a wonderful moment, and then one gets swept off in the aftermath of this big announcement with media interviews, calls, emails, and endless invitations to speak, etc. And no, I  actually haven’t had a minute to fully observe the scale of this achievement; I’ve been continuously travelling. There has been so much work, which I am grateful for, but it does get overwhelming at times. It is a huge win for Indian languages, not just Kannada. From day one, I had hoped that this would lead to some greater interest in translations from India. 

HELLO! India: You’ve spoken about translation as a creative act, not simply a technical one. Did the Booker win feel like validation of that belief? Also, has this recognition changed the way translators are valued within the literary ecosystem?

Deepa Bhasthi: While a lot of writers who are keen on getting their works translated don’t acknowledge translators, which is narrow-minded and unfair, the Booker platform has always clearly seen translation as a creative act. So, this idea that translation is just as creative a practice as writing something from scratch has always been around. The Booker win certainly brought attention to this idea, and that’s what is so important about the prize. While we, as writers and translators, have always known that translation is a creative practice, readers perhaps have not. An accolade like this that clearly acknowledges the translator as a co-creator certainly introduces the idea to more people. 

There was a time when a lot of publishers wouldn’t even mention the translator’s name on the cover page of the books they worked on. That’s changed to a great extent these days. But they barely get any mention in the media. So, while things are a lot better than they used to be, the field hasn’t progressed as much as it ideally should have.

HELLO! India: Any surprising responses or messages you’ve received since the award was announced?

Deepa Bhasthi: I can’t really pin it down to just one message, but the response has been overwhelming. I’ve been especially happy to hear from students, whether it’s students from India or students who are of Indian origin, South Asian origin, or from elsewhere in the world. They talked about how they saw themselves. They related so much to the translation because of how many words were retained, how it just felt so Indian, and like the English they were used to speaking, that they saw themselves in the translation.

So, I think that cultural aspect of the translation was what really struck a chord, and I’m always very thrilled when I hear  young people talk about how they didn’t think English could be written this way, and now that they see how it can work, 
they also want to try something like this.

HELLO! India: You’ve spoken about “translating with an accent.” Can you elaborate on what this means?

Deepa Bhasthi: What if we could find a way to retain a phrase here, a word there, to remind the reader that the text comes from another language? That, in reading an unfamiliar word, they have just learnt something new, have learnt a word they might never use themselves but whose meaning they might remember? It goes without saying that there is a fine balance to be sought between keeping some source language nd ensuring a reader in English is not met with an impenetrable target text… Devoid of the musicality with which retained accents enrich the translation, we would remain separate languages and cultures, condemned to bear the burden of the proper in our unaccommodating, un-elastic cultural lives.

HELLO! India: Having worked as a writer, journalist, and translator, how do these different identities inform one another in your creative life? 

Deepa Bhasthi: I don’t necessarily see these practices separately; they are all creative works. All these different experiences I have writing in different styles inform one another. I hope it makes my writing richer than if I had pursued only one kind of writing. Having said that, I’m just a writer, and like I keep reiterating, translation is also a form of writing