‘You must, in some sense, go mad with literature’: Writer Vivek Shanbhag
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Literature marks the moment of passage, when thought crosses from private consciousness into public meaning. In translation, it makes yet another crossing – from one language to another, from the familiar into foreign territory. This conversation brings together two people acutely alive to that threshold, or what celebrated Kannada writer Vivek Shanbhag calls “the gate of translation”. Shanbhag’s spare and devastating Ghachar Ghochar traces how moral life mutates under the pressure of aspiration, how families invent new grammars to frame what they have become – or chosen to become. Questions of language, migration and identity carry particular weight for Shanbhag, whose novel found global acclaim through translation. His interlocutor, Parul Sehgal of the New Yorker, was once described by Teju Cole as a “good smuggler” who secrets herself inside her writing even as she listens for what lies hidden in an author’s words. Sehgal’s own childhood traced a geography of displacement – Washington, Delhi, Manila, Budapest – teaching her how language, once altered, quietly alters us. As Shanbhag reflects on writing within, against and beyond linguistic inheritance, Sehgal probes the aesthetics and ethics of this movement. The discussion opens onto larger questions of identity, taste and belonging. How does a new language rearrange desire,...