An extraordinary author-translator collaboration produced a book, “Heart Lamp,” that was lauded for enriching the English language.
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.
It also shows the evolution of literary translation in India as a growing number of works in the country’s many languages are being translated into English. That has brought Indian voices to new readers and enriched the English language.
“I myself have broken all kinds of stereotypes, and now my book has also broken all stereotypes,” Ms. Mushtaq said in a phone interview.
Ms. Mushtaq, 77, is an author, lawyer and activist whose life epitomizes the fight of a woman from a minority community against social injustice and patriarchy. The stories in “Heart Lamp” are feminist stories, based on the everyday lives of ordinary women, many of them Muslim.
