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Academic and feminist J Devika’s politics is central to the job of translation, and she is never apologetic about it. Her recent translation of Manoj Kuroor’s novel The Day the Earth Bloomed won the Crossword Book Award for Translation, and the inaugural Kerala Literature Festival Book of the Year (Fiction) in 2025. In a conversation with Scroll, J Devika discussed the book and other aspects of her translation. Excerpts from the interview:

What made you gravitate towards Manoj Kuroor’s novel, and what helped you translate the sensibilities of the Sangam era literature into English?
The answer to the first is also the answer to the second. Kuroor’s novel was remarkable for many reasons. First, I’ve always loved Sangam poetry, and I’ve read both Akananuru and Purananuru. Not in Malayalam, though there are several good translations in Malayalam by many poets. But when I read these poetry collections in my teenage years, the poets who had translated these works used Sanskritic idioms, which is why these translations didn’t sound – or read – like Tamil at all. So, I could see that something was amiss, because Sanskrit has a different emotional register. I quite enjoyed and loved reading AK Ramanujan’s translations because there’s a remarkable avoidance of excessive...

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