Vivek Shanbhag on ‘Hyphen’, and bridging the gap in India’s translation landscape
What happens when you cradle a seed of an idea and nurture it for almost 20 years? For novelist and playwright Vivek Shanbhag, it led
What happens when you cradle a seed of an idea and nurture it for almost 20 years? For novelist and playwright Vivek Shanbhag, it led to the founding of Hyphen, a literary journal to celebrate India’s multilingual heritage with an exclusive focus on translations from Indian languages into English. “I grew up reading translations from other languages, whether it was Malayalam or Russian. But I have always felt that while Indians have so much access to writers from outside the country, there is little access to writers from our own neighbouring States. It was this desire to read writers from other Indian languages that led to Hyphen. We named it six years ago when we started Bahuvachana Prakashana, our publication house, but no one noticed it then,” says Shanbhag. Now, in the wake of global attention on Indian literature following the International Booker Prize wins for Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell in 2022, and Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasti in 2025, the moment seems opportune for a venture such as Hyphen to bridge the gap in India’s translation landscape. What is Hyphen? With Deepa Ganesh as Editor-in-Chief, Hyphen is launching on July 26 with three components: a literary journal in English, in print and digital formats; a publishing wing; an online space for translation resources, a curated bookshop, fellowships and mentorship programmes, seminars, book clubs, and publisher forums. It will also be printed and circulated in the United States and the United Kingdom.
An initiative of Bahuvachana Trust, of which Shanbhag is the founding trustee, Hyphen is supported by an advisory board comprising distinguished writers, translators and literary figures, including Geetanjali Shree, Perumal Murugan, Namita Gokhale, KR Meera, Christopher Merrill, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar and Sudhir Sitapati. The name, Hyphen, is borrowed from a line by famous scholar and translator AK Ramanujan, says Shanbhag. “Ramanujan once described himself as the hyphen in ‘Indo-American’. So, this is a tribute of sorts to him. I also feel that the hyphen signifies the connecting of two disparate things,” he explains. A world of languages It is the diverse nature of a journal that makes it an efficient and enticing way to introduce Indian writing to readers around the world, he feels. “While a book will expose you only to one writer, a journal can have 20 writers. In a linguistically diverse country such as India, a literary journal can offer people a taste of what these writers are, pique their curiosity and help them pursue it further,” says Shanbhag, who is no stranger to running a journal. He brings to Hyphen insights from his seven-year run as the editor of Desha Kaala, a Kannada literary magazine, coupled with his experience working in the corporate world. What makes it even more personal is the wider readership Shanbhag has enjoyed with the English translations of his popular and much-loved Kannada novels, Ghachar Ghochar and Sakina’s Kiss. “It is one thing to run a small magazine such as Desha Kaala, and another to run Hyphen.
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