Translation, an avid and frustrated practitioner once said, is forever impossible and forever necessary. Among the major languages of India, Telugu has suffered from the meager efforts to take its literary treasures to the larger international readership through competent translations. Translation, particularly of the texts produced by the hitherto neglected dispossessed groups of the society, poses several challenges. The authors discuss the problems of putting across the dialog in the stories of writers like Yendluri Sudhakar and the culture-specific texts in the poems of Prasada Murthy and Karra Vijaya Kumari and the solutions, necessarily tentative, provided by them.

We have been translating together for some time now. One of our objectives has been to take contemporary Telugu texts to non-Telugu readers. As most of our translations have been from Telugu to English, we have naturally encountered many culture-specific problems. The problems get compounded in the context of a splurge of Telugu texts in the recent times from the dispossessed groups-dalits, minority religious groups, writers expressing themselves more and more in their own dialects about regional concerns, and women. We wish to share some of the problems we have experienced in translating some of these texts.

We begin with Yendluri Sudhakar's "Karuvu" (Famine). Written in the oral narrative mode, it is in the form of a conversation between an aunt and her nephew, both belonging to the Madiga community. It uses the Telugu dialect as spoken in Kanigiri in the Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh. We have tried to transport the life in the source text by retaining expressions like "nagajemudu plants" and "gorla gundi grains." But there was no way we could capture the dialectal variations in our English translation. We have tried to approximate this at times by taking recourse to literal translation. Let us consider these examples: "You proved the proverb, `The horse knows the pain only when it burns there', right after all" (Sudhakar 97). Or "Such a famine that it was dancing on our entrails!" (Sudhakar 98). Such translations, of course, strain the imagination of the readers. But we did this consciously, hoping that the readers would pause at such places and make an attempt to understand the specificity of the experience conveyed in the source text.

Wading through Specificities: Translating Contemporary Telugu Texts into English, competent translations, culture-specific problems, oral narrative mode, nagajemudu plants, non-Telugu readers, culture-specific texts, larger international readership.