US publisher translates Kannada tale

That single moment's intensity hasn't been matched in my life before or since. A woman who I didn't know has chosen to accept me, in body and mind...so begins one of the chapters of Ghachar Ghochar published in the prestigious magazine Granta.
Written by Vivek Shanbhag, Ghachar Ghochar, published in 2013, is the first Kannada novella translated into English by Penguin Books USA.The same will be released in the city today.
From a cramped, ant-infested house to a spacious bungalow, a family finds itself making a transition in many ways, which forms the essence of the novella. And Shanbhag, who has authored five story collections, two plays and three novels, has captured the transition of a middle-class family over a period of 20 years in vivid terms.
Shanbhag found the translator for his book, Srinath Perur, some 18 months ago, quite by chance. Perur, who had sent his fiction writing to Shanbag for assistance on publishing, landed up translating his 80 page novella. "It's important \for the author and translator to work together, because the latter needs to understand the unsaid," says Shanbhag.
The English translation is longer than the original novella, so that no nuance of the original story is lost in translation. "The book has to be experienced. My stories stay with me," says Shanbhag simply. So does it with the readers.