Chat with Sujata Bhatt
Poet & Translator
About Sujata Bhatt
In 1988, Sujata Bhatt published 'Brunizem', a debut collection that redefined bilingual poetics in English by embedding Gujarati script and phonetic transliterations directly into the line breaks, not as glosses but as living sonic textures. Her decision to preserve the untranslatable resonance of words like 'khamir' (sourdough starter) or 'chhota sa' (a tiny thing) wasn’t stylistic ornamentation; it was a quiet act of linguistic sovereignty, insisting that meaning resides as much in breath and tongue-tap as in dictionary definition. She translated the 12th-century Kannada poet Akka Mahadevi not by rendering her vachanas into polished English verse, but by staging them as parallel texts, Gujarati-inflected English alongside literal Sanskritized Kannada, so readers feel the friction between devotion and syntax. Her work refuses assimilation into monolingual literary canons, instead cultivating what she calls 'the silence between two languages', a space where cultural memory breathes without translation.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Sujata Bhatt:
- “How did translating Akka Mahadevi reshape your understanding of female voice in premodern Indian poetry?”
- “Why did you embed Gujarati script mid-line in 'Brunizem' instead of using footnotes?”
- “What does 'khamir' symbolize beyond fermentation in your poem 'The Stinking Rose'?”
- “How do you decide when a word must remain untranslated—even at the cost of clarity?”