‘The belief that written language is more important than spoken is harming the Konkani movement’
· Scroll
Sharing its name with the coast of its origin, the language of Konkani is spoken in multiple dialects and written in scripts as diverse as Perso-Arabic, Roman, Devanagari, Kannada, and Malayalam. Enmeshed within the politics of language, so closely tied to regional identity in South Asia, official status, standardisation, and patronage pertaining to the scripts and languages in which Goan literary production occurs have been matters of long-standing concern in the enclave.
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Located on the Konkan coast, Goa’s linguistic and literary heritage outsizes the region’s diminutive geography. Konkani is one of the languages in which Goan writers have expressed their craft in Romi and Nagri scripts, but Goan literature also appears in Marathi, English, and Portuguese. In fact, among the first novels of South Asian nascence is Os Brahmanes (1866) by Goan writer Francisco Luís Gomes (1829-1869); its Portuguese title really requires no translation, although The Brahmans (1971) – an edition in English – does exist.
Despite this varied literary heritage, in addition to the controversies surrounding it, intra- and inter-language translation in Goa has been limited. While translation efforts alone cannot diminish internecine linguistic tensions, they may support dialogue across the borders between scripts and languages. It is against this backdrop that one can place the work Augusto Pinto has been doing as a translator. His...