Poet and translator: A dialogue between Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy and Rowena Hill

Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy is a well-known and celebrated poet and writer from Karnataka, India. He is here interviewed by Rowena Hill, who translated some of his poetry from Kannada into English. The interview, which is structured as a dialogue between poet and translator, emphasizes how important an issue translation is whenever one concerns oneself with Dalit literature, and how enlightening the collaborative work between a poet and his or her translator can be. In addition to this focus on translation as a concept, a necessity, a dialectics, and a pragmatics, the interview will also foreground some very sensitive and fraught issues linked to the globalization of a literature that was born out of an extremely specific social and political context. The collaboration between Chinnaswamy and Hill resulted in a volume which was published as Before It Rains Again by erbacce-press in 2016, after the interview took place