The Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar 2021 award-winning novel; Jacaranda by Mobin Mohan, originally written in Malayalam and now published in English by PenPrints, is indeed a journey. But it is also a transplantation. A city imagined in one language has been carried, root and soil intact, into another. The responsibility of this crossing falls on translator Akhil Jose, whose English rendering does not merely reproduce the story but rehouses its atmosphere.
“This novel fictionalizes the nation, the city, and the tree, with love at its core,” writes Perumal Murugan. “In an era where hatred and division are being spread, this is a work that speaks of love and compassion. It offers a reading experience as pleasant as embarking on a journey.”
The novel’s world, Carnovia, exists beneath endless jacaranda trees. Every October, violet and blue blossoms flood the city, turning streets into corridors of falling petals. These flowers do more than decorate the setting. They signal arrival and loss, love and forgetting. They accumulate like memory. In translation, preserving such a sensory landscape is delicate work. Jose’s writing keeps the sentences light enough to let petals drift, yet steady enough to hold their emotional weight. The result is prose that feels lyrical without being ornamental, restrained without losing intensity.
Carnovia is a European city imagined by a non-European writer. Mohan constructs church bells, cobbled streets, provincial borders, and old continental rivalries with the attentive eye of an outsider. In English, Jose retains this cross-cultural tension. The European aesthetic remains intact, but the narrative rhythm still carries Malayalam’s oral intimacy. This is where the translation quietly excels. It refuses to flatten the difference. Instead, it lets unfamiliar geography feel lived-in, intimate, and emotionally immediate.
At the heart of Jacaranda are Salvador and Agostino, orphans raised together in a church home. Their friendship is the novel’s first declaration of love. Salvador’s tenderness finds form in his relationship with Amelia, the daughter of a street musician. Agostino’s hunger for recognition drives him toward wealth and Isabella, a girl from the neighbouring province of Gantia. Their diverging paths test loyalty, desire, and devotion. Here, love and friendship are not parallel themes but interwoven forces. One sustains. The other destabilizes. Jose’s translation understands this emotional architecture. He allows pauses to speak. He trusts understatement. He lets feelings rise without insistence.
History, too, is a living presence. Ancient wars, ethnic hostilities, border tensions, and imperial shadows settle into everyday gestures. A legend of King Octavius planting the first jacaranda at his beloved’s grave, and a love poem that travels through the city like a shared heartbeat, turn love into ritual and memory into geography. Translating such layered myth-making demands more than lexical precision. It demands ear, patience, and emotional calibration.
The acclaim surrounding the novel recognizes this union of story and craft. Anuja Chandramouli calls it “a compulsive, deeply moving tale about fragile bonds forged on the power of love, friendship and extraordinary circumstances… deftly translated by Akhil Jose.” Benyamin writes, “The violet flowers that fall in the fictional land of Carnovia seem to fall within our own hearts—a true testament to the mastery of Mobin Mohan’s prose.” The translation ensures that this falling reaches English readers with undiminished resonance.
Jacaranda arrives, finally, as proof that translation is not secondary labour but creative re-authorship. Carnovia now blooms in another language. Its petals fall. Its friendships endure. It’s love persists. And in carrying this world across, Akhil Jose reminds us that some cities, once imagined, deserve more than one life.
About the Translator
Akhil Jose is a writer, translator, and researcher, currently pursuing his PhD in Cultural Studies at Alliance University, Bengaluru. Jose completed his Master’s degree in English Studies from The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Lucknow. His academic and literary work focuses on Cultural Studies, Dalit Literature, and Tribal Studies, driven by a passion for highlighting marginalized voices and promoting social justice. His recent translation; ‘Mission Green Planet’ was published in the literary magazine The Antonym. This project, translating a work of significant literary merit like Jacaranda, aligns perfectly with his goal of contributing to the rich landscape of Indian literature in translation.
