Mahasweta Devi is a very well known figure in modern contemporary Bengali Literature and also a Ramon Magsaysay Award winner for her tremendous works in the field of literature mainly on tribals and marginalized people. Gayatri Spivak played a great role in making Mahasweta Devi known to the literature world through her translations and her work of subaltern studies on Devi’s texts. Spivak has translated many texts of Mahasweta Devi from Bengali into English. Translation has its own problems and issues and has been discussed at large and these issues and problems are matter of concern for every translator. The present paper is concerned with the problems which emerged after reading the select translated text “Draupadi” and what English/Western readers are deprived of while reading the translated text.
Mahasweta Devi (1926- ) is a prolific Bengali writer and a very active social activist. Her works for the upliftment of the tribal people is extra ordinary. Along with the tribal people, she has also dedicated her struggles for all the subalterns, who are the victims of the system and class. Her works like Bashai Tudu, Chhota Munda and His Arrow, Rudali, Mother of 1084, “Douloti”, “Draupadi”, “Breast-giver”, etc. gives a realistic picture of the society where protagonists are oppressed and suppressed by the different tools of the system. Major portions of her writings are journalistic in nature and are directed against the mainstream. According to her mainstream people are the mute spectators and are very much part of the exploitations inflicted upon the subalterns. Though all her stories are written in Bengali, most of the works of Devi has been now translated into English and other languages for wider readership.
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...rding to Bertrand Russel, “no one can understand the word ‘cheese’ unless he has a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese.” (2000:113).
To conclude we can say that whatever measures a translator may take but there will be always loss of information. The best a translator can do is to minimize the loss. Bengal with its rich culture, traditions and religious values it becomes all the more tough for the translators to avoid the dilution of those values.
Works Cited
1. Devi, Mahasweta. Spivak, Gayatri C, trans. Breast Stories. Calcutta: Seagull Books.2010.
2. Spivak, Gayatri C. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen.1987.
3. Venuti, Lawrence, Ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge.2000.
4. Sen, Nivedita and Nikhil Yadav, ed. Mahasweta Devi: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. New Delhi: Pencraft International.2008.
Hall, Sharon K., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 39. New York: Gale Research, Inc., 1986.
...terary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 194. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.
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Bayley, John. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 76. N.p.: Gale, 1992. 322-31. Web. 17 Dec. 2013.
Gayatri Spivak, (born Feb. 24, 1942, Calcutta, India), Spivak is a literary critic and theorist. She sometimes regarded as the “Third-World Woman”. She is best known for the article, (Can the Subaltern Speak?). It is considered a founding text of postcolonialism. She is also known for her translation of Jacques Derrida‘s Of Grammatology‟. This translation brought her to prominence. After this she carried out a series of historical studies and literary critiques of imperialism and feminism.
Sandhu, Sarbjit K. The Image of Woman in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande. New Delhi: Prestige, 1991.
The measured dialogue between Reader and Editor serves as the framework through which Gandhi seeks to discredit accepted terms of civilization and denounce the English. These principle characters amply assist in the development o...
This total idea of challenging and creating a new identity may seem quite a utopian concept, but it is not so impossible. The present paper will illustrate the writings of Mridula Garg and Arundhati Roy. The characters in their work are not extraordinary and utopian, but ordinary people like us whom we can come across in our day to day life. Here for the purpose of analysis, Garg’s three short stories have been chosen. They are: Hari Bindi, Sath Saal, Ki Aurat and Wo Dusri.
Nair, Bindu, the essay-“Subversion and resistance : The uses of Myth in Mahasweta Devi’s “The Hunt” and The Book of the Hunter”, Littcrit, vol-34, no-2, December 2008.
Nayar, Pramod K. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: From Structuralism to Eco Criticism. New Delhi: Pearson, 2010. Print.
Mahasweta Devi, always writes for deprived section of people. She is a loving daughter, a clerk, a lecturer, a journalist, an editor, a novelist, a dramatist and above all an ardent social activist. Her stories bring to the surface not only the misery of the completely ignored tribal people, but also articulate the oppression of w...
Usha. A, a Research Scholar, in her research in 'Woman 's rights in Mahasweta Devi 's
Indian-Canadian writer Anita Rau Badami has penned a few widely praised books managing the complexities of Indian family life and the cultural gap that rises when Indians move toward the west. A nostalgic mother-daughter story told by two women from the Moorthy family, Badami's Tamarind Mem is a novel about the energy of memory and narrating. The Washington post surveys the novel as being “splendidly evocative.... as much a book about the universal habit of storytelling as it is about the misunderstandings that arise between a mother and daughter.” Lisa Singh calls her reading experience of Tamarind Mem as being “bittersweet…. with often stunning, poetic prose, [Badami] gives us an intimate character study of two women” (Star Tribune).
Literature is always interactive. Thus, not only can the thoughts of people who write/translate it, but also those of people who read it can interfere. Different cultural backgrounds, growth environment etc. of different people will be the factors that can disrupt the intact understanding of the readers. Furthermore, the ‘taste’ of a word also can be related to the perception
Translation was founded a hundred of years ago because the importance of communicating and understanding other people with different languages. Translation is a bridge that fills the gaps between two languages and cultures. Moreover, “it is a communicative process which transfers the message of a source language text to a target language” (algaz, 2015, p.183). It is not only conveying the meaning from the one language to another language, but also transferring the culture and tradition of the community. Lefevere (2003, p.2) describe the translation as "channel opened" and it can influence on the target culture by the foreign culture. It cannot be denied that translation has a pivotal role in communicating and sharing culture. Ideology and