Capturing the Nuances of Bengali Writing
Sanjukta Dasgupta
VERMILLION CLOUDS: A CENTURY OF WOMEN'S STORIES FROM BENGAL by Radha Chakravarty Women Unlimited, 2010, 231 pp., 350
July 2010, volume 34, No 7

This collection of 18 Bengali short stories spans a hundred years of Bengali women’s writing. Radha Chakravarty has already estbalished herself as a skilled translator and this collection further validates the impression that she can transfer and translate with commendable ease, successfully eliminating the disconnect between the source text and the target text.

In her introduction Chakravarty has outlined her agenda as a translator and her stated endeavour of constructing the nuances of the original in the translated text has been the toughest challenge encountered by most translators of literary texts. Chakravarty states, ‘In translating the selected stories I have tried to preserve the flavour of the original Bengali texts, while rendering them in readable modern English for today’s readers’.

The essential role of the translator is that of a cultural ambassador. It is not merely linguistic translation that is of significance, the implied cultural code switching that the text conveys, depends often on the malleability of the target language. In this context this reviewer appreciates the engagement of the translator, without which translation of such texture would not have been possible. Chakravarty herself concludes her introduction with the following comment: ‘That the cultural and linguistic transfer is not always smooth reminds us that it is the translator’s role to promote understanding by bridging the gaps between languages, cultures and periods in history, but not to erase these differences altogether’ (p. xxv).

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