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.
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4. Sen, Nivedita and Nikhil Yadav, ed. Mahasweta Devi: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. New Delhi: Pencraft International.2008.
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She has describes herself as a “practical deconstructionist feminist Marxist” and as a “gadfly”. She uses
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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.
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Kapur has basically written about women; their marriage, life after marriage, their quest for identity, their trauma and dilemma if failing to achieve the aspired results in their life but in The Immigrant, she has made a departure from the above mentioned themes, for, through this novel, we come across the Diaspora consciousness of the novelist, though she does not stand in the category of the writers of Diaspora such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, V.S. Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Bharati Mukharjee, Anita Desai, Upmanyu Chatterjee, Salman Rushdie, Githa Hariharan and so on. The writings of these writers provide an inside view of the problems and obstacles endured by the expatriates in their new adopted land.
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...
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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.
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