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- Title
Translating the Nation: Of Meaning and the Mythic.
- Authors
CHAKRABORTY, AYAN
- Abstract
While the politics of translation has concerned itself with cultural globalisation, in heterogenous national formations it transcends the myopic conception of language alteration to collective imagination. What is at stake in such structures is that the idea of 'history' is severely contested across one national community with its inherent contradictions. The conflict between an umbrella term against individualities of particular communities poses the centrifugal forces of cultural identities. Herein, the co-ordinates of different identities for one community vis-a-vis its acceptance/ rejection by other communities interrogates what constitutes a larger sense of an umbrella community and how this identity is constructed and stabilized. From a technical sense of literary conception, this is a cause of celebration but a challenge for processes of historicization. In this paper, I look into the fiction of Sidhartha Sharma to understand the curious ordeals of translation as he explores the relationships of identity and language to mainland Indian independence struggle. In his novel, The Grasshopper's Run, Sharma risks a double course of translating North Eastern Tribal imagination that thrives through orality (and thus evades documentation like most native cultures) with the processes of transcription. In this endeavour, what is of importance is how meaning gets eroded and newly formed as it is transmitted across cultural barriers.
- Subjects
GRASSHOPPER'S Run, The (Book); SHARMA, Siddharth; ORAL communication in literature; MYTH in literature; TRANSLATING &; interpreting
- Publication
Journal of Comparative Literature & Aesthetics, 2021, Vol 44, Issue 4, p41
- ISSN
0252-8169
- Publication type
Article