Sampriti Bhattacharyya

This paper aims to explore the translation of socio-cultural and rhetorical nuances of language between Bangla and English with a case of the translation of Jibanananda Das's 1973 novel Malloban by Rebecca Whittington in 2022. The act of translating such a rich and culturally nuanced text poses substantial challenges, as it involves the delicate balance of preserving the essence of the source text while making it accessible to a new linguistic and cultural context. In the process, the translator, whose native language is American English, is led to straddle domestication and exoticism, thus creating linguistic, semiotic, and syntactic variations in her rendition of the source language text. This paper attempts to assess the fidelity of the translation to the original work while scrutinizing the translator's choices in capturing the intricate wordplay, colloquial expressions, metaphors, and narrative subtleties that are hallmarks of Jibanananda Das's writing. This paper also examines the instances where the translation may inadvertently alter or dilute the original text's impact and the implications of such alterations for readers of the translated work. Furthermore, this study delves into the emotional and cognitive dimensions of bilingual reading.

The early poems of the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney can be perceived as fundamentally concerned with childhood, horrors of violence and the wonders of nature. They lure the reader into a world full of "the smells/of waterweed, fungus and dank moss". His enchantment with the hidden secrets of the earth reaches another dimension in his celebrated bog poems that look into places where 'there is no reflection'. These poems particularly deal with the metaphor of Bogland, a repository of power and mystery. The bog land, for Heaney, becomes a space of spiritual, historical and physical enchantment, an inextricable link between life and death, mobility and immobility, past and present. Bog poems are symbolic representation of death and deathlessness, endless violence and peace, the grotesque and the beautiful, the silences and the screams. In the bog bodies, victims of violent tribal sacrifice, Heaney seems to have found the metaphors of historical and literary consciousness of Ireland in particular and the world in general. This connection with the past lets him explore the present in an oblique, exquisite and forceful way. Sometimes the bog bodies become the means to mythologise the torture and violence they went through, sometimes they are the repositories of beauty and atrocity of the world, sometimes they are mere eulogies of Irish national consciousness, and sometimes they are the evocation of an exquisite ecofeminist ethos. This paper tries to explore a few selected bog poems of Heaney-Bogland, Tollund Man, Bog Queen, The Grauballe Man, Punishment, and Strange Fruit, through the light of the Irish history of death, violence, sacrifice, guilt and justice.

Writing was a way for Kamala Das (1932-2009) to celebrate her selves. Kamala Das's poems is like reading multiple entities. Readers may get a peek of Kamala Das's various personas through her prose and poetry, whether they were written in Malayalam or English. Through her poetry, she allowed us to see many different sides of herself, including those of a poet, lover, devotee, young lady, wife, mother, middle-aged woman, urbanite, Keralite, and others. Her poetry is overtly physical, dripping with the fluidity of existence itself and bridging the gap between the intellect and body. She is a fragile woman, a lonely poet, and an introvert starving for companionship. She is a rebel at the same time, a sturdy woman who shouts out her claim to the right to speak and write. The employment of multiple identities, equally varied tongues, different experimental patterns, free verse and numerous devices by Kamala Das to create countless moods for her poetry is what makes them extraordinary and one-of-a-kind. The following paper tries to discuss selected poems of Kamala Das and discover how in Kamala Das's poetry, a 'sinner' becomes a 'saint' and vice versa, a 'beloved' gets 'betrayed', how there are a number of entities in there, literally: the Aami, the Kamala Surayya, the Madhavikkutty and the Kamala Das, and how at the end of the thoughts everything melts into each other.

William Shakespeare has been a perpetual source for inspiration in the field of translation and adaptation. Translations of Shakespeare in ever-increasing numbers have formed a large part of the popularization of the plays in non-English speaking countries. In Japan, there have been countless publications, adaptations and performances of Shakespearean plays in the Japanese language since as early as the 1800s. Artists like Shoyo, Naoya Shiga, Osamu Dazai, Shōhei Ōoka, Akira Kurosawa, Yukio Ninagawa and many others have added new dimensions to the Shakespearean texts via the acts of writing, translating and adapting and thereby transforming the texts with variations in language and context. Apart from novels, plays, short stories and films, in the recent era, from the very beginning of the twenty-first century the Master Artist has been reigning supreme in the platform of Japanese popular culture. Japan has witnessed a gigantic proliferation of manga comics and animated films incorporating Shakespearean classics. In this paper, I have tried to focus on the adaptation of The Tempest and The Hamlet in the popular anime
Zetsuen no Tempest (2012) and Romeo and Juliet in Romeo x Juliet (2007). I will also touch upon other popular animated films like Nisekoi(2014) and Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere (2011) which have incorporated Shakespearean themes and characters in them. I have also focused on some popular video games that feature Shakespearean characters. Following that discussion, I have taken into account the question of loss of aesthetic substance in the process of transformation, sexualisation and commodification of Shakespearean works and the artist himself in Japanese popular culture. To what extent do the Japanese animations stay faithful to the original works is the question this paper tries to trace.