In This Issue

Articles

  The Dialectics of Human Intellection  and the Semiotics of Translation:A Comparative Reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s Kar¸akunt¢sambada in Bangla and English

Anuradha Ghosh

  Translation Norms and  the Translator’s Agency

He Xianbian

  Training Legal Translators through the Internet: Promises and Pitfalls

Esther  Monzó

  Translating the Translated: Interrogating the Post-Colonial Condition

K. Sripad Bhat

  Translating Cultural Encounters: Hali’s Muqaddama

Tanweer  Alam Mazhari

  Translations into Kannada in the 10^th Century: Comments on Precolonial Translation

V.B.Tharakeshwar

  Translating Calcutta/Kolkata

Jayita Sengupta

  Shakespeare Re-Configured: Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay’s Bangla Transcreations

Tapati Gupta

   British Imperialism and the Politics of Translation: Texts From, And From Beyond, the Empire

Nabanita Sengupta

  Locating and Collating Translated Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore

Swati Datta

  Translating Suno Shefali: A Dual Empowerment

B.T. Seetha

  War, Women and Translational Empowerment in Seela Subhadra Devi’s Poetry  

P.Jayalakshmi 

  The Problematics of Getting Across Modern Marathi Literature into Nonindian Languages

Sunil Sawant

  On Translating Dalit Texts with Special Reference to Bali Adugal

S.Armstrong

Notes from The Classroom

Teaching Documentation for Translation Studies:
The Key Discipline of Information Literacy

Dora Sales-Salvador

Language, Literature and Culture: Through the Prism of Translation

Vanamala Viswanatha

Book Reviews

Writing Outside the Nation by Azade Seyhan

Chitra Harshavardhan

Teaching and Researching Translation By Basil Hatim

Meena T Pillai

Translation Reviews

Sangya-Balya

Ravishankar Rao

Short Notices

Mail

Translating Calcutta/Kolkata

Jayita Sengupta teaches English Literature in South Calcutta Girls College, Calcutta University. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in English from Loreto College, Kolkata, Master of Arts from Calcutta University and M. Phil and Ph.D from J.M.I, New Delhi. She was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Grant in 2000, which allowed her to do research in U.K, and was a British Council Fellow for the Oxford Conference in the same year. Her publications include research articles on post-colonial literatures, critical theory and feminist literatures in journals of repute. Her translations from Bangla to English include, Relationships, short stories by Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay, (Kolkata: Writers Workshop, 2003) and In the Other Bengal: A Creative Travelogue by Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay, (New Delhi: Foundation for SAARC Writers & Literature, 2005). She has edited a collection of stories from various Indian languages in English translation, The Muffled Heart: Stories of the disempowered male, forthcoming from Rupa and translated a Bani Basu novel, Gandharbi, which is to be brought out by Katha.Her postal address is P-553, Hemanta Mukherjee Sarani, Srijan Apts, Flat 2C, Kolkata 700029.

Abstract

Calcutta now 'postcolonised' as Kolkata, with its history a little over three hundred years, has been a constant source of inspiration and provocation for writers, artists and film-makers. No matter how dirty the city is, how outrageous its politicians are and how 'impossible' life seems to be here, Calcutta has never met with indifference. A mere Indian twist to the name given by the colonial masters cannot change its history. Nor can the colonial hangover which still looms ghost-like over the city, be underestimated. Just as each and every place has a flavour, odour, sound, tone and intonation of its own, Calcutta too has a dialect singularly its own. The main dialect, which the bhadralok class speaks, is commonly known as the 'Kolkataiya Bangla'. Though there have been earlier attempts by Tekchand Thakur to familiarize people with this dialect, the father of this Bengali is evidently Tagore. He could successfully modernize the language by using the "chalti Bangla" instead of the"shudha bhasha" as used by his predecessor Bankimchandra and by his contemporaries like Saratchandra. Besides this mainstream urbane Bengali there are other dialects, - the voices and the tones of the suburbs and the bangal accent in the language of the people who migrated to Calcutta in the wake of partition. And even within the bhadralok class there is a difference in the use of the spoken Bengali in the north and the south of the metropolis. For those who have watched the film made on Tagore's Chokher Bali by the director Rituparno Ghosh, the point would be clear indeed. Interestingly, a study of dialects can be a study of culture too. The spoken word with its tone and intonation speaks of the cultural / educational background of the speaker and his social status. Rendering the difference of dialect and division is easy in a film as for example the word pronounced as "aishee" and "ashchee" meaning "I am coming" would immediately appeal to the ear. But how does a translator, translating the text into English, make this difference visible and audible through translation? Most of the publishing houses in their endeavour to maintain the Indian flavour in English just end up by following certain stereotypical norms, which may lead to mistranslation of expressions and give wrong impressions. Just a mere retaining of cultural expressions like "Hai Ram!" or "Hai Rabba!" cannot carry enough weight as cultural signifiers. This paper will take up the issue of translating the Calcutta mainstream culture and its other(s) with illustrations from existing English translations and a few other relevant Bengali texts. It will attempt to discuss the 'untranslatable' or the problems involved in crossing over cultural barriers and the possibility of cultural slippage in English translation.

Ajob Shahar Kolkata
Randhi Bari Judigadi
Michey kather ke keta

(Seth 1990:314)

Any place has a sound, smell, language, atmosphere of its own which the mind absorbs and tries to rationalize or translate in definite terms. Such an act of translating perceptions into language and literature and re-translating it into other languages is a complex process indeed. When there is interplay of many languages and dialects, the task of the translator becomes further complicated and difficult. Calcutta or Kolkata, like the other metropolises Delhi and Mumbai, is a cultural text involving problematic subtexts such as dialect, which includes para-texts like race, class and caste differences, through a diachronic historical perspective. As there never was any question of cultural purity from the very beginning, one cannot look for any coherent cultural identity in the Kolkata of the present times or the Calcutta of yore. Kolkata has never been free from cultural contaminations. Whore-like in its cultural charm it has attracted visitors, artists, tradesmen and dwellers from time to time. It has had a rich cultural matrix not always free from filthy and complex political and ideological strife. For developing a proper perspective, a casual reading of translations of Bengali texts in any regional language or in English may not be sufficient. The social history of Kolkata is a dialectical one; so supplementary reading of background, social history and dialects are important. The post-colonization debate about Bengalisising of Calcutta as Kolkata in the above context is possibly a rather simplistic gesture of pinning down the city in a word. A brief look at the controversy regarding the name may help justify the case.

Well-known historians like Suniti Chattopadhyay argue that Kolikata is a pure Bengali word. He goes on to say that in Bengali it actually means lime-shell. Koli (lime) was obtained from the specialized process of burning shells (kata) and was stacked in a place close to what we now know as Strand Road. Binoy Ghosh adds on to Suniti Chattopadhyay's argument by pointing out that there were three roads namely, Chunapukur Lane, Chunagali and Chunarpara Lane where the lime trade was carried on by lime-merchants across the Ganges, which flowed at that time by the side of the Strand Road. There are also theories about the derivation of Kolkata from Kali Kota, where Kota (mandir or temple) refers to the famous Kali temple at Kalighat. So some scholars suggest that Kolkata owes its name to one of the oldest pilgrimage shrines or the Kali temple at Kalighat. Certain critics however are of the view that Calcutta is derived from Calicut. The Portuguese ship merchants had embarked on a trip to Calicut to begin their trade with India, so the name Calicut became quite familiar to the European ears even before the British merchants came. Later on the Armenians and the British used the name of Calicut, which had already made a reputation for itself for its products on their native soils. But they actually collected their raw materials from the port at Saptagram and then later from Sutanati, Gobidopur and the Garden Reach, Strand Road areas. It was much later that Calicut was changed to Calcutta. Purnendu Patri quotes Hunter in his book Purono Kolkatar Kathachitra to suggest another theory of the name's origin:

"It (Kolkata) was identified by our mariners with Golgatha, the place of skulls". ¹

(Patri 1979:111-113)

The Chowringhee area at that time was notorious for dacoits, associating skulls and Golgatha with Kolkata, which many critics later had pointed out as a picturesque error. Purnendu Patri and H.E.A Cotton (Cotton 1980: 22-23) posit yet another view that The origin of the name, they say, could be derived from Kilkila, by which the area between Saraswati on the west and Jamuna on the east was formerly known. There are thus many conjectures about the name Kolikata or Kolkata and the colonial version, Calcutta. Thus no deterministic principle can be worked out in fixing the etymology of the name Kolkata. So Suniti Chattopadhyay's argument about Kolkata as a pure Bengali word, which underlies the race of Kolkatans as being purely Bengali, is questionable.

TOP | NEXT

Copyright © CIIL and The Author 2005