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In this paper I seek to examine the relevance of the above remarks with reference to Hemchandra Badyopadhyay's Nolini Basanta (1868), and Romeo-Juliet, which are transcreations of The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet respectively.

Hemchandra Vandyopadhyay Indianized the names and tried to preserve the Shakespearian characteristics of the characters. He pours the Shakespeare's plot and characters into a native mould in order to please the readers. We do find that Hemchandra's Prospero - Baijayanta - is endowed with a native tenderness and becomes a sentimental Bengali father. Gonzalo - Procheta - is likewise sentimentalized.

In the case of Nolini Basanta there is no record of the play being performed. Shakespeare's blank verse becomes in Hemchandra's hands a monotonous undramatic rhymed verse. The sentimental - lyrical - poetic disposition of Bengal was imposed upon the robust mature blank verse of Shakespeare. The reason perhaps was that because Hemchandra was primarily a poet, the theatrical potentialities of The Tempest attracted him less than its lyrical richness, its political symbolism less than its romance.

Culture is manifested not in social custom and manners alone but in the overall ambience as well. Drama, more than other genres, communicates the atmosphere of the period of its textual location as well as that of the social space of the dramatist and contemporary audience. In the case of translated drama something of the background of the translator's milieu may very well interpenetrate the TT.

The transcultural spaces in the ST and the TT are where cultures overlap and points on the border are pierced through. As Anthony Pym suggests the borders are not impregnable lines but innumerable dots, operative points along which the translator moves in a horizontal trajectory. But by introducing major deviations from the ST Hemachandra trespasses into the canonical narrative's hegemonic territory and reinforces the borders, draws demarcating lines, underlines differences.

In Nolini Basanta Hemchandra transplants the Shakespeare text from its Mediterranean terrain and introduces various regions of India as the habitat of its characters. This necessitates a parallel change in depicting race, custom and folk psyche.

Right from the outset a barrier is erected between our culture and that of the bard. The seafaring nature of British culture, the gruff and growling jargon of mariners and boatswain, the Elizabethan consciousness and Shakespeare's realism undergo a sea-change when the first scene of the shipwreck and the tempest is omitted and the play opens with Sh.'s I ii. Miranda-Nolini and her father Baijayanta, while a ship can be seen sinking far off, speak entirely lyrical, monotonous rhymed verse

The geographical locale of the setting is transformed from the Mediterranean region to distant places in our vast subcontinent. Caliban-Barbat's mother is made to hail from Udaipur and not Argier as in Shakespeare. One may venture to conjecture the reason for this curious change. Was it because Udaipur was sufficiently remote from Bengal? But then, historically it was the seat of the heroic Rajputs. Perhaps romantic distance and the exotic locale fascinated the poet? The racial significance, the equivalence of black-ugliness-evil is definitely obliterated and Sycorax-Trijata is a simple witch. A nation's prejudices indicate the nature of its culture. Witch is simply evil but Sh's Sycorax would have provoked greater abhorrence among his contemporaries. The point at which Hemchandra crosses the border induces a culture overlap as far as witch hatred is concerned. A culture transformation occurs when he does away with the concept of the traditional European medieval 'darkness' and the white man's racial arrogance

Moreover in the translated text, there are ironic references to the fragrance of Varanasi's sewage system, the scent of Sunderbans soil; also to '3 crore deities' of the Hindu pantheon and 'kinkoris', the beautiful dancers of the court of Indra, the king of gods. It is interesting to note however that in order to explain fairy rings, which relate to authentically English rural superstition Hemchandra sticks to the original and adds an explanatory footnote on English superstition ², a brief incursion into hybridization of the cultural space.

Barbat's servility is subtly Indianized when Baijayanta calls him 'padukabahak', carrier of shoes. Carrying the master's shoes upon one's head shows reverence, obeisance, and humility. A nation's culture is assessed not only by its intellectual resources but also through the culture of the body, its eating habits. "Do you mean I shall not have rice?" tai bole ami ki bhat khabo na? asks Barbat. A Bengali ambience is at once created. The Bengali's unequivocal love for machher-jhol bhat!

The post-colonial signifier is preserved when we find Barbat pointing out that he who once was the king of this vast island is now their one and only subject. Here is a bit of culture overlap. Colonization is the common signified but was Hemchandra thinking of India's colonization of the Far East? The work becomes an exercise in mixing and matching the ST with the setting of the TT. The methodology is uneven. Culture equalizers are used without consistency but they do remind the reader that the ST is being steadily injected with cultural inputs from the T culture. A subversion of the dominant narrative and a creation of boundary fencing reinforce the differences.

In spite of the inputs of local culture the very fact that Shakespeare was so easily absorbed into Bengali literature is a measure of the eclecticism of Bengali culture, which from the 17th c onwards had absorbed into it some of the elements of other cultures. Jagadish Nandi in Bangla Sanskriti Sampute Sakespeare (Nandi 1998: 28?) points out that from the 17th century onwards inter-culturality became part of the fabric of Bengali literature, which became popular even outside Bengal because of this universality. It included deities of the Hindu pantheon as well as the sayings of Jesus and Allah. It was accommodative. For instance the lines from the Raimangal Kavya

Nandi points out further that liberal eclecticism was the hallmark of Bengali literature, and because of this Shakespeare was enthusiastically received into the culture. Apparently this suggests that there were no barriers, no opaque lines, only a border comprising dots.

From the middle of the 19th century (1855) the exuberance of the 'Alal' and 'Hutum' tradition of picaresque adventurism, didacticism, farce and derision pervaded lit. ³

The tradition of Prohoson' 'Hasyakautuk" robust appreciation of the inconsistencies of human nature, farcical elements, the Gopal Bhanr type of coarse stories form part of the fabric of 19th century culture. So in Bengal the ground was already prepared for the reception of Shakespeare's fools and the boisterous appreciation of the moral as well as questionable ingredients of society.

Jokes and pranks reveal the psyche of a nation and are embedded deep in local culture. The adventurous strain in Elizabethan culture, the deep seated nautical temperament, the sailor's loose conduct and generic songs are either omitted by Hemchandra or transferred into something bawdily urban and smacking of the 19th century babu's excursions into brothels. One should also recall that Bengal's folk culture accommodated 'tarja', 'Kheure' and 'kobigan'. ⁴ The salty, sea-drenched ambience of The Tempest is transformed. Shakespeare's Stephano enters singing, 'I shall no more to sea, to sea / Here shall I die ashore."

Hemchandra's transliteration is in keeping with the cultural ambience in which he locates Shakespeare. The metaphoric, ribald implications of 'gangasnan' (literally taking a bath in the Ganges), taking pan together, and 'adorini pran' or 'O my heart's darling.'

Let us now take Trinculo's speech in T II I "If I were in England now … not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver… When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they would lay out ten to see a dead Indian".

The locale-specific reference to the American Indian, the recreations of the people of Shakespeare's own time is transferred into locale-specific reference to the space of the target text and satire against Hemchandra's urban contemporaries. Uday says that the babus of Calcutta nowadays make merry ever so often; indulging in 'bibir nautch' (referring to what the white sahib would call 'nautch girls'), horse's dance, spirits' dance, motley clown's dance--- they spend money on all this. Yet they do not give even a fistful of rice to a beggar. Even though the pundits in the tol have become almost extinct, they would not give a paisa to these Brahmin pundits. ⁶

The derision is in keeping with the strain of satire prevalent in contemporary Bengali literature; there is intercultural fusion of the 17th c. Shakespeare text with local 19th colour. As Shakespeare was steeped in his own age, so also Hemchandra's rendering of the Shakespeare text. Although the historical time and culture were so different yet the culture overlaps between the SC and TC lead to embedding in the TT subaltern voices that are critical of their colonial betters. In this way the translation is made to create cultural equivalences

But when all is said and done, and though borders are not lines and intercultural change is valid, the changes incorporated do draw a line of difference between the two texts. The colonial grand narrative is subverted and appropriated in order to enrich Bengali literature. The ST on the other hand becomes a viable paradigm of flexibility. The irony is that instead of obliterating borders translation very often reinforces them at least in the regions of the text where such changes take place.

Gonzalo's speech on the ideal commonwealth derived from Montaigne, based on the concept of an illusory golden age, acquires in NB a different hue. The gist of it is as follows: I have always wanted to rule but our country being an old one is so very overcrowded with rulers… I used to think if I could get a smaller land to rule, a secluded one, I would show people what it was to be a good ruler. This island is ideal for that. If there could be a few communities of subjects here it could be organized. There would not be any of the superstitions one finds in an ancient land. There would not be the convention of marriage and inequality in the distribution of wealth - All women would be enjoyed by all men and all men by all women. There would be no jealousy, malice, and rivalry. There would be no falsehood. Everyone would be altruistic. Disease, sorrow, agony, tension would all be eradicated. ⁶

The embedded references to India, and criticism of its ways yoked to the Shakespearean framework, politicize the TT creating an intercultural ideology that lends to the work an additional raison d'etre. The ST allows itself to be broken into by intercultural material while at the same time the areas of culture-overlap suggest that borders are not impenetrable lines. In translations in which the ST and the TT are so far distanced in historical time, space and culture translation initiates a discourse of inter-culturality. This in its turn reinforces the notion that although translation activity is meant to obliterate borders it is also a way of impressing borders. On the part of the common reader, thanks to translation, she/he is able to glean the fruits of an alien literature with just a bit of external knowledge. Whereas the translator's power and dominance become overwhelming as the only person who holds the key to the ST: who has, what is termed 'internal knowledge', a close acquaintance with both SL and SC. The translator is thus empowered.