Gendering the untranslatable in the world literary market: reading Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Shasti’ (1893) in translation

ABSTRACT

English translations of Rabindranath Tagore have a complicated history of reception. This article contemplates the contemporary contexts in which Tagore translations emerge and circulate, by comparing two translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s short story ‘Shasti’ to narrate the terms of representing and translating gender in the global and local literary market. Close reading the translators’ decisions in presenting the terminal untranslatable remark in the short story, I track the impact of global rubrics like world literature and local factors like copyright issues to understand the foundational issues of fidelity and fluency in literary translation.

KEYWORDS:

• Rabindranath Tagore
• world literature
• untranslatable
• Tagore translation
• gender

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Maharghya Chakraborty for his invaluable assistance for tracking down an important citation on short notice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. My use of ‘Rabindranath’ and ‘Tagore’ to refer to Rabindranath Tagore in this article is strategic. While ‘Tagore’ (the anglicized form of the Bengali honorific ‘Thakur’) is usually the norm while referring to the author in English, he has always been ‘Rabindranath’ to Bengali speakers. William Radice and Nabaneeta Dev Sen have pointed out that the appellation ‘Tagore’ cannot be extricated from the Western image and production of Rabindranath Tagore, the celebrity who went on to be the first Asian Nobel prize winner in literature. Radice takes this as a sign that ‘Tagore’ cannot be jettisoned (Radice 1994, 10). Dev Sen observes that ‘in his “foreign reincarnation” Rabindranath Tagore emerged as an altogether different literary personality from what his native land found him to be. There exists a world of difference between his breathtakingly powerful use of Bengali and the rather unsatisfactory English into which his works were translated’ (Sen 1966a, 285). In a revised version of the same article in Bengali, Dev Sen uses ‘Tagore’ to denote the foreign reincarnation, and ‘Rabindranath’ to mean the literary and cultural icon familiar to Bengalis worldwide (Dev Sen 1996, 264). I have followed Dev Sen’s method in the Bengali version of her article, using ‘Tagore’ when he appears reincarnated in English translation, and ‘Rabindranath’ for the familiar Bengali literary icon. Where the two authorial subjectivities merge, I use ‘Rabindranath Tagore.’ For more on the literary celebrity of ‘Tagore’ in the west, see Chaudhuri 2011, and Dev Sen 1996. “Poète-prophète” is Romain Rolland's description of Tagore, see Sen 1966b, 9.

2. The copyright was due to expire in 1991, but was extended for another ten years at the special request of Visva-Bharati, conveyed to then Prime Minister P.V. Narsimha Rao by Jyoti Basu, then Chief Minister of West Bengal. For more, see ‘Tagore Copyright Freedom at Midnight’ in The Telegraph, 30 December 2001.

3. The Preface to the shorter 3^rd edition of this anthology claims to ‘feature new translations that make classical texts newly readable and capture the originals in compelling ways’ (Puchner et al., 2013, xix).

4. See letter to William Rothenstein, quoted in (Sen 1966a, 275); and letter to Indira Devi Chaudhurani, quoted in Das Gupta 2009, xiii-xiv.

5. Radice’s mistranslations in the 1991 edition did not go unnoticed. Isabel Kenrick drily comments in her review that the ‘number of small slips and errors in [Radice’s] translation (many corrected in the 1992 reprint) will be easily spotted by, and may very well annoy, some Bengali readers’ (Kenrick 1993, 388). I want to observe two things here: Kenrick does not assume a monolingual audience for Radice’s translation; and it is the uncorrected 1991 translation that is still in print as part of the Norton anthology of world literature. That is to say, we may not always be bound by the affect of innocence and surprise in reading literatures in translation, but the world literary market entrenches the production and circulation of this innocence and surprise.

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Sohomjit Ray

Sohomjit Ray is Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York-College of Staten Island. His areas of interest include postcolonial and queer theory; interconnections between race, gender, and sexuality; cultural politics of neoliberalism, translation, and globalization; and South Asian literature and culture. He is currently at work finishing his book project The Spectacle and the Specter: Same-sex Desire in Neoliberal India, which argues that the cultural politics of representing same-sex desire in literature and public culture of India changed significantly after 1991 due to the increasingly normalized neoliberal rhetoric. He has published in South Asian Review and Wasafiri.