Translation and Literary Genres: A Case Study of Poetry in Bengali ...

Translation and Literary Genres: A Case Study of Poetry 127
in Bengali and Marathi
consistent prosody. It was a combination of the ‘mukta chanda’ (free
verse) with the precision of fourteen lines or so. Thus, the situation
in Marathi is that the sonnet form has not really been assimilated into
the tradition.
V
A comparative look at the reception of the ‘sonnet’ form in
Bengali and Marathi literature reveals that genres change character
while passing from one culture to another. This can perhaps be
analyzed with the help of the Jaussian concept of ‘horizon of
expectations’. For Jauss, the concept of genre is an important way of
“founding and altering” the ‘horizon of expectations’: “The analysis
of the literary experience of the reader avoids the threatening pitfalls
of psychology if it describes the reception and the influence of a
work within the objectifiable system of expectations that arises for
each work in the historical moment of its appearance, from a preunderstanding
of the genre, and from the opposition between poetic
and practical language.”
The above case study of Bengali and Marathi literature
reveals such a process at work. It appears that the Marathi readers
treated the sonnet as an alien form. On the contrary, the Bengali
readers appear to be more receptive. The varying degree of reception
of the same European form, in two major Indian languages can
perhaps be explained as follows: while, the European form has been
completely assimilated into Bengali literature, it remained only a
passing phase in Marathi literature.