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Download Complete Volume - National Translation Mission

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<strong>Translation</strong> and Indian Literature: Some Reflections 13& Senapati A.M. 1967; Misra, Nuri 1969), one version differingradically from another in its presentation of the text. The translatorsof two versions have changed the title and presented their versions as‘rewritten’ in English, and further, one translator presented it as aVictorian English novel, embellishing it with epigraphs in the formof quotations from English classics at the head of each chapter andincluding in the body of translation references to English literaturewhich are absent from the original text (for a comparative study ofthe three translations, see Sherry Simon & Paul St-Pierre 2000:263-288). Further, the translator’s nineteen-page “Introduction” tries tocontextualise it in the tradition of the English novel of a certainperiod, robbing it of all anti-colonial resonance, and illustrating whatit means to be translating into the language of power/formercolonizer:I wonder sometimes why I did not choose to callmy book “Man of Property” after JohnGalsworthy. That title would have been quiteappropriate – as appropriate, I believe, as theone that my book actually bears now. So far astheir passionate attachment to property isconcerned, what is the difference betweenSoames Forsyte [sic] (that unhappy husband ofIrene) and Ramachandra Mangaraj? I couldsimilarly call my book by the alternative nameof “A Book of Rascals” after Thackeray’s “ABook of Snobs” (xiii).Such a strategy of translation, which is closer to rewriting,raises crucial questions about authorship, loyalty and authenticity.The ‘colonial cringe’ demonstrated by the translator also acts againstthe very purpose of literary translation, namely, introducing aforeign text and culture to the readers in the target language. Onehopeful thing, however, is that, located as we are, at the postcolonial

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