Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sarkar, Abhishek

Titel

Translating Robert Burns into Bengali: A case study of Rabindranath, Dwijendralal and Satyendranath

Ist Teil von

• Literature compass, 2019-07, Vol.16 (7), p.n/a

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Wiley Subscription Services, Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article closely studies the translations of Robert Burns's songs/poems made by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Dwijendralal Ray (1863–1913) and Satyendranath Dutta (1882–1922), three leading lyric poets of the Bengali language. Apart from Rabindranath's famous adaptation of the text and tune of two of Burns's songs (“Auld Lang Syne” and “Ye Banks and Braes O'Bonnie Doon”), he also translated four of Burns's songs for the monthly Bharati between 1878 and '79. He indigenizes Burns's songs and deploys the idiom of contemporary Bengali poetry (using throughout a Sanskritized poetic register) without emphasizing the foreign source. As opposed to this, the five translations of Burns's songs by Dwijendaralal Roy (included in Aryagatha, Part 2, 1893) are more innovative, if not always with a happy result. Dwijendralal's translations attempt to be closer to the source text in terms of the overarching temperament. Besides, they experiment with idioms and dialects. As opposed to these two, Satyendranath Dutta in his translation of “To a Mouse” and “A Man's a Man for A' that” (included in Tirthasalil, 1908) follows the meaning of the source text with rigorous loyalty. More importantly, he tries to approximate to the rhythm and stanza pattern of the original with startling results. As part of his vast repertoire of lyrics in translation, Satyendranath's rendition of Burns gestures towards a tacit paradigm of “world literature” and internationalism. This article attempts a comparative study of these translations of Burns with a view to assessing their underlying aesthetics and cross‐cultural negotiations.