Strategies for Translating Obscenity:

Medical Language and Sanitization in Malay Rāychoudhurī’s Poetry

Authors

  • Daniela Cappello

Keywords:

obscenity, sexual body, masturbation, medical lexicon, sanitization

Abstract

The Bengali ‘obscene’ (aślīl) poetry of the Hungry Generation is heavily pregnant with ‘dirty’ sexual imagery. In particular, the poem “Prachanda Baidyutik Chutar” and its English translation “Stark Electric Jesus” (1964) by the Hungryalist Malay Raychoudhuri concern the description of the female ‘sexual body’, male masturbation and bodily fluids. The use of a Bengali ‘medical’ vocabulary for portraying the ‘sexual body’ achieves a double operation of ‘sanitization’ of the semantic sphere of sex, unsuitable subject of poetry, and of ‘ironic inversion’ where the low dirty content embodied by masturbation and sexual activity attains the higher status of poetry, while downplaying the overtly mechanical Bengali lexicon of medical sciences. My attempt at re-translating some controversial passages of this poem helps laying out some methodological principles for developing a ‘contextual’ practice of translation in resistance to traditional notions such as accuracy and faithfulness.

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Author Biography

Daniela Cappello

Daniela Cappello graduated in Modern Indology (Hindi, Sanskrit and Bengali languages and literatures) at ‘L’Orientale’ University of Naples. From 2010, she conducted long-term research in Kolkata where she eventually edited a Bengali translation of Antonio Gramsci’s 25th Notebook (Rabindra Bharati University, 2016). In October 2015 she joined the Graduate Programme for Transcultural Studies in the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” (University of Heidelberg) as Ph.D. candidate. She is currently pursuing her doctoral research on the Hungry Generation, the Bengali avant-garde movement of the 1960s and circulation of discourses on obscenity in literature within the international avant-garde community of those years.

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Published

2021-11-17

How to Cite

Cappello, D. (2021). Strategies for Translating Obscenity: : Medical Language and Sanitization in Malay Rāychoudhurī’s Poetry. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 5(1), 22–35. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/165