Ghosts, Drunkards and Bad Language:

Translating the Margins of Nabarun Bhattacharya's Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ (‘The War Cry of the Beggars’)

Authors

  • Carola Erika Lorea

Keywords:

Bengali literature, magic realism, reader reception, slang, jargon, social taboo, Italian, horizon of expectations

Abstract

This article unfolds some problematic aspects encountered during the translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya's radical novel Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ (2003), published in Italian with the title Gli ammutinati di Calcutta (2016). I focus on the translation of the language of the margins, intended as social, ontological as well as linguistic spaces. The difficulty of translating into Italian the richness of Bengali slang in the semantic field of boozing offers an interesting case to reveal the strategies of a radical translation practice, which resists domestication (Venuti; Spivak) and endorses the unsettling use of sub-standard language(s) in order to translate the bizarre mutiny of Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ and the counter-language of its author.

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Author Biography

Carola Erika Lorea

Carola Erika Lorea is a scholar interested in oral traditions and popular religions in South Asia. After a doctoral research on the songs of a Bengali Baul guru and their performative contexts (2015, University of Rome), she was awarded research fellowships from IIAS, Gonda Foundation (Leiden) and SAI (Heidelberg) to continue her study of Bengali oral literature and post-Partition displacement. She authored several articles on oral traditions and Baul songs, translated the works of Sukumar Ray, Jibanananda Das, Bhaba Pagla and Nabarun Bhattacharya, and was socially engaged as an interpreter for Bangladeshi refugees in Italy. Her research monograph Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman was recently published (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

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Published

2021-11-17

How to Cite

Lorea , C. E. . (2021). Ghosts, Drunkards and Bad Language:: Translating the Margins of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ (‘The War Cry of the Beggars’). Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 5(1), 36–50. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/166