Translating Tamil Dalit Poetry Sivanarayanan, Anushiya; Rajkumar, N. T.
World literature today,
05/2004, Letnik:
78, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Sivanarayanan shares her experiences in translating the Tamil Dalit poetry of India, stressing that she was attempting to take on the task of interpreting and illuminating voices of a culture that ...had for centuries been silenced by the country's caste system. She says that translating poetry from one culture to another involves being sensitive to cultural registers, such as those of the Tamil poems of N. T. Rajkumar, in which references to the religion require not simply an understanding of the various names of the mother goddesses he lists, but an easy sense of comfort within the folk culture described.
Dr Kaiser Haq gives his fine new English translation of Tagore's novella Chaturanga the title ‘Quartet’. This elegantly preserves much of the meaning of the Bengali title, for not only does it imply ...the ‘four limbs’ or ‘four parts’ that make up the novella—the four chapters that were originally published separately in consecutive issues of Sabujpatra (November–February, 1915–16)—but also, as in a string quartet, the interplay between the four characters that the chapters are named after. Since Tagore was always alert to the full meaning or etymology of names, perhaps we should also remember that a chaturanga in epic India was a complete army comprising elephants, chariots, cavalry and infantry. This matches the grandeur of the novella, the vigour and precision of its prose, and the moral and spiritual battles that are its subject. Finally, chaturanga as a name for a chess game (technically a four-player version of the game) evokes both the intellectualism of the book and its concentrated passion.
This dissertation explores the ideological constructions of the identity of South Asian children and young adults, especially in the discourses of literatures targeted for younger audiences. By ...categorizing these novels in terms of the authors' strategic positions as having outsider views (Western authors writing about South Asian youth), insider-outsider views (South Asian diaspora authors writing from "exile"), and insider views (South Asian authors based in home countries), I examine these literatures as "pre-texts," "con-texts," and "post-texts." I have discovered that these discourses have been "disOrienting" South Asian youth at different levels, and the Westernizing tendency observed in these discourses is at once empowering and disempowering readers in the formative stages of their identities. I have analyzed the patterns seen in the novels of Roland Smith, Patricia McCormick, Suzanne Fisher Staples, Tanuja Desai Hidier, Kiran Desai, Salman Rushdie, Shyam Selvadurai, and Arundhati Roy. As the literatures written from these different contexts all involve texts which often tend to be "contrary" to the lived realities and actual social expectations of South Asian youths, the process of these youths' identity formation becomes further complicated. My research provides a mapping of these complex processes of casting and recast(e)ing "alien" veils on South Asian youths, wherever they may be living. Finally, I argue that the cross-cultural analysis of international children's and young adult literatures provides opportunities to both teachers and students to understand themselves and the world around them better.
Nehru's Model Morality
The Wilson quarterly (Washington),
09/2004, Letnik:
28, Številka:
4
Journal Article, Magazine Article
Throughout his political life, says Khilnani, a professor of politics at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, Nehru struggled with the choices and responsibilities ...that came with power. To Nehru, there was equal disaster in "attempts to define the character of the state in terms of the claims of religious faith" and in concentrating too much power in one person. "In a world in which religion was declining (as in the West) or in which religious faith existed in multiple forms (as in India), no particular religion or belief system could claim universal allegiance, no shared morality could be taken for granted."
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