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Marie Corelli’s The Secret Power in Bengali Rendering: Translation, Indianisation and Cultural Criss-crossing



Author(s)

Pritha Kundu

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2014.11.008

Independent researcher, West Bengal, India

Since the 1980s and 1980s, a new trend in the discipline of Translation Studies has emerged beyond the boundaries of Europe. Scholars from post-colonial nations like Canada, India, China, Africa, and Latin America have argued that translation was used in the past as a means of depriving the colonised people of their voice. In the colonial structure, the hegemonic culture used to dominate, making the others subservient. Translation in the colonial period reflected that hierarchy. In this light, decades after the independence of India, translation from a reverse direction, that is, rendering popular English texts in minority languages, may be seen as a process of “writing back”. Even if the original text concerned is not a “political” writing, and the translation is apparently meant for “safer-zones” such as “young students’ literature”, a tendency of claiming cultural equality, overlapping the translator’s own cultural and literary heritage with the original author’s, can be discovered. This paper attempts to focus on these issues in a particular text—the 1995 Bengali translation of Marie Corelli’s 1921 science-fiction, The Secret Power. The purpose of this paper is to explore how Sudhindranath Raha has intermingled Biblical references and Western contexts with allusions to Indian culture and Sanskrit literature, thereby claiming a space for mutual understanding and respect between two cultures.

translation, The Secret Power, cultural criss-crossing