ABSTRACT
Both the translator and the disability activist situate their actions at a ‘distance’ from codes and conducts of a supposedly homogenous socio-cultural ‘normalcy’. Their overlapping interrogations of the ‘source’ could start with recognition of the capacity of vernacular texts to ponder upon the moments of dissonance in the socio-cultural constitution by including marginalized perspectives.
The present paper is concerned with translating the late colonial Bengali ‘regional’ short stories on differently-abled persons, which, being inherently inclined to exposing the fractured sensibilities of prolonged colonial subjectivity and liberating energies of individual selves, introduce an evolving notion of corporeality. Reapplying Walter Benjamin’s term ‘translatability’, this study proposes to trace an ‘inner-translatability’ in three seminal Bengali modernist disability texts – Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s ‘Nāri O Nāgini’ (‘Woman and Snake-wife’) and ‘Tamoshā’ (‘Darkness’) and Jagadish Gupta’s ‘Bonjhi Gunjomālā’ (‘Niece Gunjomala’). Each of these texts enquires into the repressive social disabilism and unsettles borderlines between ‘comprehensible’ and ‘incomprehensible’. Approaching this intracultural heterogeneity in Bengali tales by employing English as a tool of transcultural communication this study sets an aim to translate each register against its historical context and every dramatic movement as resulting from interactions among conflicting bodies.
