ABSTRACT
This essay is a reflection on translating ‘Viklang’, a story by Suraj Sanim. It uses the lens of disability studies as well as a specific theory of translation—reading as translation—by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in order to reflect on the act of translating this story.
While discussing the two aspects of language, “logic” and “rhetoricity”, Spivak writes that although every act of communication carries a bit of the risk of fraying, or “disruptive rhetoricity”, “our stake in agency” keeps this down to a minimum. She proposes that the translator’s task is to facilitate this fraying to pry open the gaps already present in the text. I use this conception of Spivak’s, “reader as translator”, to examine the use of metaphor, gaze and silence in the context of disability within the story.
The story unfolds a couple of decades after the formation of the independent Indian nation state with its dreams of modernity leading to an egalitarian society. But this promise remains unfulfilled for the economically and socially disadvantaged central character of the story. This fraught relationship of the marginalized with modernity is what made the story so important to pick up for translation and through translation, perhaps transformation.
