ABSTRACT
The present essay seeks, via a retrospective reflection upon my own practice as a translator, to change the idiom in which one thinks about the relationship between translation and disability.Here I revisit some stories I have previously translated, resituating these narratives at the cusp between translation and disability studies. When recast in the idiom of this complex discursive field, the selected stories by Rabindranath Tagore, Mahasweta Devi, Debes Ray and Rizia Rahman, give rise to several pressing questions that are central to my re-reading. Can the forms of ‘dysfunctionality’ represented in these stories – disfigurement, childlessness and mental impairment – be classified as ‘disability’? Who determines such classifications, and by what principles? What emancipatory potential can we locate in the practice of translating disability? What are the special challenges of translating disability in a South Asian context?How can translating disability in South Asia function as a distinctive form of textual radicalism premised on a recognition of heterogeneity? This essay argues that translating disability has emancipatory potential and represents a way of enhancing our awareness of the significance of disability in literary studies.
