RECONCEPTUALISING SILENCE IN CLASSROOM INTERACTION : A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF BENGALI LANGUAGE TEACHING IN GOVERNMENT-AIDED SECONDARY SCHOOLS OF MURSHIDABAD DISTRICT

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ABSTRACT: This paper seeks to investigate the rendition of socio-cultural and rhetorical subtleties of language between Bangla and English, taking as its focal point the translation of Jibanananda Das’s 1973 fiction Malloban by Rebecca Whittington in 2022. The endeavour of rendering such a profound and culturally layered text presents considerable difficulties, as it necessitates the precarious equilibrium of retaining the spirit of the source text while simultaneously making it comprehensible to a new linguistic and cultural milieu. In the course of this undertaking, the interpreter, whose primary language is American English, is compelled to negotiate between domestication and exoticism, thereby generating lexical, semiotic, and syntactic divergences in her version of the source language text. This paper endeavours to evaluate the fidelity of the rendition to the original composition while scrutinising the interpreter’s decisions in capturing the intricate wordplay, idiomatic expressions, metaphors, and narrative nuances that are distinguishing features of Jibanananda Das’s literary craft. This paper further examines the instances where the rendition may inadvertently modify or diminish the original text’s resonance, along with the ramifications of such alterations for readers of the translated composition. Moreover, this study ventures into the affective and cognitive dimensions of bilingual reading.

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CONCLUSION: Jibanananda’s Malloban is a commemoration of chaos — one that eludes any coherent framework of translation. Whittington’s rendition of the novel appears to impose an overtly regimented and amiable veil upon the raw, fragmented, and colloquial atmosphere of the original. While a non-native interpreter frequently ventures into the act of translation with a certain disposition of inadequacy and an unavoidable impulsion of anxiety regarding the standards that the source text has established within its sociopolitical, linguistic, cultural, and literary backdrop, Whittington’s endeavour to render Jibanananda Das accessible to a global readership is eminently commendable. Her world is demarcated from Jibanananda — or Malloban himself, for that matter — by an unfathomable chasm, yet she manages to navigate the turbulent waters of translation nonetheless. The manuscript of Malloban was unearthed nearly two decades following its composition, and after almost three decades of its initial publication, it has been rendered into English owing to Rebecca Whittington. However culturally remote or linguistically disruptive it may prove at certain junctures, it stands as the first and sole English rendition of the novel to date — a distinction that itself attests to the singular courage and commitment of the translator. This paper has endeavoured to examine how Whittington contests the grand narrative of power dynamics in language and translation by selecting a Bangla novel composed by a Bengali writer primarily recognised as a poet and rendering it into English for the inaugural time. By scrutinising the particular case of Malloban, this paper has sought to illustrate how collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches may enrich the theory and practice of translation. Employing the theory of semantic equivalence as the primary framework, this paper has endeavoured to appraise the undertaking of a non-Bengali interpreter in preserving the narrative, visceral, aural, symbolic, and visual essence of a Bangla text. Through a close and contrastive perusal of Das’s novel and Whittington’s rendition, this study has endeavoured to portray a translator not as one who merely conveys the literal signification of the words of the source text, but as one who transmits the sensibility embedded within those words. It has further sought to situate Whittington not merely as a translator but equally as a receptor within the broader purview of transcultural and bilingual readership. While foregrounding the significance of comparative analyses of multiple versions of a text in order to apprehend the diverse interpretive predilections and their social, political, psychological, cultural, and linguistic ramifications, this paper has illuminated the reception of Whittington’s rendition among English-speaking audiences, furnishing insights into cross-cultural comprehensions and prospective misinterpretations. .......

Institutions

• Bangabasi Morning College

  West Bengal, Kolkata

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