Life Writing and Translation

This book aims to explore the expansive field of life writing, both as a practice and genre of literature, and its intersections with translation. It will serve as a rich resource for university students, researchers, and academics of literature, history, sociology, cultural studies, translation studies, and comparative studies.

The steady rise of auto/biographical narrations across various Indian languages, including English and translations into English, as different forms of life writing marks a moment of social and political ferment. This book aims to explore the expansive field of life writing, both as a practice and a genre of literature, and its intersections with translation. Addressing the affinities between life writing and translation, and the emancipatory possibilities it offers, can shift the focus from individual texts to a space for encounter between languages, identities, and cultures.

Focusing on how life writing in India has emerged as a distinct literary and publishing phenomenon in recent times, the volume traces the diversity and richness of the various bhasha traditions of life writing and looks at how they have gained recognition both in regional languages and in translation. Traversing various languages, the book examines memoirs of incarceration and exile, narratives of marginality, literary memoirs, biography, and oral songs of protest among others, and engages with life writing's affective and political potential in documenting everyday lives and struggles, and fostering solidarity among readers. Exploring the ways life writing and translation are mutually implicated, it deliberates on the ethical, political, and translational significance of life writing and seeks to spark academic interest and further research in this field.

This volume will serve as a rich resource for university students, researchers, and academics of literature, history, sociology, cultural studies, translation studies, and comparative studies, and those who are interested in South Asian literature.

Autorentext

Mukul Chaturvedi is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. Her doctoral research is on women's testimonial literature from, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her areas of interest include postcolonial literatures, autobiography studies, life writing, testimonies from conflict zones, gender and/in translation. She has recently published an edited volume titled, Life Writing, Representation, and Identity: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2024) and is currently working on the second volume of life writing.

Inhalt

Part I - Introduction **Part II - Truth-telling, Re-imagining and Translation ****1. Inscribing the True Self, Translating Masculinities: Experiments with Gender in Gandhi's Writings and Life Narrations 2. Retelling as Translation: The Refashioning of Vaishnavite Hagiographies as Bio-fiction in Postcolonial Assam 3. "I saw a light": Translation and the Question of Agency in the Lifewritings of Suryakant Tripathi Nirala 4. Truth-telling and Translation in Maitreyi Pushpa's autobiographies Kasturi Kundal Basai and Gudiya Bheetar Gudiya Part III - Translating Resistance and Revolution ****5. Translating the Self in Ajitha's Ormmakurippukal: Context, Concerns and Challenges 6. Tek Nath Rizal's Nirbasan as a study of translation at the Eastern Himalayan Border 7. The Self and the Cell in Minakshi Sen's Prison Writing 8. Translating the Revolutionary Self: Political Auto/biographies and Memoirs in Punjabi Part IV - Gender, Agency and/in Translation ****9. ay t-e Ashraf as an Auto/biography: Translating Women's Resistance and Agency 10. 'Bepardahgi' amid Social Taboo: Radical Acts of Narration in Bilquis Jehan Khan's Autobiography A Song of Hyderabad (2010) 11. Mary Kom's Collaborative Autobiography: Negotiating Authorship 12. Translating Desire and Dissent: A Study of Rajbangsi Women's Folksongs Part V - Life Writing, Marginality and Translation ****13. Dalit Writing and/ in Translation: Analysing Dalit Women's Life Narratives in Marathi 14. Translation of Dalit Victimhood and Difference: An Examination of Bhanwar Meghwanshi's I Could Not Be Hindu 15. Writing the Disabled Self: Gender, Sexuality and Women with Disabilities 16. Translated Lives: Devadasis and the Anti-Nautch Movement Part VI - Memory, Migration and Translation ****17. Uncanny Memory-scapes: The Recreated Pastoral in two contemporary Bangla Partition (1947) Memoirs 18. Privileging Non-Conformity, Itinerancy and Rationality: Self-Articulation as Resistance in Dilara Hashem's Kaktaliyo 19.* Migrant Identities: Seeking Self and Subjectivity in Lily Halder's Bhanga Berhar Panchali and Sanchita Roy's Ongar*