BETWEEN FIDELITY AND FOREIGNNESS: SOCIO-CULTURAL AND RHETORICAL CHALLENGES IN REBECCA WHITTINGTON’S ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF JIBANANANDA DAS’S MALLOBAN

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.