Tagore’s “Akraatri” in English: Translations of a Dialogueless Story of Solitude

Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories very often deal with the hopes, aspirations, apprehensions, agony and frustration of ordinary people delving closely into the psychological realms of individuals in their circumstances. “Akraatri” (1892) is, in a way, a different kind of story, not because it is in the first person with very scanty space for any other character’s point of view to come to the surface, but for the fact that there is not a single dialogue in the entire story (emphasis mine). To the extent anything is said, it is spoken to oneself and in the climax, it is silence that speaks beyond words and time. It is the challenge of the translator to recapture this prevailing atmosphere of solitude, the exclusive perspective of the first-person narrator, the reality of separation, reflection, regret, lack, failure and not the least, the final taste of infinite joy albeit transitorily. The transference of the culture-specific phenomenon of child marriage in late nineteenth century Bengal and one’s thought-processes associated with it can be equally demanding. Here we compare the efforts of the Englishman, William Radice (1991) and the Bengali, Palash Baran Pal (2000) to demonstrate the range of choices available, their application, deviations and errors, certain principles of decoding which might be the strength of the latter rooted in the culture of the source text and ways of recoding, the potential strength of the former, whose mother tongue happens to be the Target Language. In an age where cultural transactions have become more frequent than ever before, the strengths and limitations of the translators overlap as frequently and do not appear along predictable lines and preconceived notions; hence, there is greater cause to explore the richness and depth of cultural understanding that the two translators come up with