Why Always Translate a Sufferer? : The Consequences of Mimetic Translations of Mahasweta Devi’s Works

Abstract

The enormous literary output of Indian female writers serves to emphasize the free flow of cognition – with which they are approaching the epistemology of past and present, and is categorizing the ‘possible’ future. The enigma of the whole corpus of female writing, it seems is predominated by the suffering portrayal of an ‘often’ female protagonist. Either suppressed under the domestic audacity, or binarized in the social plane, or is being fragmented in the cultural sphere. Translations of indigenous female writers (into English) in this respect not only open up a horizon of readership, but can also provide a pluralistic approach towards successful portrayal of femininity (along with the suffering one). However, the empirical observation suggests that the cultural consumption of a ‘female protagonist’ is signified with the ‘suffering’, ‘subjugated’, ‘oppressed’, ‘categorized’, ‘binarized’, ‘mutilated’ (among others) signifiers. Thereby, the number of translations carried out either by the popular female writers, or by the popular translating ‘persona’ – always presents the ‘picture’ of a secondary woman in a primary male society. Does this entail that females cannot be successful otherwise, without being exploited at the hands of male superiority? By applying the mimetic theories of Girard in the translated works of Mahasweta Devi’s, this paper proposes to analyse the ideology of translating an inferior protagonist. The resultant work does not only invoke a sense of ‘pity’ or ‘awareness’ in the reader, but also categorizes him/her into accepting the plights of women as just, and female success can always be achieved by being ‘secondary’ in importance.

Keywords

• mimetic ideology
• semantic memory
• consent generation