The Voice of Silence: A Study of the Act of Transportation of the Muted Voices

Abstract

Women and translation are connected by their empirical identity. Translation is something which comes after the original and holds a secondary position. Similarly, woman is second to man. The narrative from the Genesis too emphasizes the same notion. Creator endows breath of life to create the human species by transforming dust into man and then creates woman from the man’s rib. From then on it is proclaimed she is called Woman because she was taken out of Man. Woman is named here in a derivative manner and this gives the assumptions to create all the clichés on the secondary nature of woman. Similarly, translation is something derived from the original text. The clichés never acknowledge the fact that translation is actually transformation where the ‘original’ goes through a change. Notwithstanding these traditional assumptions many women translators are successful in including their own perspectives in the translated texts with subtle feminine interventions. Similarly many translated texts too have independent identities. For instance when we read a novel written by Orhan Pamuk we hardly think about the original. The 2022 International Booker prize winner Tomb of Sand, the English translation of Ret Samadhi written by Geetanjali Shree is acknowledged all over the world; but we do not weigh how far it is a derivative of the original. Keeping these ideas in view the paper will look at different nuances of translation and women in the multilingual context of India taking into account two stories “Pas Chotalor Kathakata” and “Mariam Astin Athaba Heera Barua” written by Arupa Patangia Kalita, a Sahitya Akademi Award winning Assamese woman writer. The stories bear distinct feminist identity in terms of language and experiences. With innovative narrative techniques it tells us about women’s silence and disappearance from the public domain. However, the paper will focus how English translations of the stories carry over these intricate experiences to a larger audience and endow a distinct identity to the Assamese writer.

Keywords

• translation
• woman
• gender