• ISBN13: 9788132109549
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: General Books
• Publisher: Sage Publications
• Publisher Imprint: SAGE India
• Publication Date: August 11, 2012
• Pages: 204
• Original Price: INR 825.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 500 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): Anthropology / Cultural & Social

Translation as a Touchstone focuses on translation as a creative process, where Narasimhan proposes that translation is an art of highlighting the complex relationship that arises between two languages, their cultures and sensibilities when they are positioned as a main language and a target language. The implications of this proposition are far-reaching, as Narasimhan argues in this book. The place of English in translation exercises in India is an implicit theme, where translation is an act which consolidates the terrain between two linguo-cultures.

English, as argued, is a touchstone language, and in a multi-cultural country like India, this hold of English adds weight to the case for transliteration. With the examples of Vijay Tendulkar's plays and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Narasimhan argues that transliteration not only can but also should extend to wholesale incorporations of Indian language interludes into English translations. Through a comparative study of original passages and phrases in literary texts along with their translated equivalents, she has followed a multi-pronged strategy and has used, as methodology, the comparative analysis method.

Though the target language is more than one in two of the works discussed in the essays--Samskara, by U. R. Ananthamurthy, and Chemmeen, by Tagazhi Sivasankara Pillai--Narasimhan incorporates multiple ways of looking at the translations and does not focus on any one language in isolation.

Narasimhan, Raji: -

Raji Narasimhan, born in 1930, took to full-time writing in the late 1960s, after quitting journalism (The Indian Express, New Delhi). She writes fiction, literary criticism and translates from Hindi and Tamil into English. Her book Sensibility under Stress: Aspects of Indo-English Writing (1976) was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Award. The second of her five novels, Forever Free (1979), was also shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Award, and was on the English Literature syllabus of IIT, Delhi, all through the 1980s and part of the 1990s. She has two collections of short stories: The Marriage of Bela and Other Stories (1978) and The Illusion of Home (2007).

Her translations include Unarmed (1998) of Rajee Seth's Hindi novella Nishkavach, Alma Kabutari (2006) of Maitreyi Pushpa's Hindi novel of the same title (shortlisted for the Crossword Translation Award in 2007) and Not Without Reason and Other Stories (2012) of Rajee Seth's Hindi stories Akaran to Naheen.