"Translator Translated" by Anita Desai
Prema Joshi is a “prematurely aged” instructor of English literature at a girls’ college, “a tired woman going home from work with nothing to look forward to, nothing to smile about,” who sees a way out of her malaise when she unexpectedly gets a chance to translate into English a set of short stories written in one of India’s many regional languages. The focus here is the hierarchy that separates writer and translator, with the latter clearly in an inferior position and frustrated by it, and what happens when a translator violates that order. But Ms. Desai also uses the novella for satiric purposes, perhaps to exact vengeance on some literary nationalists in India; at one point Prema and her publisher attend a conference where they are hectored by “a pudgy man in a sweat-stained suit,” who imperiously demands to know, “What made you decide to translate these stories into a colonial language that was responsible for destroying the original language?” ... "Translator Transla...
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