On Translating Indian Classical Compositions скачать в хорошем качестве

On Translating Indian Classical Compositions

BCLT Research Seminar with Malini Murali Malini Murali was BCLT Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow 2026 and was in residence at BCLT from Monday 19 January – Saturday 14 March 2026. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Devaswom Board College, Thalayolaparambu, affiliated with Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. About this seminar: Even as the axiom of effability lies at the heart of translation practice, every act of translation involves a negotiation with context. The Indian classical tradition poses a distinctive challenge in this respect. Across iterations, with their endless weave of sobriquets and long segues, the ‘literary’ in these compositions relies less on narrative than on linguistic felicity. Utterances are threaded together to evoke the music that is at the heart of language. When compositions rigorously maintain the sovereignty of form, how does one chart the course of effability through translation? While form itself cannot be translated, how might one suggest its essential impulses, which are crucial to the status of the composition, both in its immediate performative ambience and in terms of its literary value? Of course, all this applies to literature everywhere. I want to illustratively engage with this universal phenomenon in the particular case of Indian classical literary texts, drawing on my experience of translating Ezhutachan’s Adhyatmaramayanam Kilipattu, a 16th-century retelling of the Ramayana in Malayalam, and Unnayi Warrier’s Nalacharitam Attakatha, the most celebrated classic of the Kathakali repertoire.