An Analysis of Spivak’s Translation of Mahasweta Devi’s Essay

Mahasweta Devi is a very well cognise figure in juvenile contemporary Bengali Literature and also a Ramon Magsaysay Award victor for her tremendous works in the field of literature mainly on tribals and marginalized people. Gayatri Spivak played a great role in making Mahasweta Devi known to the literature world through her translations and her work of subaltern studies on Devis texts. Spivak has translated many texts of Mahasweta Devi from Bengali into English. Translation has its own problems and issues and has been discussed at large and these issues and problems are matter of concern for every arranger. The present paper is concerned with the problems which emerged afterwards reading the select translated text Draupadi and what English/Western readers are deprive of while reading the translated text.Mahasweta Devi (1926- ) is a prolific Bengali writer and a very active social activist. Her works for the upliftment of the tribal people is bare(a) ordinary. Along with the t ribal people, she has also dedicated her struggles for all the subalterns, who are the victims of the organization and class. Her works like Bashai Tudu, Chhota Munda and His Arrow, Rudali, Mother of 1084, Douloti, Draupadi, Breast-giver, etc. gives a realistic pictorial matter of the society where protagonists are oppressed and suppressed by the different tools of the system. study portions of her writings are journalistic in nature and are direct against the mainstream. According to her mainstream people are the mute spectators and are very oftentimes part of the exploitations inflicted upon the subalterns. Though all her stories are written in Bengali, most of the works of Devi has been now translated into English and other languages for wider readership.While talkin... ...rding to Bertrand Russel, no unitary can understand the word cheese unless he has a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese. (2000113).To conclude we can say that whatever measures a translator may take but there will be forever and a day loss of information. The best a translator can do is to decrease the loss. Bengal with its rich culture, traditions and religious values it becomes all the more tough for the translators to neutralise the dilution of those values.Works Cited1.Devi, Mahasweta. Spivak, Gayatri C, trans. Breast Stories. Calcutta Seagull Books.2010.2.Spivak, Gayatri C. In Other Worlds Essays in ethnic Politics. New York Methuen.1987.3.Venuti, Lawrence, Ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London Routledge.2000. 4.Sen, Nivedita and Nikhil Yadav, ed. Mahasweta Devi An Anthology of Recent Criticism. New Delhi Pencraft International.2008.