Translating Power

The objective of this volume is threefold. Firstly, it aims to explore the idea of power itself, to examine how power works, what structures of power do, how they may resisted, etc. Secondly, it aims to look specifically at some recent stories produced in different Indian languages and translated into English to see how they depict and explore these questions of power. Thirdly, science these stories are available to us, in this volume at least, through translation, the book aims to explore how power and translation are related. It is through an elaboration of these three points that this volume believes it can approach the intricacies of a dyad as complicated as ‘translating power.’ The volume is divided into three sections: (A) The first section includes eight katha Prize Stories, translated into English from eight Indian languages-Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, Assamese, Marathi and Hindi, respectively-which depict, in their own literary ways, the many different aspects of power. (B) The second section includes commentaries on each of the eight stories, which explain them in terms of the power structures they deal with and help the reader to understand some of their finer nuances. (C) The third section, which comprises five articles by renowned experts in the field, takes up the question of the relationship between power and translation to finally give the volume and its contents the required theoretical grounding. The volume thus has two primary areas of inquiry: how does power work generally; and how does power work specifically in relation to translation.