An Abstract

TAGORE as TRANSLATOR
It is well-known to all of us that in 1874, when Rabindranath Tagore was very young, his housetutor Gyan Chandra Bhattacharjee inspired him to translate Macbeth and he did that. The whole translation is not available today, except the three witches scenes (Act I, Sc I; first portions of Act I, Sc III and Act IV, Sc I), which was published in Bharati in Aswin, 1287. Translation is an important step towards dissemination of a text into other languages/cultures. Sisir Kumar Das in his essay Shakespeare in India1 shows that the reception of Shakespeare in India is an essential part of the history of nineteenth and twentieth century Indian Literature. In this paper I will discuss that though Rabindranath Tagores translation of Macbeth does not exceed three pages yet it has immense impact not only on the reception of Shakespeare in India (i.e., Dr. Mafize Choudhury has used the translations of three witches scenes done by Rabindranath Tagore2) but also on his own writing (i.e., Influence of Macbeth on Chandalika). In this paper I would discuss how translating Shakespeare affects Tagores own theatrical perception and theory of drama (i.e., Rangamancha). This paper would also explore in depth how faithful Rabindranath Tagore was while translating a few scenes of Macbeth into Bangla or how much liberty he took in order to bring equivalence between the two languages and culture. This paper would try to base this discussion in the light of semantic and communicative translation. On the basis of Tagores translation from others works (i.e., Macbeth), this paper would attempt to construct Tagore and Theory of Translation.
Keywords: Macbeth, Shakespeare, Rabindranath Tagore, translation
1 2

Das. Sisir, Kumar, Shakespeare in India, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative literature, 1997-98, vol. 36. Choudhury. Mafize, 1988, Macbeth trans. Mowla Brothers, Dhaka.

By Rindon Kundu, Master of Arts, Department of English Literature, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India. Currently pursuing Master of Arts in Comparative Literature, at the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.