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Asian Literature and Translation : A Journal of Religion and Culture
Number of Followers: 1  Open Access journalISSN (Online) 2051-5863 Published by Cardiff University  [3 journals]
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- The Case of the Curious Comestible from Bengali into English: Conveying
Sarcasm, Polysemy, Ambiguity, and Connotation by ‘Incomprehensible’
Translation, Footnoting, Transliteration, and ‘Unfaithful’ Addition
Abstract: A translator's choices include directly translating source language words into the target language (with and without inverted commas), retaining these in transliteration, explaining them in footnotes, and inserting unmarked additional words (a few or many) as seems best. This essay focuses on a single word, a metaphor for reddening in anger, its literal referent most likely the word for a sweetmeat, the Bengali lāl-mohan, used sarcastically (so it seems) for the angry being to whom it is applied. This comes from Abanindranath Tagore's classic humorous fantasy narrative Bhondaṛ Bahadur (1926), translated in Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance (OUP, 2018). This word lāl-mohan has several referents, multiple etymologies, and pairs of positive/negative connotations. A sense of all these is automatically part of the linguistic capital of the Bengali speaker, and not that of Anglophone readers, pan-South Asian or other. Hence I attempt to justify my inclusion of what seemed to be the most important shades of meaning, and how I attempted this, and why I left out the others. Published on 2022-04-30 00:00:00
- Preliminary Notes on the Extended Heart Sutra in Chinese.
Abstract: This article offers an introductory overview of the attribution and dating of the versions of the extended Heart Sutra preserved in the Chinese Tripiṭaka and some preliminary assessment of the reliability of these sources. It includes some observations about the interesting features of each version and a stemma showing how they relate to the wider world of Heart Sutra versions. Finally, a conjecture is made about the language in which the extension was made. The Heart Sutra appears to have been extended twice in the early eighth century, leaving us with two different versions of the extended text. It appears that the first extended text, like the standard Heart Sutra, may have been composed in Chinese, while the second extended text appears to have been composed in Sanskrit. Published on 2021-12-31 00:00:00
- ‘Turning the Wheel of the Teaching’: A translation of Aśvaghoṣa’s
Buddhacarita Canto 15 from a recently rediscovered Sanskrit manuscript
Abstract: This article offers a first translation into English of the re-discovered Sanskrit text of Canto 15 of Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita. While Cantos 1–14 of Aśvaghoṣa’s kāvya, or long poem on the life of the Buddha, have survived in Sanskrit, it had been thought that Cantos 15–24 only survived in Tibetan and Chinese translations. But the Japanese scholar Kazunobu Matsuda, working with Jens-Üwe Hartmann, has recently identified the whole of Canto 15 embedded in a Sanskrit manuscript of the Tridaṇḍamālā, attributed to Aśvaghoṣa. While Matsuda has made a translation into Japanese, I offer a translation of the Sanskrit text of Buddhacarita Canto 15 into English. A distinctive feature of this translation is that I present a prose translation, conveying the Sanskrit syntax and vocabulary in an accurate form, alongside a verse translation, suggesting some of the poetic qualities of Ásvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit in the form of English blank verse and unrhymed ballad metre. Published on 2021-12-15 00:00:00
- Annotated English Translation and Chiasmic Structure of the
‘Sadāprarudita Avadāna’ in Kumārajīva’s Xiaŏpĭn
Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra
Abstract: This paper on the Sadāprarudita Avadāna in Kumārajīva’s Xiaŏpĭn Bānruòbōluómì Jīng (小品般若波羅蜜經) has two aims. Firstly, to provide the first English translation of this Avadāna story as it appears in Kumārajīva’s text, a version which is distinctly different from the earlier recensions of the sūtra such as the Dàoxíng, including the Sanskrit which has already been translated by Conze. Secondly, to highlight the chiasmic structure of the Avadāna and demonstrate how important understanding that structure is in understanding both the entirety and elements of its content.Kumārajīva’s early 5th century translation entitled the Xiaŏpĭn Bānruòbōluómì Jīng (小品般若波羅蜜經), i.e. the Small Text Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, is the fourth of seven Chinese translations of the early Mahāyāna text commonly known by its Sanskrit name the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, or in English the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines. Within the text as a whole, the penultimate two chapters concerning the Avadāna of Sadāprarudita have long been of interest due to being written in a different style to the reminder of the text. While this has led many text-historical studies to conclude that it is either a later addition to the text, or is in fact the original ur-text, other studies have also largely been in the text-historical mode, attempting to work out various historical strata, inter-textual sourcing and borrowing, and the like. Leaving aside diachronic studies, it is noteworthy that the structure of the story displays chiasmus or inverted parallelism. These forms, with paired literary elements in the form A-B-C-…-X-…-C’-B’-A’, are important in reading and understanding of the content.Before the translation proper, the Introduction discusses the source and its editions, provides an overview of the content of these two chapters, and discusses the voice and policy of my translation. The English translation is not an attempt to return to some now unknown Sanskrit original, nor a reading of it through later Chinese traditions, but as close as I can understand to Kumārajīva’s own understanding and translation technique. The entire English translation is critically annotated, marking significant points of interest both internally within the text, but also externally when compared to the other Chinese translations and later Sanskrit recensions. This translation complements an earlier translation of the first two chapters of the same text. Published on 2021-07-23 11:44:51
- The Pārijātaharaṇa Narrative in Early Sanskrit Sources
Abstract: The Pārijātaharaṇa or theft of the magical Pārijāta tree is a well known episode in the life of the Hindu god Kṛṣṇa. The earliest Sanskrit sources of the incident consist largely of short or passing references to the deed, and mainly understand the seizure of the tree to have involved a fight between Kṛṣṇa and Indra. The actual episode is narrated in the critical text of the HV, but there no fight occurs. This piece follows up on and responds to a recent publication in this journal in which the narrative discontinuity surrounding the Pārijātaharaṇa is treated briefly in connection with the problem of textual emendation. After identifying and contextualizing the relevant epic passages, I take up the key sources of the myth in the following centuries, and reflect briefly on the issue of the Sanskrit tradition's own work of narrative emendation, as well as some of the implications thereof for readers and translators. Published on 2020-12-16 00:00:00
- An English to Vietnamese Translation of Yusef Komunyakaa's "Saigon Bar
Girls, 1975"
Abstract: Serving his country as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross during the Vietnam War, winning a Bronze Star, Yusef Komunyakaa draws upon his experiences for works such as the collection, Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won the Dark Room Poetry Prize. Beaucoup dien cai dau is a Vietnamese-French term regarding how the Vietnamese people during the war saw American soldiers, translating to "crazy in the head." The collection is presented through the lens of personal experience, especially centering the positionality of Black soldiers and the landscape of Vietnam. Despite the countless awards to compliment an immense oeuvre, "Saigon Bar Girls, 1975" from the aforementioned collection stands out as a poignant, slice-of-life snapshot of postwar life in Vietnam through the eyes of Vietnamese prostitutes, which exists as a powerful mode of bringing Vietnamese subjectivity to the fore of how the war is remembered in the global consciousness. Published on 2020-12-16 00:00:00
- Translations from the Vietnamese: 'The Blood Lily' by Vuong Tam
Abstract: Vuong Tam was born in 1946, in Hanoi. He graduated from Hanoi University of Polytechnic and started to write fiction as a child. He is a member of the Vietnam Writers’ Association and currently is a news reporter for the New Hanoi. He is a prolific writer and has published both poetry and fiction for which he has won several awards. This short story is anthologized in Chien tranh cung mang khuon mat dan ba (Women’s Faces in War), published by Literature Press, Hanoi, in 2014. “The Blood Lily” is both romantic and traumatic: the female protagonist romanticizes her memories of the Vietnam War, although it causes her traumatic scars. The flowers she plants represent her bitter-sweet memories of the past. Published on 2020-06-05 00:00:00
- Translations from the Vietnamese: 'A Missing Person' by Vuong Tam
Abstract: Vuong Tam was born in 1946, in Hanoi, Vietnam. He graduated from Hanoi University of Polytechnic and started to write fiction as a child. He is a member of the Vietnam Writers’ Association and currently is a news reporter for the New Hanoi. He is a prolific writer and has published both poetry and fiction. “A Missing Person” is anthologized in Chien tranh cung mang guong mat dan ba (Women’s Faces in War), published by Literature Press, Hanoi, in 2014. The story emphasizes how stirring up memories of war experiences is a way of healing, especially when a veteran feels being part of a group, a substitute family that understands and accepts him. Published on 2020-06-05 00:00:00
- Translating Vaidya’s Harivaṃśa
Abstract: This paper is a philological and textological complement to a new translation, produced in Cardiff, of the Sanskrit Harivaṃśa, the final part of the Mahābhārata. The paper is a project report, providing a detailed behind-the-scenes account of the translation project. It discusses the specific 118-chapter published text that was chosen for translation, and the reasons for that choice; it discusses the emendations that were made to that text, and the reasons for making them; it discusses the method, process, and conventions of the translation, with particular reference to the intended audience, the accompanying apparatus, the format of the translation, its literary and linguistic register, and the treatment of specific words; and it discusses a selection of problematic passages in relation to previous translations. The paper’s discussion of the Sanskrit Harivaṃśa is wide-ranging, rigorous, unprecedentedly in-depth, and makes significant original contributions in the fields of Sanskrit philology, translation studies, and world literature. The appendix to the paper is a searchable electronic version of the Sanskrit Harivaṃśa text that was translated. Published on 2019-08-19 00:00:00
- The Tale of King Suratha and its Literary reception: Texts and
Translations from the Surathotsava and the Durgāvilāsa
Abstract: This article is a companion piece to 'Licence and Faithfulness: Taking liberties with kathā in classical Sanskrit poetry and aesthetics' (Journal of Indological Studies, Kyoto University, Nos. 26-27 (2014-2015). It contains the texts and the first English translations of the tale of King Suratha from two mahākāvyas, the Surathotsava by Someśvaradeva and the Durgāvilāsa by Rāmakṛṣṇa. A full literary and historical analysis of these texts and their illumination of the issue of poetic licence and its implicitly free, creative and subversive nature is to be found in the other article. The Surathotsva and the Durgāvilāsa together exemplify the literary heritage of the Devīmāhātmya a Purāṇic work treated as scripture containing the archetype of the Suratha story. The tale of the king contained in these mahākāvyas diverges in many ways from the scriptural source, but most prominently in a new emphasis on Suratha as nāyaka, the swashbuckling hero whose exploits showcase heroic prowess, adventure, daring and kingly glory. In these stories we see Suratha tempted by gorgeous women, create cities out of magic and preside over spectacular courts as Dharma personified.
Published on 2018-11-05 00:00:00
