“Battala” is a Bengali metonym for commercial print culture which gained popularity during the Bengal Renaissance. This print culture became a translational palimpsest, disseminating literary genres and leading to the creation of a site where high and low culture converged. Our paper examines the complex relationship between 19th-century colonial Calcutta and the languages in this fast-developing city. The popular print culture blurred distinctions between cultural forms, transcending geographical and literary boundaries of the colonial cosmopolis. This paper contributes to the discourse on translating otherness in the city by demonstrating how Battala intricately reflected relationships between language, memory, and urban space within the historical and cultural context of colonial Calcutta. This is done through an analysis of selected works, including Koutuk Shatak by Harishchandra Mitra, Rar Bhar Mithya Katha Tin Loye Kolikata by Pyarimohan Sen, and Ki Mojar Koler Gari by Munsi Azimuddin. Other works that highlight the blurring of cultural spaces include the translation of The Arabian Nights by Avinash Chandra Mitra (titled Sachitra Ekadhik Sahasra Dibas). Additionally, translations of Ameer Hamzar Puthi by Abdun Nabi and Shah Muhammad Saghir’s Yūsuf Zuleikhā show significant Urdu and Arabic-Persian influence. By analyzing Battala’s interactions with marketplaces, different communities, and intellectual salons, this study adds to the interdisciplinary discussion on translation and urban space. It examines the city’s symbolic representations in popular literature, as well as its geographic location and social significance.
The Arabic term ḥāra denotes a specific topographical unit of the traditional Middle-Eastern, especially Egyptian, city. Variously translated into English—e.g., as lane, alley, but also quarter, district, neighbourhood—it belongs to the category of culture-bound terms. This article presents an analysis of its use in the novel Awlād ḥāratinā (1959) by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), in which it plays a crucial role, and of how it has been rendered in four translations into English, Polish, and Spanish. The difficulty which the translators had to negotiate when dealing with ḥāra lies not only in its cultural specificity, but also in its polysemy: five semantic facets of this term are distinguished in this study (geographic, metonymic, architectural, social, and cultural/economic), of which four can be found in the novel. A number of occurrences of ḥāra in these four senses and their equivalents used in the four translations are discussed in terms of their semantics and connotations. Special attention is paid to the non-canonical use of this term to which Mahfouz resorted in order to refigure the topography of the Egyptian city and to give the novel an allegorical dimension. In translation, this meaningful alteration is reverted and literary space normalized back into a conventional shape. The analysis shows how the translators have domesticated the literary representation of urban space to suit Western notions, normalizing it in certain cases, but in some others have opted for foreignizing solutions.
In this article I explore the “translational city” through the unique lens of contemporary Venice. The multiple cities that have been the subject of work on the “translational city” display different linguistic and cultural relations: from the dual city, through (post)colonial cities, to cosmopolitan cities. While Venice historically shares some of the characteristics of these models, its social, cultural, and linguistic make-up is exceptional in terms of both nature and scale. Progressive hyper-touristification in the last 30 years has led to a complete transformation of Venice as an urban space with the dramatic shrinking of the resident population and their ways of inhabiting the city and has made travel writing central to how its urban spaces are imagined and experienced. This shift calls for a reconsideration of the role of travel writing in shaping our perceptions and our experiences of the city. The article offers a comparative analysis of how the city is imagined, by placing Joseph Brodsky’s influential English travel account, Watermark, in conversation with two collections of residents’ narratives; it is also an attempt to map how travel writing, as a form of translation, mediates between the city’s global perceptions and its local realities. The analysis uncovers an important disjuncture between how Venice is imagined by Brodsky as a global citizen and how it is remembered, memorialised, and constructed by Venetian residents as “denizens” seeking to reconstitute a local/minoritised language. The article explores Venice as a specific example of a translational city, while reflecting on a broader set of questions on the politics of language, travel, translation, and community.
Stuart Dybek is a writer invariably associated with his neighborhood of Pilsen/Little Village on Chicago’s Lower West Side. Having grown up there as a descendant of immigrants from Poland, Dybek frequently “revisits” his old neighborhood in his writing. His texts showcase the changes of the urban space, narrated through references to the material, social, cultural, and linguistic environment. In this essay, I will analyze two of Dybek’s texts—the sequence “Hot Ice” from his second collection of stories The Coast of Chicago and the story “Qué Quieres” from I Sailed with Magellan—to probe the palimpsestic construction of urban space, whereby the past, present, and future of urban orders are narrated simultaneously. Both texts illustrate ethnic succession in the neighborhood—from Slavs to Hispanics—which finds its reflection in the linguistic layer of the stories and construes translation as an inevitable element of urban experience.
