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In the liquid borderlands between South and Southeast Asia, where refugees from East Bengal were resettled after the massive Partition-induced displacement, the god Ram is narrated as a great model of filial piety but also as the murderer of a low-caste ascetic. The Vaishnava saint Chaitanya is a divine character but also a reproachable renunciate who abandoned his mother and forced her to beg from door to door. The crocodile is an ideal devotee who caught fish to bring as offering for the religious congregation, justifying the introduction of an otherwise forbidden substance on the altar. Drawing on both ethnographic and literary sources, I use recurrent "bundles of stories" such as these, transmitted and performed by the Matua community on the Andaman Islands, to discuss narratives as a way of knowing and to describe "bricolage thinking" in borderland selves. I interpret the aesthetics and the literary devices used in these narratives as strategies to shape borderland community values. These rely upon past memories and provide for present articulations of resistance. This article suggests that Matua narratives contest political borders by traveling between and connecting fragmented sections of the displaced community through the voices of itinerant preachers, performers, and pilgrims. At the same time, they trespass onto other kinds of borderlands, such as those created by unequal positions of socioeconomic power and those marking the center and periphery of religious hegemony., "Stories across Borders: Myths of Origin and Their Contestation in the Borderlands of South and Southeast Asia" edited by Monica Janowski and Erik de Maaker

This article unfolds some problematic aspects encountered during the translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya's radical novel Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ(2003), published in Italian with the title Gli ammutinati di Calcutta(2016). I focus on the translation of the language of the margins, intended as social, ontological as well as linguistic spaces. The difficulty of translating into Italian the richness of Bengali slang in the semantic field of boozing offers an interesting case to reveal the strategies of a radical translation practice, which resists domestication (Venuti; Spivak) and endorses the unsettling use of sub-standard language(s) in order to translate the bizarre mutiny of Kāṅāl Mālsāṭand the counter-language of its author. Keywords: Bengali literature; magic realism; reader reception; slang; jargon; social taboo; Italian; horizon of expectations

Since the growth of translation studies, translators and literary scholars have increasingly come to acknowledge the intense ethical and political, as well as practical, issues involved in preparing, producing and circulating translations of literature. In the field of South Asian literature, questions of status and visibility affecting authors, regional literatures and marginalized populations have been paramount, for instance, surrounding Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translations of the late Mahasweta Devi or the Marathi poet Arun Kolatkar’s poems in English. However, in this special issue of Sanglap we are also particularly concerned, following Lawrence Venuti, with the translator’s visibility or invisibility and how this may be bound up with either 'fluent' and 'domesticating' or 'resistant' and 'foreignizing' strategies of translation[i] – above all when faced with the 'mission impossible' of texts that present more or less insuperable challenges to the traditional goal of linguistic fidelity. The title of this special issue – “Translation Impossible” – intends to address these challenges and explore the interstitial and contradictory spaces between possibility and impossibility, success and failure, communicability and silence, in literary translation from and within South Asia. How does one find solutions to translating songs, proverbs, jokes, dialect, slang, and political rhetoric or allusions? How do we negotiate translation choices with a publisher whose main concern is the readability and saleability of translated literature? To aim at a straightforward kind of communicative 'fluency' can result in suppressing challenging or deviant textual elements altogether, which may be an ethically problematic approach with respect to the original aesthetic or political context.

The songs performed by the Bāuls of Bengal are characterized by a charmingly enigmatic language by which terms and practices related to the dimension of sexuality and ontogenesis are concealed under the veil of intriguing metaphors. While the orature of the Bāuls has been widely explored from the literary as well as the religious point of view, the question of the semantic reception of the songs has rarely been considered. The semantics of these songs concerns the fundamental opposition between man and woman, as the only unborn difference Bāuls acknowledge in human beings. The foundation of such a difference lies in the sexually active body. Although, for a meaningful practice of ritualized sexual encounter (yugala-sādhanā), male-female identities (svabhāb) have to be transcended, and male practitioners are recommended to adopt a feminine nature (nārī bhāb). This article will focus on the problem of the interpretation and understanding of Bāul songs revealing how a diverse typology of listeners or performers can differently explain the meaning of a song and its allegorical images related to the microcosmic body of the practitioner. The analysis of the interpretations of a selected sample of ‘songs of practice’ (sādhanā saṅgīt) composed by the saint-songwriter Bhaba Pagla (1902 – 1984) will show how the lyrics are understood and explained on different levels according to the social and religious background of the informant: a superficial, literal layer; a bhakti-oriented metaphysical layer; and an esoteric-Tantric layer, decoded and orally transmitted by living gurus. Combining the approach of the contextual theory of the study of folklore and verbal arts with the theories on the interpretation of metaphors and the semiotics of reception, I will try to show how different exegeses of the same songs – collected during an ethnographic investigation in the field – can at times encourage the institutionalization of a cult purified from its embarrassing ‘Tantric’ aspect or, in other cases, reinforce the system of beliefs about bodily fluids and sexuality of an esoteric community. The problem of the heterogeneity of oral interpretations and the polysemy of songs’ meanings will lead to a discussion on the politics of power that entangle emerging Bengali cults and their negotiation between universalism and esoteric secrecy., Kervan. International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies, No 21 (2017)