The purpose of the book The Stories from the Past is to create diversion in the minds of the children and to give them some moral instructions. The stories are not just loose plots or simply moralistic in approaches but those are thought-provoking anecdotes that will definitely stimulate the minds of the children and such healthy stimulation will create positive thoughts in their minds.
Sukumar Ray's dramatic works are also humorous like his stories. School children usually perform his dramatic works on different occasions in Bengali medium schools. Due to laughter producing quality, his texts are still popular among children. And the performance of these dramas makes the audience roll on the floor. This is a translation of Ray's Jhalapala. This text exclusively points out different aspects of teaching and learning. Panditmashay's activities, speech, and manners are amusing. Anyone will laugh loudly looking at him on the stage. His two legendary students Keshta and Ghatiram add extra fuel to the laughter with their nonsense activities. Two other characters, Kheturam and Duliram are busy pleasing the landlord so that they can stay at the landlord's household. Panditmashay's tendency is also the same. On the other hand, Ramkanai the servant of the landlord harasses all these people for their nuisance but they are shameless. The parasite-like behaviour has been well presented and criticised. However, for the children, Sukumar Ray's Jhalapala is a gift. This translation aims at maintaining the dramatic quality of the original text. It also aims at retaining humorous content as much as possible. This work is like Ray's other works, such as Abol Tabol, Pagla Dashu, Ha-ja-ba-ra-la etc.
The translation which is called in Bengali anuvada is the substitution of the Source Language text's materials with the probable equivalent TL (Target Language) materials. The target language may be the same language i.e. Source Language or any other language. When the translation takes place between two different languages then it is called proper translation. The translation is not an easy task as it entails so many things such as meaning, style, structure, context, time, linguistic issues, and so on. While translating a text the translator has to keep in mind various linguistic issues of both languages (SL & TL). It is a challenging matter to find out suitable equivalent material for any text in another language. A language is not just a language, it is the medium of expression of human beings and that's why it is complex enough. A language is a codified format that entails verbal, non-verbal (gestures), and graphological codes. So language is the codified expression of human beings that comes from the human heart and this human heart captures everything of the society. While we are speaking or making conversation, various factors of society influence our conversation and the same is the case in our writings too. So a written text contains so many factors! And these factors vary from place to place, community to community, culture to culture, time to time, etc. Translation, being a bilingual process entails all these issues to a great extent and it is a challenge to transfer or incorporate the meaning from one set to another one maintaining all these factors. In most cases, the translator incorporates the SL text's meaning into the TL as much as possible going through all these factors, overcoming all the challenges as much as possible.
Sukumar Roy's rhymes, plays, and stories are well-read by Bengali children. Roy's writing easily captures young and immature minds with its attractive content. The witty and laughter-producing simple presentation makes these texts digestible to the children. During my childhood, I also had a fascination with Sukumar Roy's texts. I think due to this attractive quality he is still popular among Bengali children. Humour is an omnipresent force almost in all of his texts-prose or poetry, and he is an expert in embedding humour in different ways. The content itself is humorous side by side the diction and sentence formation are also strikingly laughter-producing. The wordplay has given an extra point in the production of humorous situation. The play or drama translation is challenging like poetry, sometimes more challenging than poetry as during the translation of drama or play a translator has to handle different things such as content, dialogue, stage direction, etc. If the play contains too many humorous entities then it becomes too much challenging to translate. The play is always a live text; it is not a text like a novel or poetry that is meant for reading only. A play is for acting, so it is a very much complex issue to make a translation that is worthy of stage production. The quality of a play depends on how much it can stimulate the audience, and how much it can build up different emotions in the audience.
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