NEHU to organise National seminar on translating contemporary Indian drama

Dimapur, Sep. 28 (EMN): Sahitya Akademi, India’s premier literary institution, in collaboration with the Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong will be organising a daylong seminar on ‘Translating contemporary Indian drama’ at the NEHU premises on Saturday, 30 Sep. 2017 from 10 a.m. It is informed in a press note that, translation studies and drama studies are expansive fields of study in the global as well as Indian literary contexts. However most of the experiments and scholarly endeavours on the above fields have not really combined their inherent potentials to support each other. Hence most of the Translation Studies scholarship derive their models of translation from genres like fiction, prose or poetry and do not cater to the performance potential or performative dimension of drama. For an instance, a play that needs to be translated is almost a transcribed play, where its musical, spectacular, and other cultural, performative elements need to be culturally transmitted / translated / trancreated – an attempt which does not gain support from translation studies criticism, which as Susan Bassnett says should focus on the linguistic or the extra-linguistic potential of translating a play rather than its ‘performability’. It is in the above context that the ‘National Seminar on Translating Contemporary Indian Drama’ becomes relevant. The invited speakers will be speaking about and sharing their experience of translating drama and also performing theatre in the context of translation. Prof. H.S.Shivaprakash (Eminent Kannada playwright), Dilip Kumar basu (noted theatre artist), Debashis Majumdar (veteran playwright / director from West Bengal), Atamjit Singh (renowned Punjabi playwright), Mangai (theatre director from Chennai), Chandradasan (charismatic artistic director of Lokhadarmi, a Kochi based theatre centre), Chandrakant Patil (a significant Marathi poet translator) are some of the notable theatre personalities. The other notable speakers are Srinivas Denchanala (Hyderabad based theatre director), Maitreyi Karnoor (poet, translator and freelancer), Y. Sadanand Singh, Prof. Esther Syiem, Prof. J.Prodhani and Prof. Mala Renganathan from the Department of English, NEHU, Shillong. The Seminar hopes to encourage more efforts on drama translation and enhance a healthy debate on the translation criticism and translation of theatre as a potential field of activity and research, it added.