BETWEEN FIDELITY AND FOREIGNNESS: SOCIO-CULTURAL AND RHETORICAL CHALLENGES IN REBECCA WHITTINGTON’S ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF JIBANANANDA DAS’S MALLOBAN

The endeavour of rendering such a profound and culturally layered text presents considerable difficulties, as it necessitates the precarious equilibrium of retaining the spirit of the source text while simultaneously making it comprehensible to a new linguistic and cultural milieu.

In the course of this undertaking, the interpreter, whose primary language is American English, is compelled to negotiate between domestication and exoticism, thereby generating lexical, semiotic, and syntactic divergences in her version of the source language text. This paper endeavours to evaluate the fidelity of the rendition to the original composition while scrutinising the interpreter’s decisions in capturing the intricate wordplay, idiomatic expressions, metaphors, and narrative nuances that are distinguishing features of Jibanananda Das’s literary craft.