Overview

Can the subaltern joke? Christi A. Merrill answers by invoking riddling, oral-based fictions from Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu that dare to laugh at what traditions often keep hidden-whether spouse abuse, ethnic violence, or the uncertain legacies of a divinely wrought sex change. Herself a skilled translator, Merrill uses these examples to investigate the expectation that translated work should allow the non-English-speaking subaltern to speak directly to the English-speaking reader. She plays with the trope of speaking to argue against treating a translated text as property, as a singular material object to be carried across(as trans-latus implies.) She refigures translation as a performative telling in turn, from the Hindi word anuvad, to explain how a text might be multiply possessed. She thereby challenges the distinction between originaland derivative, fundamental to nationalist and literary discourse, humoring our melancholic fixation on what is lost. Instead, she offers strategies for playing along with the subversive wit found in translated texts. Sly jokes and spirited double entendres, she suggests, require equally spirited double hearings.The playful lessons offered by these narratives provide insight into the networks of transnational relations connecting us across a sea of differences. Generations of multilingual audiences in India have been navigating this Ocean of the Stream of Storiessince before the 11th century, arriving at a fluid sense of commonality across languages. Salman Rushdie is not the first to pose crucial questions of belonging by telling a version of this narrative: the work of non-English-language writers like Vijay Dan Detha, whose tales are at the core of this book, asks what responsibilities we have to make the rights and wrongs of these fictions come alive age after age.

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Explores humor, sexual politics, and other aspects of storytelling in India in the Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu traditions. Christi Merrill's Riddles of Belonging queries practices of translation, interpretation and criticism across cultural worlds -- persistently, affectionately, unflinchingly, and with clarity of vision. Infused with her love of word play in all its beauty, humor and potency - and exposing the ways expressive language may be equally political language -- Merrill's radiant prose reveals dark, fraught power discrepancies while simultaneously offering gleaming literary delights.-Ann Grodzins Gold Resourcefully inventive, ever willing to experiment, Christi Merrill mixes literary history with personal anecdote, theoretical speculation with a narrative of her translation process, detailed analyses of original compositions with equally close readings of translations. Yet she is never less than acutely self-conscious of her status as a North American academic working with Indian cultures. Her book is a shrewd intervention into the contemporary US academy, where the hegemony of identity politics risks reducing the study of cultural differences to ideological critique, if not utter victimology. She shows that, on the contrary, it is possible to acknowledge the inevitably transformative dimension of studying and translating foreign cultures in ways that are sophisticated and witty without a hand-wringing abandonment of the possibilities for intercultural communication.-Lawrence Venuti

Explores humor, sexual politics, and other aspects of storytelling in India in the Hindi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, and Urdu traditions. Christi Merrill's Riddles of Belonging queries practices of translation, interpretation and criticism across cultural worlds -- persistently, affectionately, unflinchingly, and with clarity of vision. Infused with her love of word play in all its beauty, humor and potency - and exposing the ways expressive language may be equally political language -- Merrill's radiant prose reveals dark, fraught power discrepancies while simultaneously offering gleaming literary delights.-Ann Grodzins Gold Resourcefully inventive, ever willing to experiment, Christi Merrill mixes literary history with personal anecdote, theoretical speculation with a narrative of her translation process, detailed analyses of original compositions with equally close readings of translations. Yet she is never less than acutely self-conscious of her status as a North American academic working with Indian cultures. Her book is a shrewd intervention into the contemporary US academy, where the hegemony of identity politics risks reducing the study of cultural differences to ideological critique, if not utter victimology. She shows that, on the contrary, it is possible to acknowledge the inevitably transformative dimension of studying and translating foreign cultures in ways that are sophisticated and witty without a hand-wringing abandonment of the possibilities for intercultural communication.-Lawrence Venuti

Author Information

Christi A. Merrill is Associate Professor of South Asian Literature and Postcolonial Theory at the University of Michigan. Her book on translating Detha's stories, Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession, was published by Fordham University Press in 2009.

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