Translations of Shakespeare: his texts and theatre in Bangladesh

Abstract

Translation of Shakespeare has a long history in the region of Bengal. It began in 1809 when Charles Monckton, a student of Fort William College, translated a few excerpts from Tempest into Bangla. Since then, there have been many more attempts to translate Shakespeare into Bangla. Most translations were done either for stage performance out of the translators' passion for Shakespeare, who saw in such a venture a way of popularizing the great playwright among educated Bengalis. In this dissertation, I have discussed the background of the translations of Shakespeare done in this region, but focused on translations in the post- independent Bangladesh. The study is a comparative account of the translations of Macbeth- one by Syed Shamsul Haq and another by Mafize Choudhury- and Othello by Prof Munier chowdhury and Prof. Kabir Chowdhury. The theoretical framework of my study will be formed by the `communicative' and `semantic' theories of translation. The study also looks at the translated plays as theatre presentations undertaken by various theatre groups in Bangladesh with a brief discussion of the evolution of theatre activities in Bangladesh.