Creative Writing as the translation/transmission of voice and emotion

Résumé En

Whatever form it takes, creative writing always promotes transmission: political messages are spread, emotions are voiced, futures are imagined, entire universes are set into motion and transferred from a writer’s mind onto the page to be shared with an audience. In that sense, creative writing is quite similar to translation: both are ways to make words available to an audience who could otherwise not access them. While translation means learning the words, codes, references, emotions and sensations of another language, creative writing can be viewed as the transmission of emotions, sensations, of the invisible imagination and thoughts: it is a translation of the non-verbal into verbal form. Like translation, creative writing thus creates connections. Words become an ensemble of parts that allow messages or ideas to cross the distance between people and peoples: creative writing therefore facilitates communication, understanding, and empathy, while it can also give a voice to people who are often not given a chance to speak: the subaltern, women, the poor, the disabled, or children. In this paper, I would therefore like to explore some of the relations between transmission, translation and creative writing, focusing especially on the English translation of Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Pterodactyl.” Mahasweta Devi’s writing indeed forms a complex web of transmission through which a Bengali author writes in Bengali about the experience of the subaltern, using the highly metaphorical story of an extinct species to translate that experience into writing and make it available to readers, only to then be translated into the language of those who once dominated the country to make the experience of domination accessible to a broader audience.