Читать книгу Making Kantha, Making Home - Pika Ghosh - Страница 9

Spelling Bengali words in English is vexing because Bengali has no standardized ways of transliterating, perhaps with good reason, as it is not only a Sanskritic vernacular, but one amply filled out with Persian, Arabic Turkish, English, Portuguese, and even a handful of Danish terms over the past centuries. I have avoided the standard Sanskrit system of transliteration with diacritics in order to try to retain the flavor of the local Bengali and to keep the text accessible to a larger audience. To that end, I am inclined to use the Bengali version ashon (seat/mat) rather than follow the typical Sanskrit version, āsana. However, I have also refrained from transcribing Bengali pronunciation into English with precision, as it can become unfamiliar, even to Bengali readers. (The three sibilant sounds ś, , s are pronounced as sh, and the dental v is absent.) Instead, for the sake of approachability, I have used my judgment to choose the most familiar form in which a word occurs across both the scholarly literature in English and more popular English language materials such as periodicals and magazines. Unfortunately, this has the disadvantage of significant inconsistency. Rather than the Sanskrit rāsalīlā, or the more phonetically precise Bengali version, raashleela, I have opted to remove diacritics from the Sanskrit version as the word is shared across Sanskrit and Bengali literature and the Hindi and Bengali speaking belt of north India today. However, I have used Raashsundari, rather than the Sanskrit transliteration (Rāsasundarī) or the Bengali (Raashshundari), to be consistent with the main translator of this woman’s work into English.

Place names for cities, towns, villages and districts are standardized in accordance with current popular usage, for example, Braj for Vraja or Braja and Brindaban for Vrindavan. However, I use Calcutta for the most part to refer to the colonial period of the history of the city, and Kolkata for the recent past decade, recognizing the change of its name at the governmental level.

Non-English terms are explained in the context that they appear, glossed parenthetically in the body of the text at first use.

All translations from Bengali into English are mine, unless otherwise noted.