Dr. Munia Bhaumik: Translating Tagore in Latin America
Thursday, March 17, 2022 4:00 pm – 5:15 pm CET/GMT+1A Global Modernisms Lecture
During the first half of the twentieth century, an epochal period defined by two world wars, fascism, and the British empire’s disintegration, a set of intertextual lyric routes circulate between Bengali, Spanish, and Portuguese-language poets (although none of them could read the other’s poetry in the original language). These “lyric routes” between the peripheral but high modernist metropoles of Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Havana, Mexico City, and Santiago are pivotal in reshaping key aesthetic debates and poetic experiments reflexively cognizant of the limits of European discourses of Westphalia and “civilization.” Moreover, the often playful translations of verse from a previous translation, rather than the language of the original text, render new poetic forms and philosophies of language for critical concern.
This lecture focuses on the specter of Rabindranath Tagore’s verse and celebrity in Latin America during a pivotal moment of world decolonization during the interwar period. As intellectual, art, and literary historians demonstrate, not just Tagore’s Nobel Prize recognized oeuvre and prose-poem Gitanjali, but a number of earlier writings, dramatic plays, doodles, and paintings come to yield enormous influence on major Latin American poets, philosophers, and intellectuals. Yet the translations and incorporations of Tagore’s poetic-philosophy by Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Jose Lezama Lima, Victoria Ocampo, and (eventually) Octavio Paz are not mere passive translations but offer a critical reservoir of lyric transculturation registering a specifically modernist disenchantment with European modernity. At stake in this comparative framing is not just a story of reception between South Asia and Latin America, but critical reconfigurations of the political ideals of universality as world-making through poesis.
Munia Bhaumik is the Program Director of Mellon Social Justice Curricular Initiatives at the University of California, Los Angeles and an award-winning scholar of comparative literature, politics, and law. Her research and teaching critiques racial and gender inequities as well as the multiple social factors impacting whose lives count before the law. Dr. Bhaumik received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley before joining the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta where she engaged with new Asian/Latinx immigrant and African American community voting rights alliances in the South, while also developing a vibrant undergraduate degree program in comparative literature and critical theory. Based on her research about noncitizens as the “uncounted,” data and democracy, as well as on poetry as political action across the Global South, she received the prestigious Stanford Humanities Center, Herman Melville Society, and Cornell Society for the Humanities faculty awards. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Bhaumik also spent a decade as a primarily Spanish-speaking labor/community organizer on the staff of leading progressive organizations in Los Angeles shaping national debates about social justice through direct action. Equally motivated by the humanities as by social movements, particularly the ethical dilemmas communities-of-color are mobilizing in this global (post)metropolis, her work brings to attention research protocols in alliance with the demands for abolition and noncitizen citizenship as well as multilingual, queer, migrant, worker, healthcare, and Black equal rights.
This is the third lecture in the Global Modernisms lecture series. Global Modernisms is a collaboration among OSUN institutions that focuses on modernism’s transnational exchange, aiming to open up the modernist canon and integrate approaches to teaching and research on modernism.
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