Translation of “Dimensions” by Alice Munro

Abstract

Canadian author Alice Munro is known as the ―master of contemporary the short story‖ (Wikipedia). She is the creator of contemporary short stories and has changed the definition of short story. Known as ―Canadian Chekhov‖ Munro won many literary awards including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.She won Canada’s Governor General’s award thrice in her life and received Man Booker Prize in 2009.Despite all these literary accolades her stories are not widely read, at least in Bangladesh. Therefore, I felt an urge to translate one of her stories in Bengali for Bangladeshi readers while I was reading the stories of Alice Munro. I have translated ―Dimensions‖ to represent one of her stories to Bengali readers. ―Dimensions‖ was first published in The New Yorker on June 5, 2006. The story is about a young woman Doree, who was always dominated by her husband and was unable to explore her individual identity, but who moves towards emancipation in an epiphanic moment. I read quite a few Munro’s stories and after thinking of translating few other stories, finally decided to translate ―Dimensions‖. Since most of Munro’s stories are set in south-western Ontario where she was born, the setting is quite different from Bangladesh. Cultural, religious and geographical aspects of Munro’s stories may sometimes make them quite incomprehensible to Bengali readers. So I was looking for something which, if not culturally relevant, is at least thematically familiar or universal. By ―universal‖ I did not mean common, but something which has the power to move people. I think ―Dimensions‖, in any language, has the power to move readers. In the following pages, I will briefly discuss the life of Alice Munro and the nature of her stories, in addition with a commentary of my own translating experience of this story through examples.