Crossing Borders and Challenging Rules. Challenges in translating Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi Novel Ret Samādhi

This article highlights the subversive use of the Hindi language in Geetanjali Shree’s writing, which creates an experimental, fragmented and dreamlike narrative, full of language games and invented words, with a constant play on the Hindi/Urdu lexicon. Ret Samādhi is a novel about the permeability of borders – between countries, religions, genders, languages, ages, life and death – so it also transcends language barriers. The melodic curve of the sentence, which largely depends on the use (or non-use) of written punctuation and other stylistic strategies, allows for the deconstruction of all identities, linguistic-cultural and religious. Through examples of Geetanjali Shree’s ‘difficult’ ‘ungrammatical’ ‘disobedient’ language, I discuss some challenges related to the task of translating this polymorphous language into Italian, comparing the different translation strategies and choices in the English and French translations that were available at the time of the Italian translation.