SOURCE: “Spaces of Translation: Bharati Mukherjee's ‘The Management of Grief,’” in Ariel: A Review of International English, Vol. 28, No. 3, July 1997, pp. 47-60.

In the following essay, Bowen explores how in “The Management of Grief” grief becomes a “complex force for change, cultural resistance, and moral choice.”

The word “translation” comes, etymologically, from the Latin for “bearing across.” Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands

In the final article of the special January 1995 issue of PMLA on “Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition,” Satya Mohanty observes that “vital cross-cultural interchange depends on the belief that we share a ‘world’ (no matter how partially) with the other culture, a world whose causal relevance is not purely intracultural” (114). There are occasions on...