Translation of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Abstract

This dissertation offers a Bangla translation of the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by the American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story was originally published in 1892 and became a best-seller later. The story is about a woman who suffers from mental illness after three months of confinement in a home, where she has to stare at the same revolting yellow wallpaper. Gilman, herself a sociologist and a reformer, wrote the story from a need to change people’s mind about women’s role in Victorian society, where the lack of autonomy proved be a barrier to women’s mental, emotional and even physical health. It has been a pleasure for me to translate this short story mostly because I am a woman and reading the story made me feel I could understand her predicament fully even though I, myself, have never gone through such an experience. I loved her writing style, her deceptively simple prose structure and I, never once, felt I was reading a story that was written more than a hundred years ago. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was that extraordinary, she was born and lived in the 19th century yet was that forward thinking. The way she so skillfully depicted the psychological turmoil of the main character, I felt the need to translate the story into Bangla. In the following pages, I shall try to introduce Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wallpaper to readers along with a brief narration of my own experience of translating this exceptional short story.