Hepzhibah Israel / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / The Nature of Difference

24 Jun-30 Sep 2023

Overview

In the upper balcony of the Georgian Gallery, Hepzhibah Israel presents மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / The Nature of Difference, a series of twenty individual text works commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery and produced in collaboration with Fraser Muggeridge studio. Israel’s script moves between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, poetically exploring the nature of translation and what it is to navigate borders.

Hephzibah Israel is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her first and postgraduate degrees in English Literature were completed at the University of Delhi, India, where she also taught English literary studies for several years before moving to the UK. Hephzibah’s research explores the cultural history of South Asia through the lens of translation and language use in literary and religious contexts. She studies the encounters between writers and translators across religious traditions in colonial and contemporary South Asia. She loves translating as much as she enjoys teaching and talking about translation and its effects. She has authored Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation and the Making of Protestant Identity (2011) and has edited the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion (2023). She has collaborated on several research projects, from conversion accounts written and translated in colonial South Asia to the presence (and futures?) of colonial monuments in European and colonial public spaces.