چکیده (انگلیسی):

This essay considers Rajiv Joseph’s play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and investigates how it features the complex
processes of translation by portraying a translator working in war-torn Iraq during the American occupation of the
country. Through an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s theories of mourning and translation, it illustrates how the playwright
connects translation both to eschatological thinking and to the capacity to speak to/for the dead; the play emphasizes
death and translation as in-between states where characters explore aspects of their lives they could not access when
alive, and develop skills that allow them to ‘translate’ themselves in different linguistic and cultural contexts. Through
an analysis of the translator as cultural hero and ‘stand-in’ for God, this essay equates translation with post-secular
theological inquiry, and looks at linguistic and cultural translations as acts of faith in which the emergence of the new
text is both always in the process of manifesting itself and always predicated on the ashes of the original.