From London to Bombay: On the Repatriation of Fanny Hill

John Cleland's novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill) is a classic of eighteenth-century English erotica. This article contains a brief discussion of some of the linguistic and stylistic decisions taken by the author in his Marathi translation of the novel. These decisions are dictated by a confluence of factors, namely, the historical influence of English on the syntactic structure of Marathi, the peculiarities of Marathi grammatical genders in sexual contexts, and the challenges involved in carrying out a cross-cultural transportation of the sacrilegious elements in Cleland's novel.