Translating Ismat Chughtai’s work is a task fraught with danger, writes Tahira Naqvi. It's not just the story that needs retelling; her work carries a certain mood, a tempo and essence that cannot be put into words.
In a letter she wrote to me in response to my translation of her story ‘Do Haath’, Ismat Chughtai said, “Translating from Urdu to English is a very difficult task. There are great differences between languages. If you are satisfied, that is enough.” I had hoped, perhaps somewhat optimistically and also because I had just begun the Ismat translations and did not know the author as well as I do now, that she would give me an opinion of my work or, to be more honest, an endorsement.
Of course, I realised then and I know now that although she was happy to see her work translated and subsequently made available to a larger audience, especially a Western audience, the concept of translation, of making the leap from Urdu to English, distressed her, even if this may not have been the case when she began writing. In an early prose piece I translated recently, she says she would like to see her work translated because, “one gets more money for an English version…Ahmed Ali got me four pounds for one of my translated stories.” At that time, the consideration—as with all young writers—was to make a living first, but now, having done her best work and established herself as a doyen of Urdu fiction, she could be utterly honest.
The “distances” she mentioned in her letter have been all too obvious to me in the course of my travails as a translator of Urdu fiction, particularly Ismat’s fiction. She presents challenges that most other writers I have translated do not. Diction is one area where I have felt the need for the greatest scrutiny and attention. On the one hand, we see a distinctive, multi-layered language that includes the refined polite vernacular with its picturesque figures of speech often referred to as “begumati”—used by middle-class women, begums, in the households of the Urdu speaking-community—while on the other, laced with a specific brand of dynamic and colorful idiom, is the everyday speech patterns of the working-class and servant-class women who crowd her narratives.
One encounters in her stories a vibrant and robust flavour deeply ingrained in her language that must be dealt with adequately if the translation is to have any real merit. In effect, there is not just a story that requires retelling; there is also the question of metaphor and figure of speech that has to be grappled with.
Subsequently, one encounters in her stories a vibrant and robust flavour deeply ingrained in her language that must be dealt with adequately if the translation is to have any real merit. In effect, there is not just a story that requires retelling; there is also the question of metaphor and figure of speech that has to be grappled with. As every translator knows, a metaphor that is alive and well in one language can be dead on arrival in another. In addition, the work in the original carries a certain mood, a tempo and a particular essence that is not reductive and cannot be put into words. As the writer Krishan Chander puts it,
There is one more thing [Chughtai’s] afsaana makes us think of: a horse race. That is, swiftness, movement, speed, alacrity. Not only does the afsaana appear to be running, but the sentences, symbols and metaphors, voices and characters and emotions and feelings seem to be springing and moving forward with the speed of a storm.
For those of us who are familiar with Urdu and Hindi here’s an example from the opening paragraph in the novella Ziddi. The entire paragraph (please see original), could be summed in two sentences in English:
It was raining heavily. Deluged, the houses had collapsed and people were taking refuge under the trees, which, not made of stone, provided little protection.
That would serve narration, but not style or mood, nor would it convey Ismat the writer to the reader. So the translator plods through some very formidable idiom, tone, figures of speech, similes and tackles diction that has no equivalents in English at all. As Raja Rao writes in the foreword of Kanthapura, “One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language.” That is not easy, and a translator is inevitably faced with the temptation to smooth over, to “gloss” to use Griffith’s term, to explain, embellish, or omit.
You can continue to abbreviate and simplify in an effort to achieve idiomatic accuracy and very soon Ismat is no longer recognisable as herself. The “spirit” Raja Rao talks about is diminished, sometimes altogether lost, and the translated work is a shell.
Editors and publishers, here and in India, are still looking for smooth translations, demanding idiomatic English, searching for equivalents of Urdu lexicon and syntax in Standard English, mistaking smoothness for authenticity, for quality. In the case of Ismat, you can continue to abbreviate and simplify in an effort to achieve idiomatic accuracy and very soon Ismat is no longer recognisable as herself. The “spirit” Raja Rao talks about is diminished, sometimes altogether lost, and the translated work is a shell. Using the above paragraph from Ismat’s novella, I will show my own attempts at holding on to this “spirit”.
Rain fell with unflagging tenacity. The sky seemed to have developed holes, but was it any wonder really that having been stretched taut for this long it rots and disintegrates and develops holes? Many nights it rained and it had been raining since early morning today. Heavily, as if oceans of water were being hurled with great force at the earth. The foundations of the walls had succumbed to the impact of the water and had collapsed. The roofs swung from the weight of the bamboo poles and rafters like wet beards, and the owners of the houses huddled under the trees. But it was as if the water was toying with them. And the trees were not canopies of stone, so why should they prevent water from ripping through the leaves and falling upon their heads? But it didn’t matter because it was as if someone was gathering up handfuls of water and flinging it up from the base of the trees as well. The uproar of the drains was adding to the feeling of apprehension and then, night was advancing. Darkness, ominous and total, was thickening. The gutters were rapidly collapsing.
When a work travels from Urdu to English and takes up residence there, it must bring something of itself along, something more than just the machinations of plot. It must, of necessity, transport with it its texture, sounds and rhythms, its cultural burdens, a process that, much like writing in English by those for whom English is a second language, “creates two audiences and faces two directions…through an act of writing which uses the tools of one culture or society and yet seeks to remain faithful to the experience of another” (Griffith). The sky as a metaphor for God, the similies and analogies that abound, the figures of speech that create the sense of hopelessness and also bind the reader to the place itself in a geographical and cultural sense—the act of translation has to take into account all of these with the greatest care and precision.
Using some models from the new trends in post-colonial writing and taking into account syncrecy—“a process by which previously linguistic categories, and by extension, cultural formations, merge into a new single form”—we must review and reform the ways in which we have handled translation until now. This is old hat, but we need to bring it into any discussion of translation to make a point. English is no longer just the language of England and hasn’t been that for ages. So, as Ashcroft argues, “We need to distinguish between what’s proposed as a standard code, English, and the linguistic code, english, which has been transformed and subverted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world.”
There is mounting evidence that translators and writers alike are allowing the “spirit that is one’s own” to permeate the language “that is not one’s own.” As a matter of fact, by so doing we are actually colonising a text.
We can call it whatever we like—we can call it English still—but there is mounting evidence that translators and writers alike are allowing the “spirit that is one’s own” to permeate the language “that is not one’s own.” As a matter of fact, by so doing we are actually colonising a text. We enter the world of the text, and how we colonise it will make us a failure or a success at what we do. I view it as an act of colonisation indeed, but one where the translator as coloniser treads softly, noiselessly, so that he or she can see clearly and hear all, and then, in trying to make the text his or her own, become one with it.
Of the many schools of thought where translation is concerned, the most popular one demands near-perfect syntax and a smoothness that will make the reader forget the work is a translation. The other school, to which I subscribe, wants the reader to always remember that the text is a translation: colonised indeed, but not trampled upon, rid of its metaphorical and allegorical landmarks, its culture-specific figures of idiom and vernacular. In the past, I did not worry about any of these explanations, but as Ismat is being read widely, questions like these have arisen and need to be tackled. I cannot cut, omit, summarise or re-invent any portion of her work, a phenomenon that some translators undertake freely and many publishers feel have the prerogative to do. I am at odds with this practice for I do not feel I have the liberty to tamper with a writer’s work. I can hear her voice: “Ai ladki, yeh meri kahani hai, teri nahin, kaat-phaant ki ijazat kis ne di? [Girl, this story is mine, not yours. Who gave you permission to cut and take out?]”
I agree with Walter Benjamin when he says that the “task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.” Hence, the purpose of translation is not to conceal the soul of the original, and in Benjamin’s words, “to say that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language.” He argues further that “the significance of fidelity as ensured by literalness is that the work reflects the great longing for linguistic complementation” and “allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium to shine upon the original all the more fully.” Here, I would like to take you back to the Chughtai paragraph. What I have tried to achieve is, again, best expressed by Walter Benjamin: “a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.”
Works Cited
- Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1993). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. New York: Routledge.
- Benjamin, Walter (2000). The Task of the Translator. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
- Chander, Krishan (1992). Bala Khezi (Leaping). In Chughtai, I.: Chotein. Lahore: Rohtas Books.
- Chughtai, Ismat (1992). Ziddi (The Stubborn One). Lahore: Rohtas Books.
- Rao, Raja (1970). Kanthapura. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks.
