WHILE literary creative output is a tangible entity regardless of its worth, the same is not true of creativity itself. It’s an absolute intangible and gives creative souls an aura that they share with none. And they share it with none simply because they themselves don’t quite understand the phenomenon in all its nuances, shades and hues.

Nobel Laureate and one of the most famous names in global literature in modern times, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for instance, called it an intuition of sorts. “When I have a feeling of something cooking inside and about to pass me by, I go very quiet so that I may grab it when and if it does.”

This act of having a feeling in the first place, grabbing the moment with precision, and then processing it into an art form together represent the element of craft in the overall scheme of literary finesse. The line between the art and the craft of writing has been a matter of much debate since time immemorial as it tends to get tricky every time someone tries to establish the primacy of one over the other.

Fan-e-Fiction Nigari, a three-volume set of translations done by Muhammad Umar Memon, is an attempt to bring the word from the proverbial horse’s mouth to the readers of Urdu. The collection comprises interviews of 30 leading names in global literature representing 23 countries. Most of these interviews originally appeared in The Paris Review which ran the series in search of some key questions related to the amazing world of high-class fiction.

How 30 leading writers from 23 countries perceive the art and craft of creativity makes for an interesting cerebral workout

Though the current volumes carry interviews done between 1954 and 2015, the bulk of them relate to the decades of 1980s and 1990s, which naturally represents the choice of the translator. He needs to be commended for including a range of writers who came from a variety of backgrounds and made it big on the world stage.

Done with great aplomb and creative energy, the translations are worth reading for the placid linguistic flair one finds in the three volumes. The narrative is so fluent that it is sometimes hard to remember that the interviews were not conducted in Urdu, and that people from Africa, Latin America and Europe don’t converse in our language. It is so lucid. Though Memon would not have planned it for any other purpose than to bring these gems to Urdu readers, his output itself is nothing short of a gem, a flawless response to those who bemoan the perceived shortcomings of the Urdu language.

Despite his fantastic and comprehensive grip on the language, Memon did come across serious difficulties in translating the thoughts of people from different cultures expressing themselves sometimes in their own languages, but mostly in English. In his preface to the second volume, Memon has talked about such difficulties, especially citing the interview of Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who loved wordplay — mostly homonyms and homographs — as a tool to stress his point.

Supplemented by his sharp wit, his replies to even ordinary questions can only be enjoyed in the original language. Translation to any other language will deprive it of the spontaneity and its impact. This, mind you, is true of ‘any’ language and is not specific to Urdu. Just one example would suffice. Asked if he would like to talk about his “work in progress”, Infante retorted, “To me, it looks more like a work in regress!”

Such things can obviously be translated — and Memon of course has done that — but the witty component generated by ‘progress’ and ‘regress’ will get lost in translation.

While translation of global fiction into Urdu has been an established and acknowledged norm for more than a century, what Memon has done is certainly a path less travelled. Literary interviews have not been very high on the agenda of journalists working in the field. The interviews generally revolve around the personalities rather than their creativity.

Raza Ali Abedi in his book Jaanay Pehchanay has written in much detail about what he says is the impossibility of work done in one language being effectively communicated in another. To his eternal credit, Memon, with his three volumes spread over almost a thousand pages, has proved Abedi wrong. And he has done that by some distance.

While translation of global fiction into Urdu has been an established and acknowledged norm for more than a century, what Memon has done is certainly a path less travelled. Literary interviews have not been very high on the agenda of journalists working in the field. The interviews generally revolve around the personalities rather than their creativity. Tahir Masood’s Ye Sooratgar Kuch Khawabon Ke is a much respected exception, but the rest have not been even half as good.

The volumes under reivew bring a whole new world to local readers who can have a firsthand taste of what the great writers of the world think about the process of creativity and how different they all are in approaching the process.

Unlike Marquez who said he could feel a wave building up inside, Simone de Beauvoir simply shrugs: “I don’t know what ‘imagination’ is. Ultimately it is nothing more than the attainment of a specific level of generalisation … Things that are beyond the realm of reality don’t fascinate me. Fantasy, to me, is not imagination, but a cunning innovation.”

American writer William Faulkner can be seen rejecting the very notion of craft within an art form. “If someone has any interest in technique, one should go adopt some profession like surgery or even masonry (which need technical skills). Writing is not a mechanical job. Period.”

Czech writer Milan Kundera provides the contrast, stressing the need for a three-pronged technique to writing a novel: architectonic clarity, counterpoint, and a creative narrative. Command over these three elements, according to him, is inevitable.

Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina downplays the whole process quite dramatically. “I think a poet has no more than five or six (original) poems. He keeps writing them with different angles and different characters in different periods, but the core material never crosses those five or six poems.”

The difference in how the writers practice their art is as intense as is the perception of creativity. Some like to make detailed notes about characters and storyline before they put pen to paper, others do it but find these notes useless once they start writing, and there is no dearth of those who just start writing.

Portuguese José Saramago, for instance, comes out as an interesting character when he says all he needs to get going is “that chill in the spine” without which he can’t write. “I do have a vague sketch in my mind, but that is it … you can’t have pre-arranged passages before you actually get there.” As he tries to explain it a little further, he goes rather philosophical, and Memon has captured it well. “If a story moves on a pre-determined path — if it is possible at all — the outcome would be an utter failure. The book will be forced to be there before actually being there. Books (stories) evolve as they move along. If I force a book to have a presence when it is not present, it will be an unnatural obstacle in the craft of storytelling.”

Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, among others, brings up the contrast by being clear in the head before going to bed about things he wants to write the next day. In defence of his preference, he says all writers without an exception suffer from the Proustian problem of involuntary memory which means the writer knows directly or indirectly what is going to be written and yet feels surprised as if it was not known at all.

Apparently, the riddle can be resolved not by individual interviews but through a dialogue between the two, but the fact remains that there can’t be any one-size-fits-all prescription. Individuality reigns supreme and even dictates the timings and ambience that suits one person but irritates the other.

De Beauvoir had no issues working at different locations at different time schedules, but Marquez could only work at a fixed schedule and in an atmosphere of known ambience. “I can’t write in hotel rooms or on borrowed typewriters … and the subject has to be of my own choice for there is nothing worse than having to write what you don’t want to.”

Italo Calvino, Italian writer and journalist, probably best summed up the eccentricity of the creative, narrating the fable of a Chinese artist who was commissioned by the emperor to paint a crab for his palace. The artist said he needed a palatial home, a mighty force of domestic servants and 10 years to do justice to the job. It was all provided immediately, but at the end of the decade, the artist said he wanted a couple of more years, and then an extra week. At the last moment, he picked up his brush and the palette, and within no time there appeared a crab on the canvas that the emperor found worth waiting for all those years.

The writers featured in the three volumes have their own individualities seeping through their articulations, but there is one running thread common among almost all — humility.

But the humility seen across the pages of the three volumes has nothing to do with fake modesty. Laced with an acute sense of self-respect and a wonderful sense of self-deprecating humour, it is of the most genuine and sincere variety. The manner in which the Nobel Prize has been downplayed, especially by the winners, is one such example. And some of the statements related to fame are downright hilarious.

The case of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante is arguably the most notable as far as aversion to fame is concerned. She has nine books to her credit since 1992, countless translations, two film scripts, and a horde of literary awards, but she remains unknown behind her pseudonym. In fact, her gender is no more than a calculated guess.

Interesting though it sounds, this aversion to fame and acknowledgement leads to some vital questions. Why do people write? What is the whole point of it? Do they want to create a better world?

Saramago leads the way among those who deny having any larger purpose to their writing. “I am a novelist. I write what I see around me. To change it is not my cup of tea. I can’t change it. I don’t even know how to change it. I can only talk about things that I want the world to have.”

Even Julio Cortázar, who was an Argentinian refugee in Paris and used his pen and his creativity on the basis of a politicised agenda, was not too keen on continuing with what he was doing. “If things could somehow change, I want to rest a little and then write the stories and the poems that I have always wanted to write; purely literary in nature, free of any agenda,” he said in the interview done back in 1984.

The last word on the matter shall fittingly go to his compatriot Borges. “I write not because I find my output particularly good, but simply because I can’t breathe without writing.” That’s a reason good enough.

The reviewer is a Dawn member of staff.

Fan-e-Fiction Nigari (Volumes I, II and III)
(INTERVIEWS)
By Muhammad Umar Memon
Maktaba-e-Daniyal, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9694190679
910pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 31st, 2016