Musharraf Ali Farooqi – File Photo/Herald

“Have you secured a grant to do the translation?”

I hadn’t. Foolishly, it hadn’t occurred to me.

“Do you at least have a publisher?” he asked next.

There was no publisher either. I reported the fact truthfully.

Here was one of the most important works of Indo-Islamic literature, one of my favourite childhood reads, and it had never been translated into English in its full ornate glory. Upon discovering that all I had done was trace the original MS in the British Library, obtain a microfilm, print out the images and get down to translating it. I had foreseen complications: the problems of translating the highly Persianised language, the fact that I did not have a good collection of dictionaries at home to aid my work, not to forget the burden of translating it while working on my own writing projects and trying to balance it with the odd jobs I did in the interim, but applying for a grant to do the translation or securing a publisher were not one of them. Here I wish to reiterate, and forcefully, that I like free money as much as the next person, and would gladly have accepted it had it been offered me but making the translation dependent on its availability lay as completely outside the bounds of  my comprehension then as it does today. So, whence came the motivation? Perhaps from the silly notion that some publisher will be found for it in the end, and upon its eventual publication I would become the hero of my generation of Dastan-e Amir Hamza nerds. That about sums up the evil plan under which I laboured while translating approximately a thousand pages. I am sure that some such mad streak guides everyone who ventures to translate any literary work of more than fifty pages in length.

Providence looks after madmen, I’m sure. From the first publication of a chapter from The Adventures of Amir Hamza in the Annual of Urdu Studies to its subsequent publication by the Random House Modern Library in 2007, The Adventures of Amir Hamza attracted positive critical attention and has been a publishing success. In the meanwhile I wrote two novels, a children’s picture book and a collection of children’s tales, but I remained simultaneously involved with translations. My ongoing project is the multi-volume Tilism-e Hoshruba (1883-1893) by Syed Muhammad Husain Jah and Ahmed Husain Qamar, to be published in 24 volumes, of which the first volume came out in 2009. The hugely important work of contemporary Urdu poet Afzal Ahmed Syed, which I first began translating in the early 1990s was published in a selection, Rococo and Other Worlds, by the Wesleyan University Press Poetry Series in 2010. The novella Numberdar Ka Neela by Syed Muhammad Ashraf was published as The Beast by Tranquebar/Westland Books in 2010. A great personal favourite is Nazeer Akbarabadi’s poem Choohon Ka Achaar which my wife Michelle later put into rhyme and meter. As the name suggests, Mouse Pickle is meant only for people with highly discriminating literary tastes.

The process of translation often led to strange directions. These unstructured and haphazard journeys which usually began from searching for a word in the dictionary, and ranged from the exploration of the occult arts in Islam to the history of the subcontinent to the poetics of the Urdu dastan genre, were not only rewarding in themselves, but I also drew upon them in my own fiction. My initial feeling that perhaps I should be working on my own writing projects instead of translating others’ works passed away when I realized that I was spending my time discovering and researching subjects and themes which I wished to employ in my own fiction.

The Beast - File Photo/Herald

There were times when, doing research on a translation project, I found purely by accident some material for use in my fiction for which I had fruitlessly searched until then. I discovered one important research source for my forthcoming novel about the wrestling culture, Between Clay and Dust, while hunting for a dastan volume in the dimly lit stacks of the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library. The book Dastan-e Shehzoran did not belong to the dastan genre. It was a history of wrestling in the subcontinent. By a cataloging oversight it was put in the same stacks as the dastans because that word occurred in its title.

The learning opportunities that the translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza offered me were immense. And that door lies wide open. The Adventures of Amir Hamza is certainly not the only great work of Urdu classical literature or the dastan genre. For those who wish to explore the repertoire of Urdu classical texts, the single most important source is Urdu Ki Nasri Dastanen by Gyan Chand Jain which lists or provides details of almost every major Urdu classical work in both poetry and prose.

Translation is often hard work and training is an ‘on-the-job’ affair. One can begin with either “popular” or “literary” works. The recent translations of Ibn-e Safi’s popular series Imran Series and Jassoosi Duniya by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and Bilal Tanweer are initial experiments in this direction. Taimoor Shahid Khan’s forthcoming translations of Ibn-e Safi will be another addition to this collection.

When translating “popular” literature one inevitably runs into problems in one area: The institution of editing does not exist in Urdu. All writing is published “as found”. There is a certain informality in the Urdu vernacular which is freely employed in popular literature and coupled with the “as found” approach to editing can prove a small nightmare for a translator. But these small nightmares can still teach a lot and are great learning opportunities in the use of language and creative editing.

Those who wish to pursue “literary” writers may still run into such editing issues but their work has been made easy by other translators before them. To acquaint oneself with the ‘idiom of translation’ from contemporary Urdu into English, one would do well to study the large number of authorized translations of short stories and novellas done by Urdu scholar and academic Muhammad Umar Memon whose contribution and devotion to the translation of  Urdu literature remains unparalleled and who has provided fine examples of literary translations leaving out hardly any major contemporary Urdu writer. His academic journal Annual of Urdu Studies continues to publish translated works from the Urdu.

Urdu literary magazines are a great introduction to the young and fresh voices in Urdu. One can observe there a constant process of experimentation in language and expression. Short story writer Ali Akbar Natiq, one of Urdu’s most important new voices, and Muhammad Khalid Toor who is the most important newly rediscovered voice have been introduced by Urdu literary magazines.

Such being the rich translation prospects in various genres, who will be the future translators of this diverse and important body of literature? I would like to think that in the coming years these works will find translators among the young  Pakistani writers who aspire to write in English. Besides reading, translation is the best training for a writer. Those interested in writing about Pakistan and its culture must surely have an interest in the literature written in its cultural languages. When they mine it, they are certain to find things they would wish to share with those outside their culture. I put my money on it.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author, novelist and translator. His new novels Between Clay and Dust and Tik-Tik, The Master of Time are forthcoming. His website is: www.mafarooqi.com

The Herald is Pakistan’s premier current affairs magazine published by the Dawn Media Group every month from Karachi.