When I arrived in Karachi in early December 2010, the International Urdu Conference was into its second day. The next morning I attended the first session of the day on Urdu fiction. It was a novel experience. Panelists came and enlightened us with 10-minute speeches, some with 10-minute harangues. In my naiveté I was expecting cogently argued papers. I decided to leave. Outside the auditorium someone accosted and informed me that TV Channel One wanted to interview me for their programme ‘The Book Club.’ Well, why not? Everyone needs moments of comic relief, especially after the surfeit of wisdom in the session I had just attended. The TV personnel had set up their cameras, reflectors, cables and what not under the glaring sun on a platform used as a stage for open-air events at the back of the Arts Council building. Masud Ashar and the ubiquitous Grand-Old-Man-of-Everything-Urdu, Intizar Husain, were already ensconced snugly in their seats, fanning away the pesky flies.

During a roughly hour-long interview we were presented with a number of questions which, I believe, bear repeating — their answers, no less. Has the primacy of fiction, especially the novel, in the West, and debates about it, generated any comparable discussion of the issues among Urdu literati? Masud Ashar: “Not much!” He made two points in this connection: (1) we access world literature through English translation, and (2) even English translations are sometimes found to be incorrect. He supported his claim by mentioning seven translations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and several of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Although he did admit to some outside influence on Urdu fiction in both subject (mauzu’) and style (usloob), he didn’t care to define the terms or their precise influence on the Urdu fictional product.

It seemed to me that this answer didn’t come to grips with the complex issues involved in translation, to wit: our westerly neighbour, Iran, is practically reaching 100 per cent literacy. They regularly publish Persian translations of Western scientific, literary, and philosophical works. Recently I read that they have literally translated scores of Latin American and Hungarian novels, among others. Conversely, the percentage of literacy in Pakistan is deplorably low and the share of Urdu in that still less. Those among the Urdu-wallahs who read fiction maybe one per cent or less. Now that the classical, royal patronage of men of letters, erudite scholars, painters and musicians is a thing of the past, an Urdu writer simply cannot live by his or her writing alone. Most of our writers, Ashar and Intizar Sahiban included, earn their living from professions other than creative writing. And some writers even pay out of their own pocket to get their work published. The print run of most literature books is seldom declared to be more than 500 copies in a population of over 180 million. At Partition it used to be 1,000 or 1,100. (Of course, everyone knows that actual print runs are larger than 500 copies. Publishers are one cunning lot! But even a print run of 5,000 or 10,000 would not put food on the table for longer than a few months.) Given this situation, how reasonable is it to lament the absence of a vigorous involvement in literature: original writing, translation and discussion? Shouldn’t we perhaps worry first about raising literacy?

Moving on to more substantive issues, to say that umpteen translations of a Western writer were necessitated because earlier translations were felt to be “ghair-sahih” is to simplify the matter. Differences are bound to surface simply because each society and generation translates essentially for itself. And within each generation different writers bring their own personalities and insights to a work of art, which would be lost if there were only one translation. There is no such thing as sahih or ghair-sahih in verbal arts. Each creatively used word is a many splendoured thing in itself. Translators see in it that which is germane to their own experience and express it in the language of their time. After all, Dickens, Joyce, and Julian Barnes are not writing the same English. A 19th-century French translation of Dickens will be significantly different from a 20th- or 21-century translation. (God forbid, Westerners are not above blame. Just read the section on ‘Translation’ in Jordon Elgrably’s ‘Conversations with Milan Kundera’ (Salmagundi 73, Winter 1987) to appreciate the litany of Kundera’s complaints, his sheer terror at the English translation of his novel The Joke.) Then there is the problem of why one writes. At the root of good fiction lies a disquietude resulting from the disconnect between the perceived world and how the writer wishes to see or imagine it, which impels him to construct this imagined world in his fiction. Intizar Sahib once told me that before writing a story he begins to feel a nameless disquiet, a vague foreboding, which even haunts his dreams. He then writes a story to make it intelligible to himself. In other words, before a story is born, it is preceded by a period of subliminal restlessness.

The desire to fabricate a world of one’s own already sets a writer apart from his society. He lives in exilic mode. He could be called a stranger among his own people and environment, an outcast, a non-conformist, a rebel, one who goes against the grain. Inasmuch as it is an imaginary world with only tenuous analogs in reality, its main tool is a language devised basically to articulate the known (as there are no exact words for objects, rather images, that only exist vaguely in the mind) and describe what stands out tangibly in experience, not what flickers on the edge of sensation and consciousness, waiting for the moment of its future becoming. Precisely here lies the writer’s main problem: the search for mot juste. Llosa mentions that there was an avenue of lime trees near Flaubert’s house in Croisset called allée des gueulades, i.e., the “shouting alley.” Flaubert would go there and read out loud what he had written. His ear would tell him whether it sounded right or he needed to resume his search for the exact right word. The writer’s desperate attempts to capture his cerebral images, in all their hazy refractions, in a language that helps only so much often compel him to use it creatively, twist it, mangle it, and, if need be, ride roughshod over grammar.

A translator’s job is even more arduous, fraught with enormous linguistic difficulties, especially if he is translating a trans-cultural text. (As an aside, in my own translations I have occasionally come across sentences left deliberately vague by the author. How does one translate vagueness without first knowing what it is meant to leave vague or hide?) I might pull in here a couple of other questions posed later in the interview for their relevance to the present discussion. Shouldn’t the translation read smoothly? The interviewer then added, quoting Intizar Sahib, “it shouldn’t feel gritty like a lump of crystal sugar (misri ki dali) in the mouth.” Whereupon Ashar Sahib complemented Intizar Sahib for his translation of Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, which read like an original Urdu novel. I think a lot was lost in the complimentary lyricism.

Not all translations from Western languages will always read, or can be made to read, like original Urdu novels, like refined sugar in a cup of coffee, which melts within seconds, and flows just as quickly into the blood stream with severe consequences. It is a lot easier to translate novels that spring from the translator’s own cultural zone. Regardless of their language, their allusions and ambience will remain largely intelligible, unless a powerful personal creative element has intervened. If Attia Hosain were an Urdu writer, she wouldn’t have written it any differently than Intizar Sahib’s translation, giving due allowance to their respective writerly abilities and personalities. For simplicity, let’s chop the world into just two cultural zones: Western and non-Western. There is a bank of common allusions, myths, legend and lore in European languages, and translation and intelligibility are relatively easy between, say, Czech and French in that sense. Regardless of their internecine wars and hostility, their history is shared. They all use fork and knife and, yes, toilet paper. The problem arises when you want to translate Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night or his Death on the Installment Plan, in which he used a variety of slang radically at odds with the style of writing and the general temperament of contemporary French. With all his great admiration for Joyce and setting him up as a model to emulate, Intizar Sahib has never felt drawn to translating Ulysses or, God forbid, emulating Joyce.

Contemporary Urdu publishing is filled with a dizzying misuse of punctuation. One often sees a whole string of periods (………), but its raison d’être escapes the reader. Perhaps the writer thinks that its sole purpose is to overwhelm the reader, so why stop at three, the more the better, and vary the number to four, five, six, and so on, to throw in a dash of freshness. The use of ellipses, in other words, appears arbitrary and thoughtless, with no useful function in the overall narrative scheme. In contemporary Western fiction, punctuation also has a function beyond its obvious grammatical one. It is seamlessly woven into the texture, indeed it is an inextricable part, of thought. I invite you to read Kundera’s Encounter, not a novel but in part about novels. Or Anour Benmalek’s short story ‘The Penalty.’ Linear narratives of the jatika type and those that depend on plot would perhaps offer fewer problems in translation than narratives where spatial gyrations and temporal juxtapositions overly tax your mind and grate on your ears when the text is read out loud. Short sentences are by no means a rarity in English; if a writer nonetheless chooses to write a long sentence, it is to ensure fulfillment of some definite narrative purpose (as in the novels of Javier Marías or José Saramago). To chop a long sentence into a series of short ones may make the flow of a translated text more palatable to an Urdu palate, but it comes at a cost. For the fun of it, try translating the following and see whether you have the sensation of floating in the air (of refined sugar melting smoothly in your mouth) or of a bumpy ride on a roller coaster (crystal sugar):

“It appeared to be a civil, solitary form of corruption. And for this very reason, they all agreed (savouring their teacherly disapproval, touching it with their tongues, sucking it like a sweet) all the more serious.” And this is not from a European writer either, but from our neighbour Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

Fifty-two years ago, Muhammad Hasan Askari pointed out some problems peculiar to Urdu in his perceptive article ‘The Use of Adjectives in Literature.’ Let me just quote the third example in his trick sentence. You have been taken to task for your two renderings already, “so you write ‘kaf-dar-dahan, cheekhti chingaarhti mez’ [foaming at the mouth, screaming, bellowing table]. This sentence does, no doubt, offer a very clear image, but people [read Urdu-wallahs] will say: ‘The fellow’s off his rocker! Where did you ever see a table foaming at the mouth?’” Never mind that tables can scream and bellow in fiction.

Another problem: although Urdu stalwarts never tire of anointing it as the second or third — depends on who is talking — major language of the world, the plain fact is our institutions have done precious little to produce an English-Urdu dictionary especially sensitive to English literary vocabulary. After 30 pages I gave up translating Ilan Pappe’s Out of the Frame, which is not even a work of fiction but one about the Palestine-Israel conflict.I have also often wondered about Urdu syntax, lack of single-word adverbs, and this demand of fluency. If you look into the matter closely, it is hard to escape that Urdu is a language meant essentially for declaiming, not for reading, where the eye is used more than the ear. I may be wrong, but I increasingly feel that Urdu continues to be best suited to oral delivery. But we have moved on — haven’t we? — and come to depend increasingly on the printed page. A person can’t repeat his own slightly long sentence verbatim a second or two later. He is forced to keep it short and simple. But if a person is reading from a page, no matter how many times intrusions in the form of parentheses, ellipses, and em dashes suddenly break the thought and prose rhythm, he needs only to move the eye up and tie the threads. He may not even have to do that much since the eye covers a larger area and at least four or five lines of text are simultaneously present within its range, and a lot more in its peripheral vision. Sound vanishes, the written word endures.

Fiction, as it is understood in the West, is a borrowed form in Urdu. Our pre-modern, pre-colonial narrative prose form was the dastan — a different fictional possibility than the Western short story and novel. But it was always narrated orally by dastangos.

Once we have moved from orality into the age of literacy, of print, in the fullest sense, with due regard to the gamut of tools required for it, where the eye is the main source for the transmission of thought, I’m sure we will get used to the jarring notes and sometimes the fractured rhythms of contemporary prose. I think Masud Ashar, Intizar Husain, and the interviewer sahiban, in fact everyone who locates the success of a translation merely in its ability to sound smooth and fluent, need to consider what I have said above. Of course, I’m talking about good translations, with the proviso that fluency need not be the sole standard of “goodness.” I said “merely” because no criterion other than “fluency” and a translation’s ability “to read like an original Urdu novel” was offered.

I was asked about the reception of Urdu fictional translations in the West. My mind was preoccupied with “subject” and some other questions: has our fiction kept abreast of the demands of modern life, has it reached the level of Western production? Intizar Sahib doubted that it had met those demands head on and if it had attempted to, the attempts probably didn’t add up to something worthwhile at a creative level. He also found the claims of our elders about our fiction being able to stand confidently shoulder-to-shoulder with the West quite ridiculous. If we can’t show a work of the caliber of Chekov and Joyce, rubbing shoulders with an O. Henry is hardly an achievement (to kya teer maar liya).

These questions seem somehow interrelated. I thought the purpose of fiction lay in meeting the demands of the inner life of man, with any reference to external events as merely the excuse to reveal some truth about him. Since when has fiction been saddled with the responsibility of meeting the demands of external life, modern or otherwise? And “subject” — even more its place in fiction — is it not an ill-defined slippery slope? When our critics and writers use it, they somehow seem to imply that there is this external something that determines and defines a work. Communal riots during Partition have often been presented as the subject of a body of literature produced in the wake of that traumatic event. But if there is something that defines it, it is the existential situation of a fictional character and his attitude vis-à-vis an external agent. Long ago Askari Sahib had tried dispelling the common misconception about “subject” in the context of the communal riots of 1947. In his preface to Manto’s Siyah Hashiye, Askari wrote that the writer and reader both looked for reaffirmation of their noble sentiments. “But literature is indifferent to who is behaving like an oppressor and who is not. […] Its business is to observe the internal and external behavior of the oppressor and the oppressed [victim] during the commission of oppression. As far as literature is concerned, the external act of oppression and its equally external complements are meaningless.” And: “These stories are not about communal riots (fasaadaat). They are about human beings.”

Never mind Elie Wiesel’s remarks on the question of Palestine, but could one call his Night a novella about the Holocaust? Is it not rather about the little Jewish boy, the elect of God, who had, as François Mauriac puts it, “lived only for God and had been reared only on the Talmud, aspiring to initiation into the cabbala, dedicated to the Eternal” — the boy who was condemned to witness the horror of the death of God in the depths of his soul and subsequently didn’t bow to Him? Likewise, regarding Manto’s corpus, its fashionable, entirely unwarranted and uncritical classification by trendy social scientists and historians into stories about (a) Partition, and (b) prostitutes is a misguided foray into a territory whose custodians have lowered their guards and shamefully abdicated their responsibility.

Intizar Sahib is right about his disillusionment with the infantile desire to compare Urdu fiction to Western fiction. To me this desire betrays a strange anxiety and a basic lack of confidence. As if by merely positing the comparison, membership, even if honorary, in the club of world-class writers is conferred on us. The question to be asked is rather: to what extent has Urdu fiction delivered on its promise, if there was one.