PESHAWAR: Safoora Arbab has earned her Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York City with her major in philosophy. She is now pursuing a PhD in the department of comparative literature, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her study focuses on the Pashtun nonviolent movement of the Khudai Khidmatgar during Indian Independence, as well as looking at the historical erasure of the movement in post-partition Pakistan.

She is closely examining the literature generated by the Khudai Khidmatgars - their poetry and writings in the journal the Pakhtun - to explain how nonviolence was embodied, at least for a short historical span, by a people who think of themselves, and are painted, as inherently violent. Ms Arbab especially looks at the poetry of Ghani Khan for representations of an alternate Pashtun imaginary.

During an online interaction, to a query ‘what prompted her to render Ghani Khan’s into English’, she said that she took a class in translation methods at UCLA and translated a few of his poems that she could also use in her research work later on.

She said she knew that there were no published English translations of Ghani Khan’s work. Once she started translating a few of his poems - especially ‘Latoon’, she fell in love with his work, his way of thinking and expressing himself, his witty humanism, and it was such a wonderful pleasure to be able to relate to his expressions both as Pakhtun and as part of the global diaspora,” she explained.

Ms Arbab pointed out that she was quite surprised that Ghani Khan had not yet been translated into English. She however, did know of Imtiaz Sahibzada’s translations of many of Ghani Khan’s poems, but these were yet unpublished.

She felt that the brilliance and complexity of this poetry, a complexity that was expressed in very simple straightforward Pashto that anyone could relate to, had to be shared with others. “It is a form of poetic thinking that crosses nationalist boundaries and speaks to both the local and the diaspora,” the translator observed.

Regarding the challenges, she faced while putting Ghani into English, she said, “It was surprisingly easy to translate Ghani Khan’s words and concepts into English because I think he also, like most of us today, was educated in the West and so his expressions speak to a mixture of the Pakhtun and Western context he was brought up in”.

She added that even though Mr Khan had attended Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Azad schools and was educated in Pashto in his early years, the influence of the colonial context was pervasive in that era. Of course, she said, his later education was a mixture of British, American and even a nationalist one at Tagore’s Shantinekatan. She went on to add that his expressions and metaphors were drawn from this rich global background.

“What was really difficult to translate, however, was the complexity of meaning, the nuances, and history of the metaphorical allusions that he refers to in very simple language. She said the language, so deceptively simple, could seem flat and even silly in English without that background reference that was available in Pashto or even the Western philosophical thinking, which always seeped through his poetry.

To another question, Ms Arbab replied that most often there was an element of surprise that the thoughts in Ghani Khan’s poetry were so easily accessible, and its humour and humanism so universal. She said, sometimes even a denial that this poetry was actually written in Pashto.

Ms Arbab elaborated that the classification of the Pakhtuns in the world was of a backward and violent tribal society, with little knowledge of their rich and long literary tradition, which she said made it difficult to place Ghani Khan within these predetermined categories.

“He shatters these categorisations with his words by relocating Pashto within a global and contemporary context. His words defy the nature of bounded categories and stereotypes,” the translator maintained.

About Ghani Khan’s unique way of expression, Ms Arbab said, his poetry was so unconventional not just in its breadth and expansiveness — even when he was being ironic in depicting all kinds of human follies and fanaticisms he did it so humorously — that it was hard to translate this style.

She said one had to have the context and history of Pashto poetry, of Pakhtun traditions which he both upheld and mocked, and the historical context of the times in which he was writing. “So his poetry without that context in English — which is the most difficult part as it takes away from the richness of his thought — but there is nothing else to be done,” she remarked.

Responding to a query, did she want to convey a particular message through renditions of Ghani Khan, she said, initially it was about Pakhtun expressions of the nonviolent movement, as examples that expressed an alternate ethos of the Pakhtuns other than the categorisations of them as a racially and inherently violent people, as a form of resistance to colonial representations.

“But now I am making selections that are more than just ideological examples for my own ends but rather as articulations of new, refreshing and wholly unexpected perspectives that one cannot categorise in any way,” Ms Arbab opined.

To categorise Ghani Khan’s poetry she said was in fact to commit violence to them. She said, it would try to bind and contain the unbounded spirit of the man reflected in his poems. She said she thought we needed to embrace his spirit of humanism and allow his poems to speak freely for themselves rather than try to shape them or try to structure them within any ideological or poetic category.

Mr Khan had blended actually the feel and thought of Western and Eastern hues both into Pashto. When asked how hard it was to put into rendition, she answered that Ghani Khan had captured the thinking of both West and East and blended them into a new whole so that there are no clearly drawn boundaries between them that one could point to.

“Such borders of course do not exist either. We try to create these borders ideologically but in fact there are such a lot of crossovers and re-articulations that one cannot easily draw a line between East and West,” she described.

She stated that it was why Ghani Khan was especially attractive in today’s world. She said Ghani Khan’s poetry was rooted in Pashto, steeped in its traditions and history yet his colonial and international education allowed him to fuse the thinking he was exposed to with his traditions.

“There is resistance in this kind of transcendence of both tradition and political context as well because it defies and expands both: he revolutionizes Pakhtun thinking but he also refuses to acknowledge colonial and Western boundaries of thought and representation,” Ms Arbab concluded.

Published in Dawn March 16th , 2015

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