In an increasingly globalised and interconnected world, the ability to understand other people speaking different languages, their cultures and their contexts has become more important than ever before — as has the role of the mediator: the translator. The translator is often the first point of contact between a culture and the outside world. Musharraf Ali Farooqi, who is well known as a novelist of critically acclaimed novels such as Between Clay and Dust, first became acknowledged internationally as a translator of unusual literary merit with his translation into English of the 19th century Urdu opus Dastaan-i-Amir Hamza. He subsequently embarked on translating the epic magical fantasy Tilism-i-Hoshruba — the first of its 24 projected books came out in 2009. He talks about the act of translation, the perils and pitfalls of translating poetry and prose and the essential requirements for a good translator.

This interview was first published in The Aleph Review, Vol. 2. It is reproduced here, slightly abridged.

What brought you to translation?

I was in my early 20s when I first read Afzal Ahmed Syed’s poetry. When I asked friends whether it had been translated into English, I was told that it was considered difficult to translate. I think it was equal parts interest in the work and the vanity of translating something considered difficult by others that first drew me into undertaking the work.

What was so difficult about translating Afzal Ahmed Syed’s poetry?

The first thing I translated from Afzal Ahmed Syed was ‘Zarmeena’, a prose poem. It had two terms — subh-i-nakhasteen [first morn] and sehr al masharik [canon of nature’s mimicry] — about whose meanings I had no clue. I could not ask Afzal himself because, for one, the translation was supposed to be a surprise, and secondly, because conceit would not let me ask him or anyone in the circle of friends who had warned me about the difficulty of translating Afzal, to whom I wished to smugly present my translation. So I took help from my octogenarian scholar friend and colleague Kamal Habib. He was a retiree who worked part-time as a proofreader to fill his days — we worked together in the same newspaper office. Afzal often wondered how I translated those two difficult phrases.

So that was how it all began and Afzal’s poetry is all I have translated from modern Urdu poetry. It does not cover his entire work. He writes in both ghazal and nazm genres. His ghazal comes from an abstract, semi-classical world, portrayed in imagery unique in the Urdu language to Afzal. I cannot translate it because I will not be able to pull it off, but reading it helped me understand and translate Afzal’s nazms. I think it is very necessary for a poet’s translator to read his or her various writings in order to understand the poet’s mind — how a particular poet looks at the world, how he or she articulates this vision. I had an advantage because Afzal and I were close friends and we spent a lot of time together. I could perhaps say that I understand Afzal’s poetic vision better because I know the person, know something of his imagination and how he looks at life in general. All this helped me become a better translator of his poetry.

Suppose the poet whose work you are translating is dead?

It’s an advantage to know the poet, but it isn’t imperative. If you have absorbed the poet’s vision, then you know the poet and can still translate well. Even with poets you have translated, there’s always room for improvement. My translation of Afzal’s poetry improved with suggestions by the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who read the translation and kindly wrote a blurb. He suggested I get rid of the rather heavy punctuation. He also suggested better words than those I had chosen in some places. All these revisions made the translation better and more fluid.

Do you find poetry more difficult to translate or prose, from the point of view of form, syntax, etc?

It depends on the kind of language used in a work, its genre and the period. The work of translation is also complicated by the fact that we don’t have many good Urdu-English translations from a variety of genres, idioms and historical periods, which we can look at to learn how a particular idiom must be translated into its equivalent English-language idiom.

I have avoided translating from the ghazal genre because it has a tendency to offer a plurality of meaning because of its characteristic quality of maani aafreeni [plurality of meaning]. The poetic tradition in which the source text is composed is semantically complex and that complexity is a source of pride for that poetic tradition. A poet’s mastery is expressed in how well he strings these multiple meanings in a line. And this applies to almost every ghazal poet in the Urdu canon. Another problem with ghazal poetry is that it’s impossible to replicate the way the metre in Urdu emphasises certain things by creating a musical effect with the arrangement of words. It makes it impossible to pull it off in English.

Then how does one approach translating ghazals? Is it impossible to do so?

I don’t mean to say that it is impossible to make an intelligible English translation of the ghazal poetry of someone such as Mir Taqi Mir or Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib; it’s just that in the translation we will be limited to selecting one of the various available meanings from which to translate. That is the translator’s call: if he has absorbed the poet’s vision, he will be able to access the meaning that is most relevant, the key element. If someone wishes to read about this particular characteristic of maani aafreeni in Urdu ghazal in more detail, I would refer them to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s magisterial work Sher Shor Angaiz, in which he has provided a commentary on Mir’s poetry and explained the concept of maani aafreeni through numerous examples.

This is also not to say that metric translations from Urdu poetry are impossible. I have played a small part in what I think is a very successful translation from metric verse. It is Nazir Akbarabadi’s poem ‘Chhuhon Ka Achaar’ which I translated into straight prose. From that prose, Michelle Farooqi made a metric translation into English, which I think is miraculously wonderful. It is titled ‘Mouse Pickle’ and goes:

Once more does the marketplace beckon
In a lust for mouse pickle, I reckon.
I set out my salver with mice in a row
Then pounding wee heads and paws as I go
I stir up a dish of minced rodents so nice
How simply delicious — my pickle of mice!

‘Mouse Pickle’! What a whimsical title! Is it a contemporary poem?

It is whimsical, isn’t it? No, it isn’t contemporary, it is 18th century. And ‘Mouse Pickle’ was based on an actual event. The poet Nazir Akbarabadi was very fond of achaar [pickle]. One day, he sent his servant to the market to buy some achaar. When the servant returned with it, the poet discovered a mouse pickled along with the vegetables. That inspired him to write the poem.

But to return to our main theme. One of my current projects is the translation of the Urdu masnavi ‘Sehr al Bayaan’. Because the masnavi is a narrative genre, I thought it could be successfully translated into prose. This method has been successfully used in translations in other languages. Prose translations of Beowulf, the Odyssey, and the Iliad are good examples of this approach.

What about translating modern Urdu literature?

About 10 years ago I translated Syed Muhammad Ashraf’s Number Daar Ka Neela — which remains one of my favourite novellas — as The Beast. It had a heavy narrative voice which worked well in the translation. Modern Urdu prose is generally simple to translate, with the exception of the language employed by such works as Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s Kaee Chaand Thay Sar-i-Aasman and Sawaar Aur Doosray Afsaanay.

What are you currently working on?

Most of my present and future translation interests remain restricted to classical literature in the dastaan and qissa genres. Classical Urdu texts can be a difficult territory. There are few good dictionaries available for this kind of work. And even the existing ones — such as those by John Thompson Platts and by Francis Steingass — offer very limited help because they do not have all the words one encounters in classical Urdu prose. There is constant learning in the process and many times defeat stares you in the face. It was this sense of helplessness that first made me think of putting together an online resource for Urdu translators. My online Urdu Thesaurus [urduthesaurus.com] is one project in this direction.

Do you follow a particular method when translating?

The translation approach also depends on how a particular classical text evolved historically. In some respects, Urdu classical dastaan literature is unique if we compare it to two comparable classical texts: the Persian-language Shahnameh and the Arabic-language Alf Laila wa Laila. These texts belong to languages and cultures which have heavily influenced our own.

The Shahnameh was meant for the court; an account of the glory of the kings of Persia. The audience necessitated a formal idiom and the narration was decorous. It was presented in a uniform, highly literary language, meant for an audience of one.

The Alf Laila wa Laila or the Arabian Nights was popular literature narrated in the streets. It is filled with bawdy tales and ribald humour. The language is vernacular. One can see its effect best in Muhsin Mahdi’s critical translation.

The most popular Urdu dastaan, the Dastaan-i-Amir Hamza, was popular from common people to royalty. Over several hundred years of its tradition in India, it accommodated the idiom and literary tastes from both streams of its audiences. It was also a narrative from the oral tradition, which was transcribed hundreds of years later by its narrators. So we encounter both high literary language and street language; both grandeur and bawdiness. It is important to be conscious of these things as one translates such a complex text.

It helped me that in the course of my haphazard reading of Urdu literature I had read or encountered texts from various historical periods, subjects and genres. It allowed me to develop an idiom in English for my translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, which was equivalent to the changing registers in the Urdu text.

You’re talking here about types of text. What about methodology? Are there rules that translators should know or be mindful of?

In translation from classical prose which is unpunctuated, it works for me to break the text down into phrasal pieces and treat them separately to cull the best possible meaning, before putting them together again in a sentence and smoothing out the expression. I think an idiomatic translation — for me, at least — becomes possible only when I look at the components of a line and imagine the best way to join them together. It has something to do with the principles of rhetoric and how a line sounds when we read it. But, still, this idiomatic translation has to conform to the general idiom of the larger text. Otherwise, a translation can be uneven because the components don’t relate to the whole.

That’s a very important point and it relates directly to your observation that a translator must read widely and absorb the oeuvre of the writer whose work he is translating…

Besides reading the work of the writer he is translating, a translator of classics must read widely, variously and extensively. This gives you a broad understanding of the various kinds of linguistic texture, pattern and the kinds of idioms used in various texts. Besides children’s texts, history and classical prose, reading poetic works and humour from different periods is very important, because if you can understand poetry and humour and their various hues in both languages, it means you are close to the language. And if you are dealing with a translation project, it facilitates the work of translation.

Making a translation is not merely a function of knowing the source languages well enough. One must also know the culture, from which a particular work has been published, well. As with language, so with society: one could get a sense of whether or not a translator knows the source culture well enough or not from the way he translates the source language.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 15th, 2018