Herald exclusive: Lost in translation-I
Many in Pakistan ask why readers worldwide are not appreciative of the genius of Saadat Hasan Manto or Qurratul Ain Hyder even while they are reading and raving about Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk or Fyodor Dostoevsky. After all, we firmly believe that these writers, along with a host of others such as Krishan Chander, Abdullah Hussein and Khadija Mastoor as well as Urdu’s many classical and contemporary poets, are second to none in the world.
How can literature, if it is truly great, be confined to only those able to understand the language it is written in?
Then again someone like the writer, critic and publisher Asif Farrukhi would say that great literature is the prerogative of a few discerning readers to pick up and enjoy. It, thus, becomes confined even further, to only a niche within the people who understand the language it is written in. Take, for example, Tilism-e-Hoshruba or Hoshruba: The Land And The Tilism, which is the title of the English translation done by Musharraf Ali Farooqi. “It is a monumental work but it has been ignored in Urdu as well. Even Urdu readers do not give it any importance,” says Farrukhi.
The problem, as Farrukhi and literary academics explain, is that “generally people do not read and are not interested in literature. So the market for books is very small.”
It is almost a cliché to say that people in Pakistan do not read. But even if you ignore the dismal literacy rate, deteriorating state of school education or dearth of book stores and libraries, writers and publishers confirm this view. What then naturally follows is that people do not buy books or that libraries do not bother to stock them or even that libraries and bookstores are shutting down because they simply cannot run a profitable business anymore. There is also another valid argument that would open another debate altogether: the advent of the Internet has changed reading and book-buying habits. In other words, there is little demand for, and hence little interest in, producing books or even getting them translated so that they reach a wider readership.
And while one might not want to look at anything to do with literature or art in terms of marketing and pricing, the fact is that books are a commodity requiring money while being written, produced and marketed. Writing and translating involves labour and the writer/translator has to be paid to undertake the work as much as the publisher and the bookseller.
Writer Bilal Tanweer, who translated two Ibn-e-Safi novels for Random House, India, puts it succinctly: “If people are paid to translate, they will.” Having translated for an Indian publishing house, he says, there is a market in India for such books, which is larger than the one in Pakistan, that is if such a market exists here at all. Indian publishers have the expertise that comes with having a market: “They have some pretty able editors who know what will work in English and what will not. They are able to do a good job with the final product, which is a huge problem in our part of the world.”
That Pakistan lacks this infrastructure and competence is the consensus among writers and translators. Shahid Hameed, a renowned writer and who has translated War And Peace and Sophie’s World into Urdu among other books, explains how the government set up institutions precisely for providing such infrastructure and competence and how over the years they have failed to deliver. They do not work efficiently when it comes to publishing translations, he says, because those at the helm of affairs want to finish projects during their tenures, compromising the quality of work. Qazi Javed, a director at the Lahore-based Idara Saqafat-e-Islamia, a government-financed research institution as well as a publishing house, agrees with Shahid Hameed. “Translation, which is a tool of interaction between two nations, cultures and civilisations, is not being given its due importance in our country.”
Explaining why the Indian literary market is thriving, Tanweer gives the example of Blaft Publications in India that has translated not just numerous Ibn-e-Safi books with attractive jackets but also Tamil pulp-fiction and are now looking toward literature from the south in general – Asia, Africa and Latin America – to translate and publish in India. Their translations of Urdu and Tamil books, according to Rakesh Khanna of Blaft (see interview) were unexpectedly well-received in India. Since there is no similar market response in Pakistan (5,000 copies make a best-seller here, according to Hoori Noorani who runs the publishing house Maktaba-e-Daniyal), it is no wonder that publishers are not translating more works as it entails the added cost of paying a translator.
Farrukhi, who runs a small publishing house in Karachi, concurs: “It is difficult to pay translators when the readership for translations is so small.” On the other hand, financial remuneration is important for translators working tediously and especially when the text is specialised and the writer a professional in his area of expertise with bilingual proficiency.
According to information gathered by the Herald during a brief investigation of the industry, the regular rate of payment by private publishers for a single translation between 150 and 200 rupees per page. Government-run institutions do not offer any higher than this paltry. The National Language Authority in Islamabad pays 375 rupees for every 1,000 words translated and the flat rate has not been revised since 1998. Before that the authority paid an even lower renumeration: only 150 rupees for 1,000 words. Similarly, the Pakistan Academy of Letters pays 900 rupees for translating a piece of prose, regardless of its length or word count, and 600 rupees for translating a poem for its quarterly English journal titled Pakistani Literature.
According to Masood Ashar, an editor at Mashal, a non-governmental organisation in Lahore that publishes books in Urdu, such miniscule monetary reward is the reason why it is difficult to find “those who are skilled to do translations.” In his opinion, “most translators do not have sufficient command over both languages and some even lack an academic background.”
Adding to this vacuum in expertise is a severe lack of infrastructure of writing, translating, packaging and promotion. The reasons vary from lack of institutional interest on the part of government bodies, such as the Pakistan Academy of Letters (see article Official inefficiency) to the dismal state of humanities in Pakistan. Scathing in their appraisal of the roles of official institutions, who have the platform to make a change, Farrukhi and Farooqi both categorically state that they are “not doing anything” and are “into [promoting] themselves and the people who are in charge.”
An even more fundamental shortcoming is perhaps that “literary education is missing,” as Tanweer puts it. “Take a look at the best-seller list at Liberty Books [a well-known bookseller in Pakistan]. It would include In the Line Of Fire [by Pervez Musharraf], Fatima Bhutto’s Songs Of Blood And Swords and so on. This is what people are reading. There is no quality literary fiction [being sold].” And this, Tanweer argues, “is not surprising.” As he points out, “even the literature departments at universities are appalling in general.” The result is “lack of competence and inclination to understand literary language.”
Farooqi explains that the consequence of this lack of literary competence has been a noticeable trend to treat a writer’s words as the Holy Grail, not because they are perfect but because we do not have editorial skills. Though even original works in Urdu need better editing, he points out, “in translations, the lack [of editorial skills] becomes glaring.”
Finally, until a degree of prestige is added to this literary genre, translations will not pick up and our classics will remain confined to a small readership only. “There is more prestige in writing a novel in English than in translating an Urdu one. This attitude is at the base of the problem,” says Farooqi. According to him, Urdu is losing the competition because “as a language it is not encouraged by our parents, which is a fundamental aspect that is wrong with our culture.” But he is hopeful about the future and feels that “young people do not have the same hang-ups” as their parents have. “They are trying to undo the damage.”
This is not to say that interest in reading is altogether absent from the current generation of Pakistanis. Noorani (see interview) points out that Urdu translations of Russian and Latin American writers are well-received — but just not in big enough numbers to make it a thriving business. At the moment, it seems that translations are an individual activity, so to speak. Writers are translating from regional languages into Urdu, from Urdu into English and from English into Urdu. But most translators say that they prefer to translate literary works that fascinate them or which they personally believe need to reach a larger audience, rather than be directed by publishing houses with their finger on the pulse of the reading public.
So Tanweer has recently completed the translation of Khalid Akhtar’s Chakiwara Main Wisal in English – even though he says that this sort of stuff does not have a mass readership (he is searching for a publisher) – because “it is fun, great fun.” And Farooqi says he decided to translate Hoshruba and Dastaan-e-Amir Hamza because “I really love these stories.”
Farrukhi says he translates only “incidentally” when something needs to be translated and there is no one else to do it. As a publisher, he says he is pleased at having published the translation of Agha Saleem’s novels because they are “important works”.
Because of some recent high-profile translations, all published outside Pakistan (Ibn-e-Safi’s The House of Fear; Hoshruba and Dastaan-e-Ameer Hamza) it may seem that more is being done in this field, but it is still too little to create a critical mass that can move ahead with its own momentum. While individual translators are busy planning their next project (Tanweer wants to translate more of Khalid Akhtar, and Farooqi’s novel The Story Of A Widow is in the process of being translated into Urdu), there is no discernible push at the national level to make available to the rest of the world what is best and the greatest in Urdu and other local languages. In fact, even the consensus on what is the best and the greatest in our local literature is non-existing. Not only that, Pakistani literature in English that has garnered international fame in recent years is also not available to Urdu readers. As Noorani says, she does not know why “publishers are not jumping at the chance to publish these books in Urdu.”
— With additional reporting by Moosa Kaleem from Lahore and Islamabad.
The Herald is Pakistan’s premier current affairs magazine published by the Dawn Media Group every month from Karachi.