Crossing fingers for translations

NEARLY a decade ago, shortly after my first novel was published in the UK, a literary critic in London talked me through the calendar as understood in publishing terms.

September and October were the months for the ‘big-hitters’ in advance of the Booker Prize. November and December were all about Christmas books (that is books that work well as presents). January was a quiet month, with book-buyers trying to recover from all the Christmas spending. The spring was ideal for less commercial literary fiction. May and June was time for the summer block-busters. And July...well, July was literary death. Everyone was on holiday — the book-buyers, the literary editors, the critics, the publishers.

But something must get published in July, I said. Without pausing, the critic replied: “Translations.”

It is one of the ironies of publishing in the UK that while English is seen increasingly as a ‘global language’ and the number of books published per year keeps rising (2007 saw 118,602 new titles published — almost double the 2004 figure) the number of books translated into English remains at an appallingly low rate. In fact, the UK is the only country in Europe which doesn’t even have an official statistic for the percentage of published work which is in translation — though estimates suggest the figure is no higher that two per cent.

Contrast this to France and Spain — where translation figures are near 30 per cent. When you take into account that much of the two per cent of translated work in the UK consists of well-established heavyweights such as Marquez and Pamuk, and of classic texts such as Don Quixote and The Arabian Nights, the picture becomes even gloomier.

This matter of the paucity of translated work in English came up during a writers’ conference in Delhi last year, where a writer who doesn’t write in English complained that because so many South Asian writers are producing work in English it means that non-Anglophone subcontinental writers don’t get translated — the publishers feel they can get books about India, Pakistan and Bangladesh without having to commission translations. There was more than a little stab of accusation in the comment — directed at the Anglophone writers who were depriving their non-Anglophone peers and betters of publishing markets.

There are several assumptions within this accusation. One, it assumes publishers buy books purely based on their geographical origins and once a quota has been filled from that particular nation the publishers will not take on any more, regardless of how diverse the style and subject matter of books from the same country might be. I’ve encountered enough anecdotal evidence to believe there’s certainly some truth to the idea of unacknowledged quotas, but it’s not the complete truth.

The ‘boom’ in Indian fiction in the ’80s and ’90s showed that when writing from a particular country sells well publishers look out for more books from that country. The fact that the Indian fiction boom never crossed over into translated fiction from India suggests there’s something more to the story than quotas.

The second assumption is that somehow Anglophone writers are complicit in the UK publishing industry’s attitude towards translation, and must therefore be held responsible for it. Other than giving writers an influence they simply don’t possess, the charge is particularly damaging because of the wedge it drives between Anglophone and non-Anglophone writers.

The truth is, I don’t know any writer who wants to be the only voice from his or her nation. The burden of expectation, the concerns around representation, are simply wearying. The more novels come from a region, the more writers have the freedom to see their books judged on individual merit rather than being seen as The Novel of Pakistan or The Novel of Malaysia and measured by that impossible yardstick.

The final assumption is that if novels from Pakistan or India weren’t being written in English, publishers in the UK would commission translations of work from those countries. The earlier statistics on translation suggest this isn’t true. I can’t think of many French, Spanish or German writers writing about their home nations in English, yet this has done little to increase translations of French, Spanish or German novels. And these are countries which exist in the same neighbourhood as the UK. Their food crosses the border, their citizens cross the border, but their fiction does not.

It is true, though, that English-language publishers’ and readers’ rather dismissive attitude towards translation is connected to the notion that English-language books are so rich in variety that there is scarce need to look elsewhere. Insofar as this is true, I accept that all of us who write in English from different cultural traditions around the world help perpetuate this notion. The very thing I love most about Anglophone writing — its depth, its variety — is also linked to the very thing I object to most in it — its lack of translations.

In the meantime, I’m expectantly waiting for between 50 and 100 books to arrive on my doorstep in the next week. These books are entries for a just-inaugurated new literary award — The Western Australian Premier’s Australia-Asia Literary Award — for which I’m one of the judges. In focussing on Australia and Asia, rather than categories such as the Commonwealth or America, the prize hopes to draw in writers and books often overlooked by other major prizes.

And while English is the lingua franca, in recognition of the fact that it’s the one shared language of all the judges (myself, the Australian critic Peter Craven, and the Hong-Kong based Sri Lankan writer, Nury Vittachi), the prize is open to both work that is originally in English and work that is translated into English, from publishers anywhere in the world, just so long as the author is resident in Australia or Asia, or the book is set primarily in Australia or Asia.

I’m keeping fingers crossed for some stellar translations — and, in the long term, for prizes such as this one and the IMPAC prize to play their part in the process of allowing translated fiction to sit less sporadically alongside Anglophone fiction, both judged purely on the quality of the work itself.

The writer’s novels include Kartography and Broken Verses.

Manufacturing dissent

WANT political paralysis? Then try a game of ‘will-he-or-won’t-he’. First, pick your option: sack the president; replace the army chief; amend the constitution; impeach the president; restore the judges; break the coalition; dissolve parliament; declare martial law; or spill state secrets. Then pair your choice with one of these men: Asif, Nawaz, Musharraf, Kayani, A.Q. Khan. Confused? Not sure who wants what? Don’t worry — that’s the paralysis part.

Madness has descended on Islamabad. The already faint line between fake and real news is now invisible; rumours of news now pass for the real thing. Off the record, media executives admit freewheeling news channels are damaging the industry’s credibility; on air, their channels are rabid competitors in the lucrative race to the bottom. Anonymous sources purvey opinion as fact and hope as reality, and the channels lap it up.

As ‘news’ of Musharraf’s demise was flashed on screens across the country, I asked a top media executive if it was true. Yes, the president is receiving guests who have come to say goodbye, he said. Then, the punch line: the president is asking his guests where they are going. Yet the circus went on, the non-credibility of the presidential camp rendering its denials futile. You almost — almost — felt sorry for them: denial only fuelled the rumour, while silence would have all but confirmed it.

True, many in the media do have their knives out for Musharraf but this whispering campaign wasn’t orchestrated by them. The explanation is more pedestrian. When barebones news gathering operations are asked to fill a 24/7 void, the beeper becomes a producer’s best friend. A beeper is industry jargon for the phone-in news that you hear rather than see — radio journalism, as a newspaper editor disparagingly referred to it. You’ve seen it countless times: a newsreader is patched through to a reporter on a mobile phone and asks some basic questions while an appropriate — sometimes inappropriate — headline appears on screen. ‘Rumours of president’s resignation’. Or, sullying its good name, a question mark is employed: ‘President to resign?’ It’s immediate, cheap and efficient — everything on-the-fly reportage demands.

From there a story takes on a life of its own. Every newsroom has a wall of TV screens that is closely monitored at all times. When, for whatever reason, one channel flashes breaking news, the other newsrooms erupt. After some quick consultation, standard operating procedure kicks in: a reporter is lined up to narrate the rumour; a spokesman for the affected party is contacted to deny or admit the news; a rival party is allowed to counter the affected party’s spokesman; and an analyst is roped in to air his tuppence. If enough channels do it — and they have only minutes to decide what they will air — the ‘news’ assumes a semblance of the truth in the media echo chamber. A veritable Goebbelsesque heaven, where the appetite for news far outstrips the capacity or inclination to monitor its veracity.

But propaganda will only get you so far. Hold your nose for a minute and assume you are a Musharraf-backer. The president is your guarantor of stability in the last resort, a link with the establishment, home and away. Remember that you are not too concerned about democracy; what matters is national security, political stability and economic growth. And the fact that so much mud is being thrown at Musharraf isn’t too bothersome; after all, better him than you, the person behind the façade.

Now peek over the fence and see what the civilians are up to. The newly supremacised parliament is idle, only different to the last one in where its orders come from Zardari House or Raiwind as opposed to Army House. CJ Iftikhar is waddling from one district bar to another, fulminating against CJ Dogar & co. and all but calling for them to be sent to the gallows. Nawaz’s Musharraf allergy is getting worse by the day, with few fresh governance ideas emerging from the Punjab Assembly. And the economy? Best not to think of that. The zeitgeist was captured at the back of a smuggler’s truck: bootlegged foreign liquor concealed along with wheat flour. Forget who bequeathed this crisis to the nation. Remember, you’re a Musharraf-backer. Do you advise the president to leave now or to wait it out until the civilian clowns put their house in order? The answer is obvious. Chicken or egg debates — Musharraf’s exit or smooth transition — are for philosophers, not guardians of a state in crisis.

This is the reality of our transition. However, could the difference between the theory and praxis of transition be one of rationality? Analysts have consulted their game theory texts, academics have pored over their democratic transition tomes, and right now everyone argues that this time the two leading parties will work together because they must.

But could this be news to Nawaz I-will-never-take-dictation Sharif? The consensus suggests that Nawaz must back down and Asif must play nice. Then again, the coalition took a month to be formed; the Murree Declaration had a month to be fulfilled; May 12 has come and gone; and constitutional reform will take an unknown amount of time. And still the constitutional amendment or parliamentary resolution debate is not resolved. The optimists suggest that the repeated rounds of negotiations are an indication of a commitment to making things work. The pessimists wonder whether success can be salvaged from a string of defeats.

It comes down to power. Everyone agrees that all politicians want it. But there’s a secondary question, the answer to which may not always be clear: will politicians always choose the certainty of power today over the possibility of power tomorrow? It’s not hard to imagine Asif and Nawaz connecting the dots wrongly: dictators, army chiefs and presidents come and go, they may conclude, but only civilian politicians live to fight another day. Letting the chips fall where they will is only a small step away then.

cyril.a@gmail.com

Explosive revelations

SCOTT McClellan’s new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception has struck Washington’s political landscape like a bombshell.

It was not scheduled for release until June 1, but some unauthorised copies started to circulate a week before the due date, the explosive revelations raising a firestorm in the news media. The 341-page book has quickly climbed to the top of the Amazon best-seller list, and in many area bookstores all copies have been sold out. The book contains scathing criticism of some of President Bush’s policies and the way the war in Iraq was sold to the American public.

However, on the face of it, the book is neither unique nor exceptional in nature. Similar uncomplimentary books about the Bush administration have been written previously by others, including the former army officer, Lt General Ricardo Sanchez, and a former advisor on terrorism, Richard Clark. In addition, two former press secretaries, Larry Speaks who worked for President Reagan and Marlin Fitzwater who served the first President Bush, wrote their memoirs, without provoking major controversies.

What makes the McClellan book so special is the fact that he was a trusted Bush loyalist who served the administration for seven long years, the last three (2003-2006) in the powerful position of presidential press secretary. In this position, he sat in on many high-level meetings, and from his vantage point became privy to sensitive information not divulged to outsiders.

The book is not in every respect hostile to the president. While critical of his handling of the Iraqi war, McClellan compliments the president as a “man of personal charm, wit and enormous political skills”. Although he claims continued affection for Bush personally, McClellan devotes a whole chapter to ‘Selling the War’, and alleges that the president and his aides misled the nation into the Iraqi war by shading the truth. He accuses them of making the “decision to turn away from candour and honesty when those qualities were most needed”.

He has refrained from accusing Bush of telling outright lies, but accuses his administration of “managing the crisis in a way that the use of force would become the only feasible option”. He claims that, in making the decision to invade Iraq, “contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or simply disregarded”. McClellan portrays the president as someone who makes decisions based on his gut feelings and personal convictions, rather than relying on intellectual debates or thought processes. He characterises the president as unable or unwilling to acknowledge the errors of his judgment, or to learn from them.

McClellan propounds his own theories to explain the ill-fated decisions by the current administration, such as the leaking to the media of the identity of a high-level, secret CIA operative Valerie Plame — which is in fact a federal crime. Apparently, Plame was punished in retaliation for the report her husband presented on his return from a fact-finding mission to the African country of Niger, having found no evidence that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium to manufacture nuclear weapons. The book hypothesises that many abuses were rooted in the fact that the Bush team never rid itself of the notion that it were running an election campaign and was under siege.

McClellan argues that the true reasons for the Iraqi war, the theme that had occupied the president’s thoughts since 9/11, can be traced to his desire to leave behind a legacy of greatness. This could be achieved by transforming the Middle East into a bastion of democracy and ushering in an era of enduring peace between Israel and its neighbours. The Iraqi war provided the rationale to achieve this sublime objective, even though the case for weapons of mass destruction was no longer sustainable.

In his book and his various subsequent TV interviews, McClellan has not spared the key figures of the Bush administration, especially Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Cheney is shown much deference by the president and is nicknamed ‘magic man’ in the White House, for his uncanny ability to achieve his objectives. By contrast, Rice comes in for some sharp criticism for being excessively compliant, and “too accommodating to the views of the president”, as she failed to caution the president of the potential disastrous consequence of his plan to invade Iraq.

These criticisms notwithstanding, McClellan has concluded that “if (Bush) could have foreseen the cost of the war — more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead — he never would have made the decision to invade”.

Predictably, the book has ignited a firestorm of controversy and some counter charges. The critics question McClellan’s motives in writing the book, characterising him as a disloyal, disgruntled former employee, unhappy at being forced out of office two years ago. The New York Times, which had opposed the Iraqi invasion, in an editorial chastised McClellan for having had no qualms about defending the same policies as press secretary to which he now severely objects.

Some critics have insinuated that the harsh language used in the book is so uncharacteristic of the soft-spoken, former press secretary that perhaps the text may have been spiced up by the book editors to boost its sales. Similarly, there have been suggestions that McClellan may have been motivated entirely by greed. While money may or may not have been a significant factor, the publishers of the book, Public Affairs, represent a small enterprise that is unlikely to offer huge sums to authors.

Since the book’s release, McClellan has been appearing on various TV shows, mostly to respond to his detractors and promote the sale of his memoirs. He has explained that his thinking underwent a progressive transformation while he served at the White House. He was particularly vexed that he was lied to by senior White House officials, and was left to defend their false statements to the press.

The book comes out at a crucial stage in the ongoing political contest in this country and its contents are unlikely to help Republican candidate John McCain, who has strongly supported the invasion of Iraq, conflating it with the general war on terror.

The relations between the president and his press secretary, both from Texas, have not always been so testy. In one of his farewell comments to departing McClellan, President Bush in his characteristic joviality had mused about the future: “He and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days.” After the recent episode, Bush, as former president, may no longer be so keen to share his retirement time with his one time press secretary.

Narco-terrorism

DESPITE being one of the main victims of terrorist violence, Pakistan has been repeatedly accused of not doing enough in the war on terror.

The knee-jerk reaction to terrorist incidents occurring in other parts of the world is to establish a linkage with the seminaries in Pakistan or with militant groups in the tribal areas. Amidst accusations of harbouring Al Qaeda elements within its borders and the government/military inability to flush out these extremists are subtle innuendos that the state is consorting with the enemy.

It is true that despite billions of dollars being injected into this war, the most technologically advanced military in the world along with its allies has not been able to eradicate its enemy. The alliance’s inability to achieve its goals, however, cannot be solely placed on Pakistan’s shoulders. The core factor for the resilience of the opposition is to be found across the Durand Line in the form of drug money.

Under international pressure the ban on poppy cultivation during the Taliban years in Afghanistan reduced the country’s share of global opium yield from 70 to 10 per cent. It has now, under the Karzai regime, risen to an all-time high. According to the 2007 Afghanistan Opium Survey, 193,000 hectares are being used for poppy cultivation. Opium production has reached 8,200 tons and accounts for 93 per cent of the global opiate market, making Afghanistan “practically the exclusive supplier of the world’s deadliest drug”.

The vertical push towards the proliferation of opium/heroin laboratories within Afghanistan has amplified the stakes as the value-added end-product yields higher dividends. According to one estimate, the narcotics trade now injects approximately four billion dollars into the Afghan economy (approximately 53 per cent of the country’s GDP) and employs nearly 3.3m people (14.3 per cent of Afghanistan’s population).

The nexus between narcotics trafficking and terrorism is undeniable. The two are mutually supportive and the war on terror must target both. Afghanistan has become the epicentre of narco-terrorism.

Anarchy and the erosion of the state’s writ have provided ideal conditions for the drug trade to flourish. Drug barons and extremists have found common cause in their violent opposition to the government. The Al Qaeda/Taliban insurgency, therefore, finds sponsorship for its cause through its cooperation with Afghan drug lords. The Taliban are provided with arms, logistic equipment and money to pay their militia and, in return, drug convoys are assured safe passage through the already porous borders.

If the flourishing Afghan drug trade is the main channel of extremist financing then it is logical to assume that the eradication of poppy cultivation will administer a devastating blow to the insurgency. Yet virtually nothing has been done to curb this menace. In 2004, Hamid Karzai turned down a US proposal which involved the aerial spraying of herbicides to end poppy cultivation because he dared not alienate certain powerful warlords on whose support he depended. By 2005, Afghanistan became the world’s major source of narcotics production and trafficking for which the international community is also culpable.

According to UN/World Bank reports there are 25 to 30 key traffickers that run the Afghan drug trade. They manage a network of farmers, local and mid-level traders, corrupt politicians and government officials. Their operational procedures and overall system are far more structured and efficient than the mechanism used by the Karzai government to counter their efforts.

Narcotics production and trafficking have to be addressed on a war footing. Corrupt government and military officials involved have to be identified and punished. The Afghan government has to recapture its writ from the warlords and drug barons. Coordinated global efforts have to be implemented to disrupt the narcotics trade chain in any way possible, starting from the farmer all the way up to the end-user. Economically viable and practicable alternate options should be provided to the farmers. If the crop substitution option and subsidies are declined then action should be taken to eradicate the existing poppy crop.

The argument that the already poor and debt-burdened farmer will fall further into debt is fallacious. The expenditure for crop substitution and compensation for the farmer is miniscule compared to what is being spent on the war on terror.

Even if one accepts the faulty reasoning that farmers will suffer, the international community must ask itself what ranks higher on the ‘agenda of concern for human welfare’? Do the economic interests of Afghan farmers outweigh the global impact of the Afghan drug trade in the form of a rise of terrorist attacks, crime and the overall social degradation due to the usage of the end-product? The answer is clear. Precious time is wasted as debates and discourse merely result in dithering over the most ethical way to counter this problem. The obvious beneficiaries of this vacillation are the terrorists and drug barons.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Criterion Quarterly.

mushfiq.murshed@gmail.com