HERE is an Urdu version of Jane Austen’s famous novel Pride and Prejudice published by Ilqa Publications, Lahore, under the title, Takabbur aur Taassub. The translator is Professor Shahid Hameed, who has already to his credit the translations of two great novels — Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. With such an experience of translating fiction, he chose to translate the most famous work of the 18th century English novelist, Austen.

His translation of Pride and Prejudice was first published at the end of the last century. Now, after 13 years, its second edition has come out. And Hameed appears to be more excited as he has gained a new confidence in the worth of this translation. The newly-written preface to this edition speaks of this excitement and at the same time gives us the clue to this excitement. He recalls what he had written in his previous preface. He was then content to quote F.R. Lewis, who ranked Austen among the five greatest novelists of English. In addition, he had referred to a survey which revealed that though most regard War and Peace as the greatest novel of the world, their favourite is Pride and Prejudice. But now this statement “appears to me the understatement of the century,” he says.

Now we are living in the 21st century when the internet appears to dominate all sources of information. And how revealing was the information available on it. He now came to know that Pride and Prejudice is no longer stuck at the level of a novel and “has raised to a higher level, a very high level. It has gained the elevated status of an industry giving a fillip to a billion dollar yearly business.”

A novel transformed into an industry. Should it really be treated as a compliment to the novel? However, serious readers of fiction will be more interested to know about what makes it a good novel. Hameed has pointed to a few literary qualities of Pride and Prejudice. But his emphasis is on its immense popularity, which went on growing with time. He has presented a long list of writers who were admirers of the novel, ranging from Virginia Woolf to Sir Walter Scott. But it is very rare if any one of them speaks about the quality of the novel.

Of course, Woolf is generous enough to call Austen best among the female English novelists. On another occasion, she paid her a left-handed compliment by referring to Austen’s intolerant devotees, who will not allow one to betray a sign of indifference to their favourite writer. However, Dickens was rude enough to declare that he has not cared to read any of Austen’s novels.

As for the present translation of the novel, I have already written about Hameed’s experience in this field. And no one should doubt his honesty and sense of responsibility in this respect. He takes extraordinary pains to be faithful to the text. He extends his care for faithfulness to each word occurring in each and every sentence in the novel. He seems worried with respect to the term ‘ballroom dancing’. How to translate it into Urdu is his worry. Here I may ask my friend if he has ever seen a dance-loving foreigner worried about translating the term Kathak in his own language? Come what may, Kathak will not budge from its linguistic soil for the sake of any foreigner keen to translate it into his own language. So is the case with names of ragas and terms associated with them. They grow out of the depth of the culture the ragas and dance forms are rooted in. They are untranslatable. A sensible translator is expected to accept them as they are.

As stated above, Shahid Hameed translates with a sense of responsibility. He takes pains to remain faithful to the text. We can rely on him as a faithful translator. The problem arises only when he is seen engaged in the search for an equivalent of some typical expression. An odd word from the dictionary rarely serves the purpose. To be more precise, his extreme care for the exact word creates problems for him. Otherwise he is a successful translator.