ISLAMABAD: One of the first sessions of this year’s Islamabad Literature Festival (ILF) was a discussion on literary translation in Pakistan, from the perspective of a translator and a publisher.

Titled Other Tongues, Other Wonders: The Burden of the Translator, the session was held on Friday in one of the halls of the Margalla Hotel, which the ILF has taken over for the weekend. The panel featured publisher Hoori Noorani and translator and novelist Bilal Tanweer in a discussion moderated by author and journalist Mohammad Hanif.

Mr Hanif began the session by discussing the importance of literary translations. He remarked that most people in Pakistan are multilingual, and even those who do not attend school must learn multiple languages for work. He said literary translations allow one to glimpse into another’s life, to learn more about the lives of people in countries one my never visit and what it is like to love in another language.

Mr Hanif said that there are other, smaller countries where one can find translations of almost any text, and asked the two panellists why the tradition of translation is so much weaker in Pakistan.

Ms Noorani said the basic matter was that of education. She said only a few people read Urdu texts and that books are so expensive that translations come much later.

However, Mr Tanweer argued that countries where translations are more common want to interact with the rest of the world, and want to know and understand people that are different from them.

“The most translations are done in Europe,” he said, “and those countries do not have that national phobia. Here, because of our nationalism, we think we know everything and we have books that contain all the knowledge in the world. We do not need anyone else.”

He said that there is no institutional support for translation or for anything that makes it easier for us to interact with the outside world, adding that reasons beyond literacy need to be considered.

Mr Hanif then asked Ms Noorani what makes her decide as a publisher what she wants to translate, to which Ms Noorani responded that her publishing house Maktaba-i-Danyal has published translations of Russian classics, a book on Sindhi history, a book on World War II titled 17 Minutes of Spring, Ayesha Siddiqa’s Military Inc. and other works. She added that they are also interested in publishing books that people may not have read, such as the works of Gogol or Pushkin.

The panellists also discussed their experiences as translators. Mr Hanif said translation is a “labour of love”, as translators are not well-paid and do not receive the same amount of attention as a writer whose work they have translated, and asked the panel what their motivations were as translators.

Mr Tanweer explained that it was not his idea to translate his first literary translation, Ibn-i-Safi’s The House of Fear, but he heard that a publishing house was looking for someone to translate the book.

He said he read and enjoyed Mohammad Khalid Akhtar’s Love in Chakiwara and Other Misadventures, which he also agreed to translate.

He said Akhtar’s work had a slightly different sense of humour, one that had a mischievous and playful tone that is not usually how humour is generated. He said he received a grant from the United States and decided to translate Love in Chakiwara.

When asked whether it was true that Akhtar’s sentence structure was similar to sentence structure in the English language rather than in Urdu even though he wrote in Urdu, Mr Tanweer agreed. He said Akhtar himself said he wanted to write in English, and used to think of a sentence in English and then translate it to Urdu before writing it down. He added that Urdu’s linguistic structure includes sub-clauses within a sentence which allow the writer to build and extend what is being said, but the English structure does not tolerate this. He said he attempted to retain the sub-clause structure as much as possible in his English translation.

Mr Tanweer read from Akhtar’s original Urdu text and his English translation, and added it is not necessary that words that generate humour in Urdu will do the same in English.

The panel also discussed translations in regional Pakistani languages. Mr Hanif said there was not much of a chance that Punjabi readers would read modern Sindhi writing, or that Pashto readers would read what is being written in Punjabi. Ms Noorani said that there is some translation from Urdu to regional languages, such as Sindhi. She said that at one time, the Pakistan Academy of Letters tried to promote translations from regional languages.

Mr Hanif asked why there was no curiosity about works in regional languages among people who are interested in reading, and wondered if their curiosity is simply satiated by television.

Mr Hanif asked the panel why Pakistani English-language writers are not translated to Urdu, and both Mr Tanweer and Ms Noorani said they did not know.

Ms Noorani said this may be so because publishers thought those who are interested in reading those books will read them in English.

Published in Dawn, April 15th, 2017