Can we imagine the world without translation, the world whose one of the defining features is linguistic diversity? It’s a kind of vestibule that takes us from one society to another which would otherwise remain at its best a little understood and at its worst misunderstood. As our enriched world is an outcome of unending stream of migration, so is the mental world a result of translation without which it would be a sterile empty space.

We do not mean translation in the sense of being something executed from experience to language. What we mean here is translation pure and simple; a body of linguistic constructions in a language rendered into another language. Interestingly what constitutes translation is a contested intellectual issue. There are two extremes; one faction calls translation a forgery and other declares everything translation as it believes that any kind of experience is translated into a specific linguistic construct. Whether translation is a ‘forgery’ or ‘everything’ the fact is that diverse societies and cultures have interacted through translation because every activity regardless of its nature eventually finds its enduring expression in language. Secondly, it’s not possible for all or majority of members of a society to physically have firsthand experience of another society. Translation is a bridge that connects diverse peoples at multiple levels including intellectual and imaginative ones.

It’s generally believed that poetry is the most difficult thing to translate because it’s inextricably meshed with the mysteries of the language it is originally composed in. The frequently quoted statement that what is lost in the translation is poetry seems apparently true. “What is lost in the good translation is precisely the best,” writes German author and poet Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Sechlegel [1772-1829]. Why ‘the best’ is ‘lost’ evokes a heated debate. Dr.Johnson [1709-1784] partly explains this phenomenon.

“Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore it is poets that preserve the languages; for we will not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry is not preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language”, he writes. This forceful assertion by good doctor is only partially true. No doubt the best and most complex expression of a language is invariably found in its poetry. Apart from what is commonly called content or experience, magic of good poetry invariably lies in its imaginative construction of language which is beyond the ambit of any other genre. In poetry, one may say, content and form are inseparable. But still historical evidence from the past and the present doesn’t fully support the claim. Despite all the handicaps the best poetry from foreign lands has come to us in translation if we care to look for evidence. Homer literally would have been all Greek to us if not translated. The English language would not be the language we know if the holy Bible was not translated into it in the early 17th century which came to be known as the King James Bible. One may claim in fact that if a piece of poetry fails to stand as poetry in translation it is in reality less of poetry.

Mahakavis [great poets] such as Kalidasa, Rumi, Waris Shah and Shah Latif still sound great when translated in any language. Why popular Urdu poet Faiz despite getting good translators fails to stand out as an impressive poet while Pablo Neruda from a faraway land sounds magical makes us pause and ponder. The nub of the matter is that good poetry sounds good even in translation. If poetry has universal dimension and offers more than a mere conventional linguistic construct, it will retain its appeal in translation in some measure.

Jorge Luis Borges’s claim that ‘the original is unfaithful to the translation’ is belied by his own fiction when translated. To facilitate fast movement and interaction at multiple levels in our contemporary globalised world, the need for translation and translators has exponentially increased. The European Union, for instance, has 24 official languages. That law and legal documents of EU are translated into all official languages may give you some idea of the work regularly done in the field of translation.

Translation is a robust source of enrichment for any language. Apart from other factors what makes English a rich language, translation plays a vital role in making it universally acceptable and sought after. One can find important books published in any language translated into English enabling it to serve as an instrument of knowledge. When we look at the language scene in our country, we find the existing situation quite dismal; no dedicated translation bureaus worth the name function. Whatever little is translated has a poor quality as there are no trained translators equipped with the required wherewithal. That some writers out of passions translate a few literary writings will not change the reality of our being happily existing in our narrow world with our blinkered vision. The knowledge in its widest sense has to come to our tradition-bound society from the outside world as a catalyst that can broaden its vision. And that’s only possible if we translate what other societies ahead of us produce in diverse disciplines. The fact be kept in mind that gone are the days when a language was treated merely as an epitome of a specific culture, literature and ethnicity.

Languages are now more and more being treated as commodities which can serve as a source of material benefits under the ever-expanding influence of capitalist market economy.

One wonders why it’s not mandatory for the state-funded public universities in the country to have dedicated translation bureaus. Sadly even for the translation of our literature we have to look to scholars abroad. Latest example is the English translation of Shah Latif’s Risalo. Dr. Khatau Mull, from Tharparkar, Sindh, has been kind enough to draw this scribe’s attention to the Risalo’s excellent translations done by Professor Christopher Shackle, a well-known scholar of the modern languages of South Asia.It beggars belief that no one from Sindh - which is rightly proud of its literary heritage and has a number of universities - could perform such a literary feat. In Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan the situation is far worse. How we intend to survive in the fast-moving contemporary world when we neither produce knowledge nor create literary writings of universal appeal. Worse is that we don’t even translate the best of what the world produces and creates. Consequently we egregiously fail to enrich our intellectually impoverished society by osmosis. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2019