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TRANSLATION
Under alien skies
SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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The magic that Joginder Paul weaves in Urdu is lost in the unfamiliar landscape of English.
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Beyond Black Waters, Joginder Paul, translated by Vibha S.Chauhan, Penguin India, p.128, Rs. 195.
If you don’t know Urdu, then better not read Joginder Paul. No translation can match the poignancy, the magic that he weaves into his writings by stringing words together in lyrical Urdu. His subjects lose their alloy in the unfamiliarity of an
y other language, particularly English, imported from a different culture.
A marvellous writer, a wizard of expressions, Paul, for the new readers, is a luminary of the Progressive Urdu Writers’ Movement. Born in Sialkot, Pakistan and now residing in Maharashtra, this 87-year-old has 13 collections of short stories, his singular contribution to Urdu fiction, the most popular in the genre being Be Muhavara and Be Irada. Besides, his perceptive pen has rolled out a few moving novels. Name any award for Urdu literature and Paul has picked almost all of them.
In Beyond Black Waters, Vibha S. Chauhan, Reader in the Department of English at Delhi University’s Zakir Husain College, tries her best to stay close to Paul’s original, Paar Pare. One knows that translating a vernacular novel into English is like fitting a square pin in a round hole. Almost in every line, its runs the risk of losing its appeal to the readers. In fact, it involves a double risk, that of failing to keep the readers of the original work pleased, and also failing to bring in new readers, those familiar with the translated language. So Chauhan’s inflexible position is explainable and her efforts are appreciated. But sadly, you can’t be compassionate to the translator at the cost of a literary work but take into note that Beyond Black Waters ends up reaching a category which most translated works do — dwell afar from the original.
Rare insights
Paul bases this novelette in Kala Pani in the Andamans, the West’s equivalent of Alcatraz or, say, America’s Guantanamo Bay. He has a series of characters that chance brings together. Each is a sufferer, and each is a survivor. Exiled to the island, surrounded by no humanity but only black waters, be it Baba Lalu, Gaura, Jalime and the others, all set aside their roots and build homes on Kissonwali Gali (a lane full of stories) after the end of their sentence at Kala Pani. With caste barriers, they piece together a society based only on human goodness. They talk about their past as if they are stories of a different world, a world that they have nothing to do with anymore. But not to be so for long. Baba Lalu’s youngest son is framed as a terrorist in the mainland and is sentenced to a Bombay jail. Paul, through this turn of situation, succeeds in highlighting the reality as to how the wings of hatred and intolerance have encased our society at the cost of human values.
But this somehow doesn’t flower in this translated version. Primarily because of the constraints of the language. Many times, you end up re-reading the lines, say, “The sweetness was melting in Lalu’s mouth and the bird kept twittering above his head,” to experience the beauty of the expression.
Untranslatable
Then you seem to understand why Paul, a postgraduate in English Literature, chose to write only in Urdu. “Urdu is not just a language, it is a culture,” he has often said. A culture that can’t be feathered by any other language. In bits and pieces, Chauhan puts across the quintessence of Paul’s narrative. In one of the pages, she writes:
“So my dear behena, I have wasted my whole life teaching Gurmukhi.”
“No matter how a life is spent, Jalime, it is a waste, in the end.”
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