'Manto: Selected Stories,' is a set of translations of short stories written by Sadat Hasan Manto in Urdu that have been translated by Aatish Taseer. The volume looks sleek and distinguished in its dark shadowy jacket, and one wonders at the contrast to Manto’s colourful world. Manto was a genius in painting all the complexity of the mixed culture that was his Bombay with something akin to a single brush stroke. It was never the amount of detail but the one or two items that he chose to describe that made all the difference; however, many of us have only read Manto in translation and have also been onlookers to the criticism faced by his earlier translators, so we are curious about how and why this book is different. In this interview, Aatish Taseer speaks about what Manto’s stories mean to him, about translation and his forthcoming travel cum memoir Stranger to History.
In your introduction, you say, “The translations became a way for me, with my mixed heritage, to limit the effects of the intellectual partition Manto feared.” Can you explain this?
Yes, what I mean by this is that a writer like Manto, a Bombay writer, in many of his stories, easily understood by the average north Indian reader, anyone who can understand the movies or some of the new television channels, has been locked away in Urdu curriculums. Premchand is taught even though in his earlier stories his language is heavily influenced by Persian, almost unreadable. Manto should be easily available in Devanagari, as well as translated into other Indian languages, taught in schools in Bombay and elsewhere. But Devanagari editions of his complete works cost Rs 2500. Who can pay that kind of the money? I’m deliberately not widening this subject because it’s complex and thorny, but yes, I see him as a casualty of an intellectual partition, someone who was allowed to leave for Pakistan. And they of course don’t know what to do with him!
Zafar Moradabadi is a character who stands out in the introduction to Manto: Selected stories. Why has he impressed you so?
Zafar impressed me for his great courage, for his devotion to intellectual life despite terrible odds, despite the world of the intellect in every way collapsing about him. Despite all of this and demoralising poverty, he’s fought for his vocation and the literary tradition he’s inherited. And so, finding my way as a writer in India, with conditions considerably improved in English, Zafar was like a painful reminder that literature is an enterprise; I think Naipaul talks about this as well, that it’s not simply an emanation of the spirit: it needs a world that can support it. My grandfather, MD Taseer and my great-uncle, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, were part of that world. They had mehfils, literary criticism, publishers, magazines, they could, and often did, write for the movies. And so it was doubly painful to see Zafar as now a prisoner of that decayed world.
Aatish Taseer, there is very little information about you in the book Manto: Selected Stories. Please tell us about your student life, career as a journalist and now, writer and translator.
I was at Kodaikanal International School, then at Amherst College in Masachusetts. I liked the school very much and found the college mediocre. Its only redeeming feature was that it had an open curriculum, which meant that I could ignore its politically motivated professors and spend as much time as I wanted reading widely. My job at Time magazine, as I said earlier, was largely clerical. It was like working in a government office; I got through by working in the mornings on a failed novel and reading fiction on-line. It was only when I left Time, and began writing for Prospect and later travelling for Stranger to History in the Middle East, that I was able to realise some of my deeper aims.
Khalid Hasan’s translations of Manto have been criticised by others, as you have done in your introduction, for being attempts at “improving” the text. Would you not trust a knowledgeable translator or editor to do this competently?
No, it can’t be done. Even if Khalid Hasan was a literary figure in his own right, equal to someone like Terence Kilmartin, Proust’s English translator, it would be absurdly presumptuous, and false, to think he could inhabit another writer’s mind. Also, translation is an act of homage. And what homage can you pay if you start touching up your subject, a writer who is many times your superior?
You speak of the challenge in translating from Urdu to English. How did you deal with this?
Yes, in Urdu it’s possible to pack many adjectives into a single sentence, without it seeming florid. Manto is often very restrained, but if you take passages in “For Freedom,” for instance — a wonderful story by the way about god-men and politics — there are descriptions that are a paragraph long. Not only this; they leave the scene of the story and become like sub-stories in themselves; I’m thinking about the one on the Kashmiri punditani who’s living in Babaji’s care, a description which Hassan cuts by half. Now this kind of thing, which Gogol does as well, a ball in Dead Souls, described for instance by a scene relating to the movements of bees, becomes very difficult to render in modern English, without distancing readers.
Your own book, Stranger to History, is to be released next year. Tell us about it.
It’s part-travel, part-memoir. It’s about a trip I took from Istanbul to Mecca and from Mecca to Lahore. The reasons for the trip were related to my brief relationship with my Pakistani father who I had been estranged from for most of my life. I rediscovered him in 2002, but then our relationship fell apart for reasons that had to do with religion, not in an obvious way, but in the way it can have a hold on someone’s idea of history and politics. Stranger to History, is the result of that journey. There are two narratives, one to do with the personal story, the other, with the travel. And they come together in the end. It’s a book I’ve been trying to write in various ways for nearly four years.
What fascinates you most about the world you have seen?
What fascinates me at the moment is how much I missed in India as I grew up here. I knew nothing. No history, no literature, nothing about its historical places, no real languages; we were so proud of our ignorance, so happy to continue with a handful of English novels under our belt and our third-rate cultural world. To be humiliated in the West for being such an illiterate and then to work your way back: that has been my return to India: a slow business of regaining language, of reading and of emerging in some way from this condition. And so to have had nothing, and to begin so to speak from scratch, is fascinating. It means that an entire obscured history and literature is available to you to uncover and it’s a full-time a job.