Lost in translation?

“YOU won't find my novels in the bookshelves, you will find them under the pillows!” Ibne Safi would say of his works. It was not another megalomaniac writer a la Sir Vidia bragging about his eloquent prose; Ibne Safi was fully aware of the magic his words wielded and the popularity he commanded as a writer. Neither did he exaggerate when he said that people in far flung areas of India and Pakistan could speak fluent Urdu thanks to his novels.

Ask any old timer who could read Urdu and he would vouch for Inbe Safi. He was the Sub-continent's own Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose characters were larger than life yet seemed real. Colonel Ahmed Kamal Faridi, Captain Hameed, Anwar and Imran are the heroes while Sing Hee, Doctor Dread, Finch, and Thressia are the villains who keep the readers on the edge. Each story would leave readers craving for more.

But as the Urdu dwindled from the school syllabi in India, the new generation grew increasingly oblivious of the existence of a great writer whose works became inaccessible to them because of the language barrier and the resultant cultural alienation. Yet, publishing houses across India, especially in Delhi, keep coming up with the reprints and new editions of Ibne safi's works. It shows that those who can read Urdu, albeit a shrinking tribe, are not tired of reading Ibne Safi's novels over and over again.

And then, a couple of months back it struck some publishers that Ibne Safi's works should be translated in English. And so we have four books— Poisoned Arrow (Zehreeley Teer), Smokewater (Paani ka DhuwaN), The laughing Corpse (Lassh ka Qehqaha) and Doctor Dread— translated by well known Urdu critic Dr Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. All the four novels are about the exploits of Colonel Faridi, an aristocrat who becomes a police officer out of his love for solving crime mysteries, and his assistant Captain Hameed who fight international criminals active in India. The translation is good at most places but not that good at certain others.

The publishers' idea behind the translation is that pulp fiction (Ibne Safi would have scowled and fumed at calling his works “pulp fiction”) in India is selling like hot cakes these days (oh, when did it not sell like hot cakes in India, by the way?), so Ibne Safi would make a great read. But there are two glitches in this stance: firstly, Ibne Safi wrote in an era of a different world order. The heroes and the villains of that era were well defined, and Ibne Safi's characters very well depicted the readers' aspirations. With changed priorities and the new world order, that has been rendered meaningless to a large extent and the new generation— that cannot read Urdu— can hardly identify with them. So, even Faruqi, the man who translated them, finds the novels somewhat outdated and he is not very upbeat about the job. “I did it because the publishers asked me to do it,” he told TSI.

Secondly, of all the writers writing detective fiction in Urdu in the 1960s and 70s, people liked Ibne Safi's works the most for the flair and flow of his prose. According to some critics, Ibne Safi is the greatest Urdu prose writer. And a translation, however good it is, is a translation at the end of the day. It cannot capture the succulence of the original idioms and some idioms and phrasal verbs cannot be translated at all. And that says my point.

Book: Ibne Safi (Four Book Series); Author: Ibne Safi; Translator: Shamsur Rahman Faruqi; Language: English; ISBN:978-93-80658-41-4; Publisher: Blaft Publications