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The much-awarded Kashmiri Lal Zakir is a prolific Urdu litterateur. His Partition-based novel, Karmavali, revolves around Karmo or Karmavali who is born into a Muslim family in a village located in the present Indian Punjab. She is married off to Faiza, from whom she begets a son, Khushia. When Partition-related rumours begin to circulate, she and her family leave for a Muslim majority village nearby to stay with her sister-in-law. There she had to leave her son and move on. Soon, amidst chaos, Khushia is lost, while Karmo leaves for Pakistan. Khushia is brought up by a Sikh family. Years later, Karmo is able to meet her son.... I’m sure the original must have been quiet riveting. However, the translation leaves much to be desired. Transcreation basically means recreating a text for a specific audience. The process involves both translating and recreating the original narrative while keeping all its elements and traits intact, viz., its message and style, the images and emotions it evokes and the period as well as cultural milieu in which it is set. For this, the transcreator must be an expert both in the source language (Urdu in this case) as well as the target language (English) and familiar with the respective cultures. Here is a quote from the book: "When I took birth, my father purchased a brown buffalo with livid (sic) milklets (sic) and rounded horns"; "He patted the back... and glidingly (sic) told my mother..." are but two sample sentences of rank bad linguistic/writing skills on display in this volume. It was an ordeal to wade through the dense verbiage. Someone said of Dryden’s translation of Homer, "It is beautiful, but there is no Homer in it" but "beautiful" this transcreation is not. A transcreator/ translator’s creative genius can make or mar a work. While translating, a transcreator has to be creative enough to recreate the original cultural ethos and ambience in the target language. The words and expressions used in this celebrated work are do not aid such a process. The use of irrelevant adverbs and adjectives do not go well with readers. This is a translation which would have benefited from better syntax and imagination.
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INDIA’S
Partition in 1947 ranks among the greatest human tragedies in history;
millions of people were uprooted from their homes and forced to migrate
across newly-created international borders, while facing unspeakable
bestiality. The tragedy spawned a huge corpus of literature — fiction,
non-fiction and poetry. In fact, "Partition" has become a
distinct literary as well as cinematic genre, thanks to such notable
works as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Amrita Pritam’s
Ajj Aakkhaan Waris Shah Noon and Pinjar, Bhisham Sahni’s
Tamas, M. S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa, and Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh
Pani. Some of these works investigate the phenomenon of Partition,
its causes and consequence, while others protest against the bloodlust
that turned humans into worse than beasts. Still others focus on hidden
individual tragedies and misfortunes, even as the human spirit and
innate decency is exalted.