The Complete Short Stories

and, as he professes in his essay ‘Sahitya ka Uddeshya’, it came more naturally to him than Hindi. (b) As a language, Urdu lends itself to finer and more intimate shades of feelings and emotions in Premchand’s hand in a way that Hindi does not; in comparison, Hindi is somewhat bare and unadorned. (c) In the Urdu versions one can find virtuoso passages, passages of purple prose designed to dazzle readers into an admission of the author’s full control and command over the language. It is interesting to think about whether there is an organic relationship between theme and language form, whether language determines subject matter and styles or, at least, whether language and themes are intimately connected. Alok Rai says, ‘It seems as though some utterances can be made most felicitously in Hindi and some in Urdu. What lies behind this—history, social and cultural predisposition or literary traditions? This can be a subject for research’¹⁹ (Alok Rai and Mushtaq Ali, 2002: ii; my translation). He further says that the communalization of these two languages is evident, as one can see that in Hindi if the characters are given Hindu names, in Urdu they are given Muslim names.²⁰ I would argue that the reasons for the differing versions should be traced in the different readerships that Premchand was addressing. And these two readerships were different not only in their religious practices and cultural traditions and cultural symbols, but also in their class differences, in their reading habits, and the literary traditions they inherited. To quote Alok Rai again: ‘Only a deeper study will reveal what was thought to deserve utterance in what tradition and what was considered redundant. One can see the emerging mental disposition of that period hidden in these differing utterances.’²¹ (Alok Rai and Mushtaq Ali, op cit., my translation)Premchand in English

In an article, ‘Nirmala Translated: Premchand’s Heroine in English Dress’, Rupert Snell raises the question, ‘Is Premchand translatable?’ and then answers quickly, ‘In a word—no: the subtext of purity borne by the very title “Nirmala” is denied to those who access this novel only through English’ (Snell 2001, 307). Snell rightly underlines the fact that all the linguistic and cultural resonances evoked by a word or phrase cannot be transferred to the target language. But this is the translator’s challenge—not to produce a ‘perfect’ translation, which is an impossibility, but to gesture towards a universe of possibilities, of cultural nuances invested in the original text. Snell further surmises that few readers would be moved by Premchand if they were to read him only in English, a proposition that one finds contestable. After all, the most widely read fiction writers in contemporary times—Orhan Pamuk, Milan Kundera, Haruki Murakami—are read overwhelmingly in their English translations rather than the original languages, and readers are still profoundly moved by them.²²

Snell’s proposition will not hold good for a multilingual country like India, where the richness of literature in many languages is accessed through English. The question one really needs to address concerns the kind of English that is employed to ensure that the voice of the original author is not drowned in what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak characterizes as ‘. . . a sort of with-it translatese, so that literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan.’²³ Any apparent unevenness and angularity should be retained, and cultural nuances must be preserved and not flattened out. In contemporary India, where the largest archive on Indian literatures and their interrelationships are being created not in any Indian language but in English, the importance of translation in this language cannot be overemphasized. In the multilingual classrooms and literary meets and festivals in India, English often acts as an ice-breaker and a catalyst for entry into the multilingual world, which is the Indian reality. English is also being moulded for this purpose by writers who are writing originally in English and translators who are translating works from Indian languages into English.²⁴

Premchand has been translated by a number of translators with differing degrees of competence and success. Elsewhere, I have dealt comprehensively with the history of Premchand translations in English and the challenges thereof.²⁵ Most of the challenges articulated in the essay—like the varying registers of the original, irregular punctuation, instability of the meaning of words and phrases in the original, and allusiveness—are valid for this anthology too. Premchand’s world is culturally so rich that any translator will have to grapple with the phenomenon of cultural untranslatability. Not to speak of English, sometimes one finds that the cultural resonances of the phrases even in Hindi and Urdu are not the same. Gregory Rabassa, the famed translator from Spanish, has pointed to this phenomenon succinctly as follows: A ‘language will load a word down with all manner of cultural barnacles . . . bearing it off on a different tangent from a word in another tongue meant to describe the same thing.’ (Rabassa 2005, 6). Attempts have been made to preserve these ‘cultural barnacles’ rather than eliminate them, even if it means straining the idiom in English. Inevitably, it has involved a series of particular, contingent judgements and ad hoc decisions that could not always be anticipated. These decisions have also differed from story to story. And that is why there are sentence structures and turns of phrases which might seem infelicitous in English but will give the reader some clue to the linguistic varieties and speech patterns of the characters in the original and the ways in which some ideas are expressed in it. Rather than assimilating the foreignness and cultural specificity of the original in a universalist idiom, attempts have been made to preserve both linguistic and cultural nuances, allowing the English to attain a certain measure of both readability and ‘bi-culturality’.

Premchand was writing at a time when the protocols of style, including punctuation, in both Urdu and Hindi were not yet settled. The editorial endeavour here has been to bring the text in