A Fraction of the World: Matt Reeck on Translation

When I began translating Saadat Hasan Manto, a fellow writer—a mentor, and moreover one sympathetic to my interest in India and its literature—told me a market publishing house would never touch it. I suggested that he didn’t know how good it was. He said it didn’t matter; Urdu was too far removed from people’s expectations.

When I finished that manuscript, I decided I needed an agent, and I was surprised to find that the stories immediately interested one. I felt temporarily vindicated. My agent was excited about the stories, but said it would be difficult to place them because Manto was dead (he died in 1955). The publisher would want help selling the book, and Manto would not be able to promote it. A book tour would be impossible.

* * *

The idea of the exotic has an important place in the business end of translation, which is to say publishing. A translator is supposed to bring home a different world (which is in one sense the exotic) and yet some of these worlds are so unfamiliar that simply translating the words won’t be enough for the reader to understand the text’s richness. There is a level of cultural knowledge—historical and aesthetic—that the reader must possess, and if they don’t, then they must at least possess a level of willingness to learn.

While this is theoretically not a problem, practically this means that most readers, like most people, are sometimes lazy and don’t want to commit to additional learning. Yes, they want to read. Yes, they may want to read something “exotic.” But, no–they don’t want to do too much beyond the actual reading. The text needs to be easily approachable, and easily digestible; the reading experience shouldn’t be a frustrating one.

What level of cultural and aesthetic knowledge is necessary to read Manto’s “Second Letter to Uncle Sam”? Not that much. Since the letter is addressed to the quintessential American reader, Uncle Sam, many references are to American matters. But in his eighth letter in this series of nine, the general conversation begins with Communism in the fledgling Pakistani state and, in the first three paragraphs alone, there are four people mentioned–real people. For the reader who doesn’t know Mulk Feroz Khan Noon, Ferozuddin Mansur, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Iftkharuddin, what are you supposed to do?

Proper nouns in general and especially those that refer to some aspect of historical reality serve as a representative case of the cultural barrier of “exotic” texts. In the case of Manto’s “Eighth Letter,” you can appreciate the text’s gist and get some of its humor without knowing the specific people because you can substitute fake names—A, B and C—and you get something. But if the references continue, and you end up using an entire alphabet of replacement names—A to Z—then to what extent can you say you understand the text? To what extent is it possible to enjoy the text? Doesn’t it almost earn your chagrin, as it makes you feel a little dumb for not knowing these things?

***

It takes a sort of hyper-investment for the reader to get into the truly exotic text–the text that requires the reader to know what an average, culturally literate reader doesn’t. This is a death-blow to the text—publishers know this recondite text will not sell. While university presses help by publishing some of these works, they don’t take on others: the manuscript must match a list, and this list consolidates established emphases of teaching and research. For a university press to open a new literature—say, modern Urdu prose—it has to make a commitment to something that they know will not only be unprofitable but will lose even more money than their lists already do.

This situation exposes some of the hollow rhetoric around translation: how believing that translation is a vast, trans-cultural, humanist enterprise without bias fools us into thinking that we’re reading the world, that we’re interested in the entire world, when in fact what we commit to as a culture, and so what is available to readers, is only a fraction of the world. And those remaining parts—the majority—stay unknown to us while we congratulate ourselves on how culturally sensitive we are, how well read we are. From where I sit, I’d say we need more opportunities for the publication of previously closed literatures, and we need to commit to learning about cultures that we know little or nothing about.

Matt Reeck’s translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Second Letter to Uncle Sam” is forthcoming in LAR issue 10. Subscribe today to receive issues 9 and 10.