|
Saadat Hasan Manto |
This has been a week of reading in translation: first Saadat Hasan Manto's
Bombay Stories, translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, and then Uday Prakash's
The Walls of Delhi,
translated by Jason Grunebaum. Manto wrote in the '30s, '40s and '50s,
and Uday Prakash in the last two decades, but the English translations
are brand new.
Bombay Stories came out last month from Random House India, and
The Walls of Delhi will be out in January from Hachette India (I read an Australian edition, which has just been shortlisted for the DSC Prize).
Translation is a strange and wonderful thing. A book rewritten in
another language is like a person given the gift of new life: a new
name, a new look, new turns of phrase — and hopefully new admirers.
Sometimes the makeover can feel radical. Both these books bring together
pieces that have never been published alongside before, giving the
authors' work a new form, and — for me — suddenly placing them in
potential conversation.
{ |
Prakash’s
bitingly satirical takes on contemporary Indian life and literary
culture, while not exactly subject to censorship like Manto, have often
brought down upon him the ire of the Hindi establishment.
|
Bombay Stories unites all Manto's fiction set in Bombay, while
The Walls of Delhi puts
the eponymous long short story next to two novellas, 'Mangosil' and
'Mohandas'. The translators' focus on Manto's richly animated depictions
of a particular urban milieu allows a different Manto to emerge than
the Partition-heavy figure that has been the staple of Manto
publications in English. (The one exception to this is the deliciously
irreverent
filmi Manto of
Stars from Another Sky, Penguin's translation of
Ganje Farishte.) The
book also, as Reeck observes, "represents the first and best literary
evidence of Bombay's emergence as the modern city we now recognise it to
be", a publishing back-flip that finally enables Manto to take his
legitimate place at the head of that now extensive sub-genre of Indian
writing which Reeck designates as 'Bombay fiction'. This world,
populated by "prostitutes, pimps, writers, film stars, musicians, the
debauched, the rich", is one that Manto seems to have inhabited with
ease.
As a writer of 'lowlife' fictions, in Salman Rushdie's description,
Manto may share something with Hindi writer Uday Prakash, whose
sharp-angled tours of post-globalisation Delhi are often routed through
the city's poorest quarters. Also, Prakash's bitingly satirical takes on
contemporary Indian life and literary culture, while not exactly
subject to censorship like Manto, have often brought down upon him the
ire of the Hindi establishment.
No comments:
Post a Comment