On translating Pakistani women poets: the ethical problematic of navigating the other

ABSTRACT

My work on Pakistani women poets is the outcome of a decade long engagement with their verse dealing with their socio-political, religious, and economic contexts. The research involved accessing their works in the original Urdu, English, or in the other languages of Pakistan. Wherever possible, I procured the material required in translation; but there was a huge body of work that I received in the original. This is what brought out the translator in me. Having had no formal exposure to translation theory but belonging to a multilingual culture of which Urdu was an integral part made the task of translation both exciting and challenging. In this article I will discuss briefly the genesis of my research, reflectingupon the dissonances and consonances created within my own identity as Indian, female, and practicing Hindu who, in researching and translating Pakistani women poets, chose to negotiate with a preconceived Other. This conscious decision transformed the ‘academic’ act of translation into a complex process involving important personal decisions and repercussions.I will go onto deliberate upon some of the ethical, thematic, linguistic, and stylistic choices I made during the course of translation. The objective of this article will be to explore the dynamics and ethics of translation through the lens of shared gender and religio-political Otherness.

KEYWORDS:

• Pakistani women poets
• poetry
• translation
• ethics of translation
• representation
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These dealt with theft, drunkenness, bearing false witness and Zina, which included rape and adultery. The offence of adultery (Zina) by a married person carried the maximum penalty (hadd) of death by stoning. For an unmarried person, the penalty was up to a hundred lashes. In practice, the law failed to distinguish clearly between fornication, adultery and rape. Rape (zina-bil-jabr) required the same testimony as adultery, that is, four adult male Muslims of good repute who testify to have seen the actof penetration. This made prosecution of rape impossible under this law. Unmarried women who became pregnant as a result of being raped could be held guilty of unlawful intercourse and punished for adultery if they couldn’t prove to the judicial system that they were raped. In addition, the legal possibility of marital rape was eliminated; by definition, rape became an extra-marital offence according to the zina ordinance.

2. In a literary establishment dominated by male writers and critics, it comes as no surprise that the only anthologies of verse that accord significant space to women poets are the ones edited and compiled by women themselves. Rukhsana Ahmad’s anthology We Sinful Women (1991) was the first to project women’s protest poetry in Pakistan. The Pakistan Academy of Letters, Islamabad, in its journal PakistaniLiterature (1994) brought out a special issue of women’s writings, edited by Yasmeen Hameed and Asif Farrukhi. Yasmeen Hameed’s Pakistani Urdu Verse (2010)includes fourteen women poets out of a total of sixty three. MehrAfshan Farooqi includes four women poets in The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature: Poetry and Prose Miscellany (2008). Ali Jawad Zaidi in History of UrduLiterature (2006) does not mention women poets at all, though he does mention women novelists and short story writers.

3. In a personal interview with me in 2013, Riaz narrated why she was exiled from Pakistan. ‘Article 124(a) is an old British law against sedition … and it carried the penalty of death or life imprisonment. A notice was served to me under this section because I used to edit and publish a journal called Awaaz, for the contents of which I was charged with sedition on fourteen different occasions, one of which was the one under 124(a). The article in question was against Zia, and it was seditious; but it was against the Zia government, not against the state of Pakistan … The article for which I was booked was actually the translation of an article in an Indian magazine, and it contained a few remarks and barbs against Zia, making him an object of ridicule … Zia informed me that I would not be hanged, but I was being booked in order to keep me in control and put a check on my seditious writing. Why would I continue to stay on in Pakistan in such an atmosphere? I got myself bailed and came to India, like many others were doing at that time.’

4. Having started out as the editor of a prestigious monthly, Mah-eNau, she was charged with various offences on at least thirty different occasions. One of these was a charge of obscenity brought against her after she published an abridged translation of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. As she recounted in an interview to me in 2010, ‘The book sold five thousand copies in the open market before finally being banned on the grounds of obscenity and pornography.’ Naheed eventually won the court case and was successful in having her post as an officer reinstated after it had been stripped from her as a punishment.

5. Shagufta married twice, both times with disastrous consequences. She suffered from clinical depression and tried to take her own life on numerous occasions. She finally threw herself in front of a speeding train, thereby ending her life at the young age of thirty. (Hameed 2010).

6. The short answer to whether an Indian national can get a tourist visa to Pakistan is no. The two governments allow only business, religious and visitor visas, and the process takes about 2 months with the red tape in both countries; even then there is no guarantee that the visa will be approved. (mha.gov.in, Hindustantimes.com, 2018, thewire.com, 2018.

7. The Ramayana narrates how Rama, crown prince of Ayodhya, emerges victorious in the battle to death against the Lankan king Ravana who abducted Rama’s wife Sita. On the verge of being reunited with his long separated wife, Rama questions Sita’s chastity since she has lived so long in close proximity to her abductor. As a test for proving her inviolacy, Sita is made to pass through a blazing fire. She emerges unscathed and is accepted by Rama. Rama and Sita are worshipped by Hindus, with Rama being idolised as the embodiment of the perfect man, perfect husband, and perfect king, and Sita, the epitome of the perfect wife.

8. The ghazal is a poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain, with each line sharing the same metre. The form is derived from the Arabian panegyric qasida. The structural requirements of the ghazal are similar in stringency to those of the Petrarchan sonnet. In style and content it is a genre capable of an extraordinary variety of expression around its central themes of love and separation. It is one of the principal poetic forms which the Indo-Perso-Arabic civilisation offered to the eastern Islamic world. Kishwar Naheed, ishrat Aafreen, Zehra Nigah, Perveen Shakir, all began their literary careers with this traditional form.

9. As opposed to the ghazal, a nazm has a title as it has a particular theme. It is unified through continuity of meaning. The nazm is further classified into arrangements based on structure (masanvi, musaddas etc.) or according to theme (qasida, marasiya etc.) The length of the line in blank verse remains the same but the rhyme scheme is omitted. It is another form widely practiced by almost all the women poets under question.

10. This is what he had to say, ‘Years ago when I heard Zehra for the first time, she was the lone female voice at the mushaira. Her admirers would praise her wondering how this delicate slender girl could write such superior poetry. They were sure the verses had been composed by a much older male poet. Her initial poetry was written in the ghazal form. It possessed all the qualities of the ghazal, and was expressed with such maturity as to convey no hint of the actual personality of the young, sensitive girl who wrote them. ‘ (Sham ka Pehla Tara, 1980, 5).

11. Translated as’free verse’, this poetic style in Urdu is not restrained by rhyme scheme or the length of its lines but is strictly bound by metre. It was introduced in the early twentieth century and is now the most popular form of the nazm.

12. The only form of nazm that is neither bound by rhyme, length nor metre; called a prose poem, its aesthetic dimension is taken care of by the arrangement of words, the use of language and the creative layout of the pattern of thought. Frequently used by KishwarNaheed.

13. Kishwar Naheed’s Dasht-e-qaismein Laila, (Laila in the Wilderness of Qais) FehmidaRiaz’s Badan Daridaah (The Body Lacerated),Chaduraur Char diwari (Four Walls and a Black Veil), Zehra Nigah’s Gulbaadshah, Gulzameena, MelaGhoomni (The Acrobat Woman) to name just a few.

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Urvashi Sabu

Urvashi Sabu Associate Professor, Department of English, PGDAV College, Delhi University Delhi. Charles Wallace India Trust Translation Fellow, Autumn 2018, British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, Norwich UK. Author of Women, Literature, and Society: Discovering Pakistani Women Poets (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2020) She has published research papers, as well as poetry and prose translations in national and international journals, books and anthologies.