Notes from the Sphere: Urdu, Khalida Hussain, and Me

Farah Ali’s translation of Khalida Hussain’s “I Am Here” appeared in AGNI 103.

A few years ago, I became curious about short stories in Urdu. Maybe it was inevitable; I hadn’t voluntarily reached out for literature in Urdu in a very long time, but it was my mother tongue and growing up in Pakistan I’d heard it all around me. I started with a little Ghulam Abbas and Manto—I’d heard of them, and I’d read Manto in English. They were familiar ground. Going into Khalida Hussain’s fiction was walking into the unknown, and it was an incomparable experience. The first story of hers that I read was very short, and very strange. So I read another one, and then another. I’d fallen headfirst into her worlds, created in the Urdu language, of people, objects, and situations that were underneath and parallel to the world I knew. Because Khalida explored the most ordinary things in the most unusual ways, it was the stories I was pulled toward; the Urdu words were just natural containers for her images. And because I loved their strangeness so much, I—who had never undertaken a book-length translation project—felt compelled to translate them into English.

For most of my life, I’d regarded Urdu as if it were a person whose intent toward me I could not figure out. I was a child attuned to the tension carried in spoken and unspoken words, both inside and outside my house. I heard anger when the informal you—tum—became tu, sharp and short. But I also grew up hearing Urdu used in loving and polite ways. For example, it was tu, and not the formal aap, that was also the ultimate expression of closeness to God in the hamds we learned and when we prayed. My grandmother, her sisters, and my father’s side of the family referred to themselves with the plural hum, a way of speaking that decentered the ego and the self.

When younger, I read as much in Urdu as I did in English: moral tales in children’s magazines, and sensational stories and serialized novels from my mother’s and aunts’ collections. There was also Urdu at school. I wrote essays and short stories in it, and practiced tashreeh—writing commentaries on Urdu poetry. My last extended encounter with Urdu was when, for our O Levels, we read Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s novel Pyar ka pehla sheher. Once I was done with that requirement, I distanced myself. I was an older teen by then, and my feelings about the language had grown even more complicated. Avoiding Urdu became part of my self-preservation strategy. I spoke it—a casual, noncommittal choice—but I feared that literature in Urdu would feel too intense, literally too close to home. I didn’t want to read depictions of upsetting worlds I’d grown up in, in the language I’d heard all around me. So I moved away from it, reading and writing only in English, but always aware of Urdu’s presence.

When I recently started reading Urdu literature again, enough years had passed to let my negative feelings about the language soften. Khalida Hussain’s writing came to me at the right time. I spent a little over a year translating her short stories into English from across her collections. In so many of them, the usual definitions of things are turned on their heads: down is up, asleep is awake, death is living. Time pauses, or circles around an event in an endless loop. A woman questions the literal matter of her existence in “I Am Here” (AGNI 103). This is one of my favorite stories by Hussain. The aging woman discovers that she has lately started being in multiple places at the same time. She tries to understand this, but sees that she has to abandon the usual rationales and logic; time itself, along with her own physical existence, has to be relearned.

Every time I read the story, I am moved by the woman’s earnest bewilderment. She’s also quietly stubborn about some small matters. There is almost no dialogue; everything is experienced through the woman’s thoughts and reactions. This is how Khalida Hussain wrote a lot of her short stories—people in them puzzle through layers of murky time, as if it’s an object they’re holding up to the light to figure out. Except that they are within that object at the same time. In a single story the assumed constants can change—whether place or time or the narrator’s physical state—creating a new set of variables. Everyday things switch around, like a washing machine and an old tree, or a person’s ability to tell direction. In an interview, Khalida talks of how she focuses on small instances and objects because by altering them she can create imperceptible but sometimes devastating ripples. Because so many of the ideas in her stories are raised through thoughts and moods and atmosphere, I at times had to translate them in a steady flow, not letting myself edit or even stop for too long on a sentence. Sometimes this resulted in clumsy strings of words, which I had to be all right with for the first couple of drafts, because they at least got across what I’d felt when reading that sentence or situation in Urdu. And that process deepened my understanding of the elasticity of Khalida’s worlds.

Later, when editing the translations, I went through two distinct phases. In the first, I kept each and every Urdu colloquialism in the original language as an act of “fidelity,” driven by a kind of guilt at having abandoned the language in earlier years. Editing required me to slow down and spend more time on each word and line, and those longer hours face-to-face with Urdu made me start to think in different ways about language and translation, and about being a writer who writes only in English, who’s spent years self-consciously away from the language she was born into, escaping into a colonizer’s language. I became too aware of the language itself, in a sort of overzealous course correction, and moved away from the gut instincts that had guided my first drafts. Reading back through, I didn’t hear the stories in the same way I had when I’d read them in Urdu. They rang, to me, of an effort to please Urdu. So, in the second phase of editing, I went back toward the version that was truer to how I’d initially heard it. I realized that staying true to the story and staying true to the language did not have to be mutually exclusive. That is, I could choose which colloquialisms to keep, when to leave in phrases and words specific to Urdu and when not to—and doing so wasn’t disloyal to the language.

I preserved, wherever I could, the flow or syntax of a sentence to mimic the movement of articulated thought or speech the way it is in Urdu. And the resulting drafts were leaner, more economical, and felt closer to the atmospheres and feelings that Khalida Hussain had created in her stories. In “I Am Here,” about a woman getting older and starting to question the very definitions of matter, existence, and time, there isn’t always a clean movement between events. How could there be when destabilization is at heart of the story? So I let the English be dictated by the woman’s shifting subjectivity as rendered by Khalida in Urdu, because the feeling of immense disorientation is the story’s central propulsive force.

A translation, in a way, is like someone performing a cover of a song. A good cover doesn’t have to use the exact same arrangement. In fact, it often doesn’t. There are a few songs whose originals and covers both move me deeply: “Perfect Day” (Lou Reed, then Duran Duran), “Hurt” (Nine Inch Nails, then Johnny Cash), and “No More I Love You’s” (The Lover Speaks, then Annie Lennox). The emotions behind the creation of either the original or the cover come through, into the listener’s ears and up into their brain and down into their limbs and stomach. And that’s what a meaningful translation does; even if you don’t know the original language, you feel the air in the world of that story, and the presence of the people in that world. In a cover, a musician or singer interested in conveying a certain emotion from the original might use different instruments to achieve it, but all with the aim of making the listener feel. In a thoughtful translation, the translator might not find like-for-like words throughout the text; in fact, that literalism often does not serve the original work best. The translator has to trust their ear in recreating what they felt when they heard/read the original.

I had to trust mine and not care that I didn’t have a long list of translation credentials. I couldn’t let my love for Khalida Hussain’s stories—my leading reason for translating them—be overridden either by my limited experiences with translating for an audience or by my fraught relationship with Urdu. I had to stay strong in the conviction that I connected with Khalida’s stories in a way specific to me as a person, in a particular time of my life. That I found these stories in Urdu was tremendous, and translating them into English was a compulsive act of love for the work and the writer.

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Read more Notes from the Sphere, and the series introduction, here.