The Full Manto
Saadat Hasan Manto, the most well-known and controversial master of the Urdu short story, needs no extensive introduction. Bitter Fruit (Penguin India, 2008) is a thick volume of his short stories, non-fiction pieces and even of his one play, here titled as 'In the Vortex,' as translated by Khalid Hasan. It is the nonfiction pieces that provide the real surprise even for those readers otherwise familiar with Manto's stories and style. In these pieces we come to know, in the writer's own words, of his steady decline into alcoholism and eventual untimely death. The 1947 Partition to him was incomprehensible, responsible not only for the murder of millions, but for his anguished banishment from the Eden of his Bombay to Pakistan's Lahore, where he couldn't find regular work, lived on a meager income from his writing (the reason behind some of his stories being obvious potboilers, which he had to produce on a daily basis in order to eat), hounded relentless both by the state and mullahs, and hauled into court on charges of writing pornography. Even then, these were his most productive years as a short story writer, and as can be seen from the piece reprinted above, despite all, or perhaps because of it, throughout the final years of destitution and ill-health, Manto remained Manto - somebody perfectly able, and willing, to slyly slice himself better than even the most vicious of detractors could. But it is his love for Bombay and its film world, where he made a good living as a scriptwriter, that animates some of the best nonfiction pieces: Unforgettable portraits (ranging from Jinnah to Nur Jahan!), biting sarcasm at the United States (far ahead of his time!) in his 'Letters to Uncle Sam', unforgettable 'Sketches.' Some of the nonfiction pieces are on Manto, with the one by his nephew Hamid Jalal titled 'Uncle Manto' being a very painful record of Manto's decline and death. By including these pieces, Khalid Hasan has given us the most complete picture and record of the man and the writer to date. Khalid Hasan's translations, however, have been criticized on the grounds of willful distortions M Asaduddin in the journal 'The Annual of Urdu Studies', in fact, wrote that Hasan "flatten(ed) out uneven contours and cultural angularities of the original" by changing titles of stories, leaving out large portions of the original and by summarizing whole paragraphs. Asaduddin did concede that Khalid's "English is good and idiomatic and his translation fulfills the goal of readability in the target language." The judgment one feels is still valid. Even though Khalid in his introduction in Bitter Fruit admits that he has taken note of such criticism, one sees that he has retained, despite a hail of objections from translation experts and critics, the title of the famous short story 'Thanda Ghost' in English as 'Colder than Ice' - when it really should be some variant of 'Cold Meat.' But still, warts and all, this is a very readable volume of translations, and until something better comes along in terms of size and volume, will no doubt be pressed into service again and again. * Nazneen Sadik lives in Washington D.C.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments