I had always wondered why translators go through the trouble of digging an unfamiliar work by an author they have possibly never known, in a language their tongue barely remembers, and translate. The idea remained foreign to me until I became a specimen of translation and my daily moments at the grocery store much like a conversation with the officer behind the glass screen at US Customs and Border Protection counter on airports.
For me, translations as I have briefly known doing them, are more than just a creative exercise. In my case, I, the writer, am a parasite and the texts I choose, the living beings I cling to, to bring life to a body of language that has been declared comatose by/to the Western world. As a translator, I draw life from the living to revive the dying: my language of Home, Urdu, in a world where the drop-down list of languages skip over the letter ‘U’.
The reason I chose to start translating archived works from the reservoir of publications that HFR has are selfish. This confession is important to make because it’s neither that I consider myself an authority on Urdu—my first language that I have translated works into—nor a seasoned enough reader of prose, poetry, and hybrid forms in both languages to think I’m able to serve justice to this project. To reiterate, my motivation to take on this project was self-serving because it’s important to me to put my language among the global languages that 1000 Languages has identified and dedicated a space to on their web platform. It’s important to me that there are literary works translated into Urdu that are endorsed and acknowledged by ASU, HFR and those pioneering the 1000 Languages Project because if there aren’t, I will graduate as just a bilingual writer whose first language was never known to others. It’s important to me that I have something to show to my friends, teachers, and family back home, many of whom cannot comfortably read and understand literature in English to know what I am doing half a world away from Pakistan.
Undertaking this project is more than just writing translations for me: it has meant that I erect a system that begins with me as the writer and translator, and connects with readers, reviewers, transcribers, typists, editors, and linguists across US and Pakistan who can collaborate to make it possible for every piece of translated fiction to appear on the 1000 Languages website. This system has demanded more than I thought it would. Time, effort, phone calls, internet disruptions, writing, rewriting, scrapping of drafts, new beginnings, teaching, learning, and more than anything, understanding that translations are probably the most political form of literary work. The struggle of translation is much like pushing a big body through tightly wound barbed wires, mincing words into something else as they transfer. This journey is especially arduous because it is done between languages so far apart that letters have died crossing the distance, some sounds gone extinct in the process, some meanings evolving into new inventions over the centuries it takes to travel from the left margin of the page to the right. And it is for those who died trying and those who remain that I have tried to arrive at the right margin and start the journey leftwards. And it is to try and prevent the loss of time and chance that Muneer Niazi mourns in these hand-carved words (quoted below) that I have tried to tell in two tongues what was only felt in one:
ہمیشہ دیر کر دیتا ہوں میں ہر کام کرنے میں
ضروری بات کہنی ہو کوئی وعدہ نبھانا ہو
اسے آواز دینی ہو اسے واپس بلانا ہو
ہمیشہ دیر کر دیتا ہوں میں
I would like to thank the writers who allowed me to translate their work while entrusting me with the task of not butchering it altogether, Jacqueline Balderrama for having faith in me and always offering comfort to my words that were still in incubation; my generous readers Noor Us Sabah Tauqeer, Zain Ibraheem, and Seemein Farrukh Hasnain who stayed committed to a task they had barely any knowledge of and worked with me across time zones split apart by half a day, my transcriber Faisal Basheer who also works as a full-day nurse to my father and house help to my mother and still managed to offer his services for no material gain other than to help our language be known as the legacy it is on a global platform, and my mother, Afshan Nusrat without whose support I would not have survived this mammoth challenge and with whose courage I came to know the importance of living beyond what the body allows and doing more than what one brain, a pair of hands, and a tongue can humanly achieve.
In each of the three works I picked for this project was something that connected me to the image of home I keep hidden beneath my clothes and carry everywhere. In Katie Farris’ The Politics of Metamorphosis, it was the metamorphosis of the human condition, the forbidden pleasures of an escape, and the possibility of finding a sanctuary away from home in a simple feeling that struck me. In Erika Eckart’s Knuckles, it was the connection that humans and animals—two living, breathing, feeling forms—feel regardless of a shared language that triggered the need to translate. And lastly, in Jenny Yang Cropp’s Oriental, I found a perfectly cinematographed scene of the sentiment I described in the introduction of this note: to feel like you are being interrogated at the Border Control every time someone addresses you with an American turn of the tongue. It was not premeditated but these choices ended up falling into a pattern that I may have been unintentionally seeking.
And with a nervous heart and tingling fingers, I end this note in the hopes that my readers back home will accept my translations with approval and those here will welcome my language, my Word of Home with grace and kindness.
About the Translator:
Asna Nusrat (she/her) is a fiction writer in ASU's MFA program, translator, and non-fiction associate editor at Hayden's Ferry Review. Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, she is a bilingual writer who often dabbles in translating to or from Urdu--her Word of Home. Beyond writing and other life things, classical South Asian music, poetry and the dance form of Kathak are her major indulgences that often offer portals for alternate storytelling, in mind and Word.
Translations:
"Knuckles" by Erika Eckart (Urdu)—Forthcoming
"Oriental" by Jenny Yang Cropp (Urdu)
"The Politics of Metamorphosis" by Katie Farris (Urdu)—Forthcoming
With grateful acknowledgment to Urdu translation reviewers: Noor Us Sabah Tauqeer and Zain Ibraheemzain