The News on Sunday: What was your childhood like? Any memories?

Muhammad Umar Memon: Nothing much to tell. I was born in Aligarh, the last of my parent’s six children. By then all my siblings had left home except one sister who was eight years older. It was a pretty lonely childhood and quite uneventful. I did have some friends. Although I have now returned almost exclusively to reading and writing, I have been interested in a number of things at different times of my life, among them painting, woodworking, macramé, making carved candles, and gardening.

I grew up with the image of a father absorbed in his books. I remember vividly finding him one afternoon sitting outside the house under the shade of a neem tree, totally immersed in reading. A big black ant had dug its pincers into the flesh on the back of one of his hands and a shiny red pearl had formed around the pair of pincers. He did nothing about the ant, so deep was his concentration. Finally, having had its fill, the ant relented and left on its own. My father published a significant amount, but during the last several decades of his life he was only interested in reading. Perhaps this image had something to do with my choice of profession and my dominant interest.

It was an average life and I went through many of the same boyhood and adolescent experiences as most boys. There’s no point in going over them now, though I might have done so quite eagerly a few decades ago when I didn’t know better. Today such things seem not just insignificant but downright ridiculous. What is one life, after all, in the immensity of the universe?

TNS: Your father Abdul Aziz Memon was a scholar of enormous standing. Did you want to follow in his footsteps?

UM: Maybe I did. But I cannot assign volition or knowledge to the choice or thought, if it was ever there. I can only say on the basis of what I am today and how I’ve lived my life that perhaps I wanted to be like him. But “want” is a terribly misleading word in this context.

TNS: You wrote a book of short stories, Tareek Gali, many years ago. Why didn’t you write more short stories or a novel?

UM: You’ve touched a painful nerve. Let me be candid: Up until the 1970s, writing fiction seemed like what I wanted to do, without realising the enormous responsibility and seriousness it entailed. When I looked at my work critically, I realised it was not much different from the work of other Urdu writers and perhaps in some cases it was even a bit inferior. There was no point in continuing. So I stopped. I think I can write well, but I lack the perseverance and discipline true fiction writing requires. I wrote my last story (“Jati Chizeen”) sometime in the late 1980s. I love it. But I’ve never published it. It needs more work and I find myself inventing ever-newer excuses to delay returning to it. Strangely, I seem to be in no hurry to publish it. The story and I have developed a very intimate relationship, which is satisfying in itself. There’s no real need to put that intimacy on public display. I feel it would be a breach of trust. A novel would be a hundred times more demanding and serious.

TNS: What prompted you to start translating works of fiction into Urdu?

MU: Basically three reasons: practical, necessary, emotional. Teaching Urdu fiction in translation here at the University of Wisconsin, I couldn’t find enough quality translations done with some thought to the chronological development of the short story form in Urdu. The existing material was in most cases unreliable and poorly done. I decided to translate. I later collected the resulting stories into my several anthologies (The Tale of the Old Fisherman, Domains of Fear and Desire, The Colour of Nothingness, An Epic Unwritten, and the most recent one Do You Suppose It’s the East Wind?). So this was the practical reason.

The necessary reason — and I mean “necessary” in an existential sense — was my desire to let the West know that regardless of our deplorable performance in contemporary times, we have still jealously preserved a stout spirit of liberalism in the finer works of our imagination. Eventually what must define us is this liberalism. It will remain and withstand the test of time.

The purely emotional aspect is that I love Urdu — even though we are Memons whose language is Gujarati/Memoni and my mother, to her dying day, couldn’t speak Urdu flawlessly. And though emotional, my love is not uninformed. I have a fairly good grasp of modern Arabic and Persian literature. Nothing like what our prose writers and poets had already achieved by the 1940s exists in Arabic and Persian, although we started to fall behind after the 1950s. It should come as no surprise that the first collection of modern Persian poetry was made by an Indian at Aligarh when modern poetry was still struggling for acceptance and recognition as a valid and viable form in Iran.

TNS: You have translated both from English to Urdu and vice versa. Milan Kundera seems to be your favourite, isn’t he?

UM: Maybe I have translated from English (and modestly from Arabic, if I may add), but not nearly enough. And Milan Kundera is not my only favourite. There are a host of others. I fell under the spell of a Hungarian writer Sandor Marai a few years ago, a very different writer than Kundera. More than half of the novels I’ve translated in the last three years are gathering dust in my filing cabinet. I am not one to beg Urdu publishers. I have no contacts and neither do I have the time or inclination to engage in public relations work. The problem is this: the only person I trust in matters of book production is Ajmal Kamal. He has an innate sense of aesthetics. But, unfortunately, he cannot publish more books because they don’t sell and he doesn’t have inexhaustible funds to continue sustaining loss after loss. Shahrazad Publishers of Karachi were only too willing to publish my translations, but they have no sense of the aesthetics of book production and lack professionalism. Besides, these translations were also done partly out of a very personal need to regain some control over my lost ability to write in Urdu, and that was satisfied without publication. Life already has very little meaning for me. If I can’t live it a little beautifully, what’s the point?

TNS: Who are your favourite fiction writers and poets?

UM: Poetry is not my cup of tea, which is not to say I’m insensitive to the beauties of a good line of poetry. I’m afraid I live in the past; hence my favourites would be Mir, Ghalib, Rumi, Ibn al-Arabi. Among Urdu fiction writers, I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoy the balance of Naiyer Masud’s short stories. He’s a world-class writer. That said, I also like a few stories of Manto, Asad Muhammad Khan, my friend Salimur Rahman, and maybe a couple more. As I say this, I’m painfully aware that I have no desire to light the way for others. I hope readers will find their own way, their likes and dislikes, and the reasons for those likes and dislikes. Choice is a lonely track along a shimmering mirage. You must have the confidence to travel it alone and trust in yourself. Maybe you will never make it. But the reward is not insignificant: you made the choice; no one else did it on your behalf.

TNS: There is an opinion that translation is an interpretation. What is your take?

UM: Assuming it is, then what? How does it solve any of the very real problems an individual comes across in the act of translating? What is more to the point is that there is usually no one-to-one equivalence between the vocabulary of two languages and, more importantly, between how the speakers of those languages experience the world. Ask someone to translate Mir’s: “Kahte to ho yuN kahte, yuN kahte jo voh aata / sab kahne ki bateN hain, kuchh bhi na kaha jata.” If you try to translate it into English literally, it will fail to glow; it might even sound terribly pedestrian. You’ll have to find an expression which more closely embodies the situation of the lover, something that feels natural to English, even if what you eventually come up with is literally at variance with the original. And this strategy may or may not work for a different line of poetry. So, if you want to call it “interpretation,” be my guest; I would, however, call it a “version” or a “spin-off.” In fiction, none of this might work. Fiction’s different formal structures predetermine our choices and impose certain limitations, which you cannot transgress. There too you have to search for workable modes of expression.

TNS: As an astute observer of Urdu literature, do you think Urdu fiction can be compared to world fiction?

UM: For one thing, I’m not an astute observer of anything; for another, this question doesn’t help us understand Urdu fiction. If anything, it satisfies a rather less than honorable human proclivity for self-importance and glorification. One should perhaps ask: what is unique about Urdu literature; how is it necessarily itself and not “itself” merely for the sake of existing and occupying a little space in the vastness of human experience, how is it crucially and ontologically something without which human experience itself would begin to hobble, something that affects and is affected by that experience.

TNS: What are you working on these days?

UM: I mentioned already that because of a lack of publishing opportunities, and my own audacious sense of aesthetics, my translated novels are edging toward nothingness, so I thought maybe I should keep myself going by translating articles written in English about Sufi metaphysics and Muslim philosophy. Not only would it be relatively easy to place them in Urdu periodicals but I would also be finally turning to a project I have often thought about undertaking in the past decade. I have already translated nearly a dozen of them and I hope to see them in print sooner or later.

TNS: Are you satisfied with your contribution to Urdu literature?

UM: Let me answer by relating an anecdote: A while back when I mentioned to a friend that I was serving (khidmat karna) Urdu, he quickly disabused me of this exaggerated notion. He said flat out that I was serving only myself. It hurt then, but it’s really true. I may be serving Urdu literature in the eyes of others, but as for me, I’m only happily preoccupied with something I’m enjoying immensely. So that’s that. My father died and is lying six feet under the ground. Is he satisfied with his contribution or his place in the memory of the people? I doubt it very much. He may have deluded himself thinking that what he did was for others. Eventually it was for him alone. Do I know better?

Altaf Hussain Asad | 10 Oct 2009 | TNS