Interview questions by Utsa Bose, a DPhil student, University of Oxford
What is your relationship with this text and poet, and how did you decide to translate this work? Please do tell us more about the beginning of your translation journey with this particular book, including the major challenges and obstacles you faced in the translation process!
I was drawn into the Urdu text of this work immediately when I was shown it by a friend. I had never had the privilege of reading such work. In school we were only taught Urdu poetry by male authors. There was never any mention of Hijab Imtiaz. I wish there had been. It struck me as important and necessary to learn more. I have spoken of this often, how partition and the chaos not just divided the land but also robbed us of continuity in our literary histories. Divisive politics eroded our culture. I speak specifically of everywhere else affected by the fallout, not India. India has flourished in ways we cannot imagine or hope for. As a result, even sourcing the manuscript was a challenge. It still is. It is not to be found readily. I do not subscribe to divisive politics. Hijab Imtiaz represents a time when we were more whole. I was fortunate to receive photocopied pages from a friend who had tracked down the manuscript to some tiny library in the UK. I wanted to translate her for myself first and foremost. I needed to delve deeper. I was enchanted by small things at first like how in the first poem I read, she said parrots had screamed, not as I had read (from another translation) that ‘songbirds were singing’. I felt truth in her; a magnetism. Hijab grew up in Hyderabad, Lucknow. Her Urdu was a special Urdu ( which I speak of in the introduction I wrote). I had to work hard to get to the kernel of her meaning and to find the same panache and depth in the English I chose. There was a lack of materials available too, secondary sources, academic articles and such. Being as single-minded as I am, I was able to find some very enriching material, which I then first translated into English in order to streamline the process for myself. I had never translated Academic Urdu before. It was very challenging but very, very rewarding.
If our songbirds are violently erased and both their ‘cacophony’ and harmony are erased by the violence of a homogenising colonial English, if we are gaslit by translations into only knowing them all as sweet ‘songbirds’, how will be ever recover from colonialism? How will we know our own music when we hear it?
I noticed the persistent recurrence of musical imagery in the poems of Hijab Imtiaz Ali. Be it the reference to instruments of music, forms of music (there are many references, for instance, to ghazals), or to natural sources/repositories of music, such as birds. In particular, there were a few poems which invoked the image of the Bulbul, a culturally significant songbird in South Asia. How do you conceive the importance of musicality to the poems of Hijab Imtiaz Ali, and how was your experience translating these culturally significant markers from one culture and language into another?
When I learnt of Hijab’s early years surrounded by music and art and literary pursuits, I began to understand her on a different level. It is important to remember however, that Adab-E-Zareen the manuscript I have translated was an outlier to the rest of her oeuvre. An exciting anomaly, but one nevertheless. I felt she was working through her past in many ways in the manuscript, which is why I thought it important to mention her early life in the essay that accompanies that translations. I feel she was freezing time, in a way… the way music does. And it is true, she is obsessed with birds; an obsession I as a poet and story-writer was happy to entertain. Writer’s obsessions are always important to acknowledge. They are an integral part of creative practice. In the case of the political aspect to the work I was undertaking, that is to say, retrieval of a lost cultural history and a decolonizing action (by ourselves for ourselves), the birds become even more important. The birds had to appear almost exactly as they were portrayed by Hijab. These birds represented our land. The sounds of these birds are our land, whole. This also led to my decision to not change the name of the Bulbul. The Bulbul appears over and over. The philosophical question comes to mind: If a tree falls in the forest…. I feel it applies here, if our songbirds are violently erased and both their ‘cacophony’ and harmony are erased by the violence of a homogenising colonial English, if we are gaslit by translations into only knowing them all as sweet ‘songbirds’ how will be ever recover from colonialism? How will we know our own music when we hear it?
The question of the questing self seems to be pervading the poems of Ali. In a number of the poems in the collection, there is a terse interplay and movement between different sensorial, emotive and psychological worlds; between the outside world and the inside, and even the inside of the narratorial voice seems to be plural. How did you negotiate these questions of interiority/exteriority, and what was your experience, as a translator, in the mediation of these spaces?
Yes, this is a great observation and I believe the questing self is why I was drawn to the work. It is actually a tool of the Sufi way. To constantly quest and distill the self. I speak of the mystical element to the work in my accompanying essay, mentioning a few key sufi concepts. I feel the interplay you mention made me feel comfortable translating the collection. This is because in my own work as a poet I too work in this way. It is a space I feel at home in. I have studied most spiritual schools and every one speaks of the dichotomy of the human in the world, emphasizing the importance of cultivating the inner world rather than the outer. I feel Hijab presents this beautifully. This collection is a work to learn from, I certainly have. She anchors the reader in the living, growing world in a way that positions us to see beyond.
There is, of course, the question of form. A number of poems in the collection read like prose-poem pieces, an observation which is complicated by a poem in the collection which is titled as a prose-poem itself. How did you negotiate form, and how important was form, both in the original, and in your practice of translation?
Hijab Imtiaz herself called Adab-E-Zareen a collection of ‘stories’. The decision of how to present them was taken from my hands as a mere translator. The publisher was adamant on the presentation as ‘poetry’. As a result, for my part I did my best to present Hijab’s relationship with forms as honestly as I could. The complications you mention are the oddities of the manuscript itself which I found enthralling and compelling. The sub-titles she adds give testimony to what I believe was Hijab’s brilliance. She was always ahead of her time and in this collection specifically she challenged form.
The poems of Hijab Imtiaz Ali have repeated references to phrases from other languages, particularly French. In poems such as ‘Ma Cherie’, ‘Je ne sais quoi’, or ‘Raison d’etre’, the reader comes across an almost linguistic split-self; how important, in your reading of Hijab Imtiaz Ali, is language to the poet herself? How do we read their own practice of translation within the original? What was your experience of translating these different registers, given that the relationship between French and Urdu, the source language, is different from the relationship between English and French, the target language?
As part of this project, I had the privilege to visit the homestead of Hijab Imtiaz, observe her space, peruse her and her partner’s comprehensive library and speak with her family. I discovered the scope of her reading. Greek and French literary works sat comfortably alongside works of science, geography and English Literature. This is why I bestow the title ‘Rara Avis’ onto her in my essay. She did not limit herself to any one way of seeing the world. I must tell you, the French are all mine. It does not appear in the urdu. This may seem unorthodox, but I felt validated in my choices, knowing what I did about her connections to French literature. I found in the translation of her work a correspondence between Urdu and French that sat much more easily at times, then any English choice I might make and in order to truly seek Flaubert’s ‘le mot juste’ in relation to Imtiaz Ali’s expressive powers, I chose some French.
There seems to be an ambivalent attitude in the narratorial relationship to questions of death and hope. While in certain poems there seems to be wilful acceptance of the inevitability of death, in other poems such as ‘Treatise Against…’, Ali says that ‘death shall turn back…’. Within your practice and experience of translating these poems, how did you negotiate these thematic differences and divergences?
Hijab’s complex relationship with death was probably the most exciting part of this work. I enjoyed every moment. She faces the questions that keep us in fear head-on. I am not sure I see an ambivalence as you mention. You see I see it as deeper than that. Even if we are able to accept the inevitability of death whilst still living, it does not follow that we will not then have any other ideas about it. In the poem you mention, I found myself breathless and enthralled by her treatise, so powerful is her conviction, that in fact there is no such thing as death, you see. What she is saying to me, is that we may ‘die’ but we never end.
Finally, how have these poems influenced you both as a reader and a translator?
As I have mentioned I am a poet and story-writer in my own right, so perhaps the work has had an impact on me in my creative practice. Her experimentalism, her challenging of forms, also the joy of getting to read a text that was written wholly before the fracturing of our psyches by technology – there is an integrity to the work that I found sublime and contemplate often. As a translator, I feel emboldened. It is difficult work, but I suppose I learnt that the translator’s job for me is to bring out the truth, however we are able to ‘translate’ that!
What are your upcoming projects as a translator – what can we look forward to reading?
I have had a number of books out since this one, none of them translation but I can reveal that I have thanks to a friend who sourced another rare manuscript of Hijab Imtiaz Ali’s and am working on translating that. I also have a piece from the manuscript Khalwat Ki Anjuman translated at a special issue published at Words Without Borders here. There were many, many delays in the publication of Belles-Lettres (another French choice!) so things that came after ended up being published before the book itself! Also, I am not sure if you are aware but the book was awarded an Honourable Mention for the 2024 A.K. Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English awarded by the Association for Asian Stud