I hadn’t given the matter much thought until today, but I notice that most of my last several columns have been about works in translation. World literature is at its peak now; yet, I’m constantly aware how many languages fail to attract the attention of enterprising translators. But, with Geetanjali Shree and Banu Mushtaq — two authors who work in Indian languages — having been awarded the prestigious Booker International Prize, this trend might be shifting.

Translators are given their due along with authors, encouraging the latter to choose novels and stories that may otherwise be confined to monolingual readers. I’m delighted to learn that Daisy Rockwell’s translation of Khadija Mastur’s classic Urdu novel, Aangan, will be released as a Penguin Classic, introducing this fine Pakistani writer to foreign readers well over half a century after the novel’s first publication. I hope that Rockwell’s translation of Zameen — my favourite among Mastur’s fictions — follows suit.

Urdu and Hindi have, arguably, a larger group of translators than Kannada, the language in which Mushtaq writes. Other South Asian languages are generally bypassed by publishers. This year, I heard that Mehdi Khawaja’s translation of To Each His Own Hell, a 1975 novel by the pioneer of Kashmiri fiction writer Akhtar Mohiuddin (1928-2001), had won a prize; but rumour has it that we will have to wait a year or two to see it in print.

I’ve always been interested in translations from languages that are considered ‘minor’ in the publishing world, regardless of the numbers that speak them. I’ve read stories by Mohiuddin over the years in literary journals and am aware that, at some point, a collection of his stories was published in English. But the one novel of his I was able to find was, to my judgement, so poorly rendered and full of typographical errors as to make it unreadable. Then, there’s the case of the very popular Punjabi writer Amrita Pritam, who was well served by the Urdu and Hindi translations in which I read her. Though her poetry has been passably well served in English, her fiction is only adequately represented by Khushwant Singh’s version of Pinjar [The Skeleton] and a handful of her short stories. Other works are all but unreadable.

In Sindhi, Jamal Abro (1924-2004) has been better served in Pirani, a series of stories translated by various hands. Often, however, when judging works translated from a language I can’t read, I wonder whether the selection of some of these stories is based on a sociopolitical rather than an aesthetic criterion, as is the case with many South Asian fictions, including Mohiuddin’s.

I’ve always been interested in translations from languages that are considered ‘minor’ in the publishing world, regardless of the numbers that speak them.

Among other Asian languages, Japanese, Chinese and, increasingly, Korean are adequately represented in English translation, unlike, for example, Indonesian or Thai. The very enterprising Lontar Modern Library of Indonesia has published a number of renowned and lesser-known fictions in translation, but these are impossible to find in British bookshops. In most cases, I have had to make do with Kindle versions. Recently, I waited a year for Amazon to make available a novel of historical and feminist significance, Against the Grain by Suwarsih Djojopuspito.

The story of the novel and its author was told to me by my friend Toeti Heraty (1933-2021), the eminent Indonesian poet and philosopher, in her Jakarta library in 1992. Suwarsih (1912-1977) originally wrote this autobiographically tinged novel in her native Sundanese but, because of its nationalist, anti-colonial content, she failed to find a publisher and, on a friend’s advice, rewrote the novel in Dutch in the early 1940s and published it in Holland.

After Indonesia’s independence, Suwarsih moved to a third language, Bahasa Indonesia, the language that Toeti, a feminist of the next generation, also chose above Dutch — in which she had been educated — or Javanese — her native tongue. It was this interface of languages, along with her pioneering pursuit of lost women writers, that led Toeti to Suwarsih’s work. She may have encouraged the older writer to reclaim her radical novel from obscurity by rewriting it in Indonesian for a generation unacquainted with Dutch and with the history of their nationalist predecessors. “I did not know that what I wrote at that time would be valuable and would attract attention today,” she said about her decision to translate herself.

The Indonesian version, Manusia Bebas [Free Main/Free People], was published in 1975, with an introduction by Toeti. I have the copy Toeti gave me of the Indonesian edition here beside me today.

Somehow, it gives me pleasure to know that the English rendition I have read is of the Indonesian and not the Dutch version, perhaps because I feel that Suwarsih would have had the hindsight to see her own Dutch words in a different perspective, and that the novel is as much a product of her mature years as it is a reflection of her youth. I can’t judge as the Dutch text is unavailable to me. This juxtaposition of retrospection, testimony and linguistic overlay gives the novel its impact; as a bilingual, I cannot believe that the act of translating ourselves can be devoid of mindfulness. (I’m reminded of Qurratulain Hyder’s and Abdullah Hussein’s similar forays into English.) What did Suwarsih delete, or add?

What we know is that the text we have before us is Suwarsih’s final and definitive word of memory and invention. How well her English translator has served her I cannot say. But today’s reader can benefit from both the immediacy of direct recall, the distance of considered recollection and reflect on the double vision every act of translation, by self or other, imposes.

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 27th, 2025