Abdur Rehman Khan

Abdur is a translator, educator and a filmmaker. He’s currently studying at the New York Institute of Linguistic, Cognitive and Cultural Studies. He likes to read Faiz Ahmad Faiz and tries his best to teach Social Sciences and Literature against continuous systematic erasure.

Translator’s Note

To read Sara Shagufta’s ‘Aadha Kamra’ is like exploring a labyrinth. One will reach different nooks and crannies if the compass of the semantics is altered just by a degree. The very act of translation then becomes like setting up a pre-decided path. Translators can be bridge makers but bridges are often rigid. The poem is filled with allusions as well as direct mentions of Western and South Asian icons and characters. One cannot grasp the line “I who was holding the clay-pot of Sohni” without knowing the story of Sohni-Mahiwal. Rather than providing such footnotes (which would have run as long as the poem if not more), I would request the reader to explore the poem on their own.

Afzal Ahmad Syed has infused the Urdu Romantic poetry’s trope of helplessness with remarkable simplicity. In my attempt to translate it, the challenge was to retain the poem’s simplicity while maintaining the structure. Machine translation finds satire hardest to translate. I believe the case is not very different for human translators as well. Deepak Sharma Deep’s ‘Main Ek Kavi Hun’ and Gorakh Pandey’s ‘Kanun’ are political poems charged with satire. But since the themes of both poems cut across languages, cultures and boundaries, the very possibility of untranslatability was eliminated.