Harish Narang’s translations paint a picture of the all too human Manto

Manto’s writing has a conspicuous unfinishedness, as if he was reluctant to clean up after the act. The images have an unassimilated excess, a kind of subconscious overspill. Perhaps it is a sign of cultivated negligence, maybe a trace of untamed energy. But the effect it produces is of logic fraying. The images seethe with violence. Beauty is mixed with dread, attraction with loathing. For the reader, it is a richly suggestive experience, but it is also deeply menacing.

This kind of writing is a challenge for any translator, for translation has a tendency to reorder and arrange. If this tendency gets out of hand, it can lead to unnecessary containment and reduction of the writer’s art. The result, then, is an impoverished imitation, not a literary translation.

Harish Narang is a veteran translator. He translates both into and from English. His translations of Manto have been published to considerable acclaim by the Sahitya Akademi. He writes with exceptional clarity and his style is supple. In his introduction to the book, he writes at length about the selection of the stories, the structure of the book and the rationale for the choices he has made as a translator of these stories. But what makes the book especially valuable is the masterclass he gives here on the practice of translation and on reading Manto. You can almost hear a seasoned teacher’s rich, ringing voice transmitting the changing temperatures and tempo of the text.

Narang’s essay on Manto, with which the book closes, tackles with reason and elegance the not-so-critical attacks on his favourite writer and establishes his towering stature as a modern writer.

He recalls Krishan Chander’s praise of Manto as Lord Shiva of Urdu literature, “who had drunk to the dregs the poison of life and then gone on to describe in great detail its taste and colour”.

Manto rewrote the meaning of obscenity. He did this by shocking society into an altered awareness of the body as a site of moral-political struggles. This required him to take a stand against prescriptive morality and propriety. He bore the consequences of his audacity with grit and conviction. Time has proved him right, as did the law.

Some of Manto’s stories undoubtedly belong among the world’s modern classics; ‘Toba Tek Singh’, for instance. He was a prolific, feverish and tormented genius, dogged by necessity and mortality. Had he more time and less discomfort, he might have been able to work more on his craft. It is tempting to imagine that more of his stories would have achieved the excellence of the classics.

But what the Manto fans are reluctant to mention, more so in writing, is that he too was a prisoner of debilitating stereotypes. The stereotypes in Manto range across several domains — from religion to race to gender. In one of his stories, ‘Smell’, they all come together in a triply toxic lump. Although one of his early stories, it is a stinking museum of foul stereotypes. I am sure Manto’s ghost will be gratified to hear some vigilant readers haul him over the critical coals for everyone’s “moral profit”. Narang’s selection of what he calls Manto’s “ill-known stories” should go some way in setting the record straight.

Neither is the accusation that Manto’s pen leaned towards the sensational completely baseless. ‘Smoke’, another “ill-known” story, is needlessly, flagrantly and inartistically prurient. Narang reads it with sympathy and great kindness, but his protestations cannot elevate it to the level of a notable, let alone great, work.

This is a sturdy, neat book, made for surviving rough handling by perturbed readers. But the editors could have been less rough with the manuscript. They didn’t give it the care it deserved.