topics: |  fiction-short | urdu | india | pakistan

	‘Your grandfather was MD Taseer, the poet, and you
don’t know Urdu?’
	‘Yes.’
	‘Then it appears I have something of a duty to teach
     you.’

So begins Aatish Taseer's introduction to the world of Urdu, which has now
resulted in this translation.   A child of India's partition, he was raised
by his Sikh mother and never met his Pakistani father until he was
twenty-one.  

It was then that he was gifted one of his grandfather's books, a book of
poetry that bore his own name, Aatish (fire), of which he could only read
the emblem of flames on the cover.  So he started a serious effort, three
hours a day, to learn Urdu.  And then Manto came along, and the first story
he reads with his poet-instructor Zafar is Ten Rupees, also the first in
this collection of ten stories.

---
blurb:
The gentle dhobi who transforms into a killer, a prostitute who is more
child than woman,the cocky, young coachman who falls in love at first
sight, a father convinced that his son will die before his first
birthday. Saadat Hasan Manto's stories are vivid, dangerous and troubling
and they slice into the everyday world to reveal its sombre, dark
heart. These stories were written from the mid 30s on, many under the shadow
of Partition. No Indian writer since has quite managed to capture the
underbelly of Indian life with as much sympathy and colour. In a new
translation that for the first time captures the richness of Manto's prose
and its combination of high emotion and taut narrative, this is a classic
collection from the master of the Indian short story.

Other reviews

Somak Ghoshal in The Telegraph, 08 dec:

After Khalid Hasan’s unduly adventurous translation of Manto published last
year, Aatish Taseer presents a sober, graceful and faithful rendition of ten
little gems by the master of the Urdu short story. In contrast with Hasan’s
tolerably lucid, though somewhat choppy, English, Taseer’s command over the
language lends a certain charm to this version. Taseer has another advantage
over Hasan, in his unwavering fidelity to the original. Whereas Hasan takes
needless liberties with the content — editing out lines or silently weaving
his own annotations into the text — Taseer is closely attentive to the
subtle inflections of Manto’s florid, yet modernist, style. Taseer has the
gift that is essential for any successful translator: self-effacement.

One wishes that his introduction, too, were a little more self-
effacing. For the greater part of its thirty-odd pages, the introduction
focuses, a little too self-indulgently, on Taseer himself.
...
Enthusiasm can tip over into over-zealousness. Once Taseer’s agenda of
repatriating Manto becomes clear, one is not taken unawares by declarations
like this: “the ugly truth about Manto [is] that for all his love of Indian
multiplicity, he went to Pakistan”. This is not just an unfairly reductive
assessment of a complex genius, but also a shallow understanding of
something as complicated as the Partition. In his time, Manto was rebuked by
friends like Ismat Chughtai for his ‘escape’ to Pakistan. Looking back,
Manto’s flight may appear cowardly, even unethical, an act of betrayal to
the country that had given him literary recognition. But he never claimed to
be a saint; in fact, he wrote about the baser human instincts, plumbed the
dark abysses of the mind and picked out pearls “from the jilted squalor and
refuse of life”, as Chughtai had famously said.

Taseer’s Manto is a labour of love, but one that is spiked with jealous
proprietorship. In Pakistan, “Manto’s world”, Taseer declares, “would feel
very foreign... His eye could only have been an Indian eye”. Manto’s
greatest muse was perhaps the city where he spent most of his life,
Bombay. Even so, Taseer’s investment in what he takes to be Manto’s
essential Indianness underestimates the universality of Manto’s achievement.

---
Sidharth Bhatia in DNA
Jan '09: 
It is intriguing to compare this translation with Hasan's: In The Blouse,
young Momin discovers new "lumps" on his chest, pressing which is a painful
pastime; Hasan simply calls them nipples.