In a way, translation is an act of transforming one social form of lived experience into another; given that a language, any language, is not just an interpretation of a way of life. It’s much more. For one, it’s a worldview embedded in the very texture of life in a particular social context. However, in today’s globalised postcolonial world, there is hardly a strict compartmentalisation of different worldviews, which though tied into relations of power differentials, are hard to differentiate, until one takes a really hard look.

Mirza Athar Baig’s novel, Hassan ki Soorat-e-Haal, does that - while dealing with a host of other issues. I read and wrote a review of the novel, titled Fill in the Blanks, in these pages a few years ago when it was first published in Urdu. Now, Haider Shahbaz has translated the novel into English, and I find it both challenging and exciting to say something about the English version of a book that I initially read in Urdu.

Setting aside the inherent bias of the reviewer (a native Urdu speaker), one can safely say that Hassan’s State of Affairs is a rare piece of fiction to have come out of Pakistan. Reading the English version, it feels as if Haider Shahbaz has provided the linguistic mode for the very feel and texture of the ways of thinking and talking of Athar Baig’s Hassan. In other words, the translation seems to be helping the reader break free from a particular feel of the Urdu text and get into another feel traditionally embedded in English (or more broadly, western) text.

Interestingly, and paradoxically, the English translation also sounds like the convergence of or encounter between two minds; with one (Baig) providing the creative-philosophical thought and the other (Shahbaz) bringing home a (historically suitable/dominant) linguistic form for the thoughts. What an irony! The novel deals with this theme, too, given that, the book, broadly speaking, is about encounters on so many levels.

Put in another way, the book, a fictional account of a dark social world, is not as much about foreclosures as it is about unleashing the possibilities of meanings and afterlives resulting from the encounters between people, things, ideas, and worldviews. It’s about the endeavour to see and write something and then letting that thing spill over with its afterlives, as the writer and readers wait and see where and how far it - the story (or stories) of the thing - goes down the drain.

The novel begins with the protagonist, Hassan, and his everyday habit of catching a glance of things through the window of a vehicle that drives him to and from his workplace, a factory fifteen kilometers outside the city. What Athar Baig does is to pause (at least for the duration of the novel) what the protagonist has been avoiding to do his whole life: take a hard look at/ into the things and events around him.

Thus, starts the creatively philosophical account. Rather than summing up things and stories that surround the things, into readymade descriptive maps of the world, the novel is more of a methodic slowing down and letting things emerge in greater detail. This slowing down and paying close attention to ordinary objects and lives is, in fact, a fictional account of the postcolonial condition, and what’s beyond. And “beyond” here becomes the foreground, rather than a ‘harmless’, hazy background lurking innocently somewhere in the corner.

The story of Hassan is an act of magnifying or a creative fabulation of what is supposedly invisible but keeps hovering over people, objects and things. This makes Athar Baig’s way of writing fiction akin to, what Erin Manning calls, a “research-creation”: the coming together of social theory and art in more creative and constructive ways, rather than making the world easily available (consumable) in finished packages of meanings. In the postmodern context, when the certainty of meaning is gone, when social theory is in crisis and when the art is no more than a consumable entity (borrowing from Walter Benjamin), Hassan’s State of Affairs is a significant contribution to new writings emerging along visionary lines.

While translating the novel into English, Haider Shahbaz, with his own distinct aesthetics and sensibility, has kept what is Baig’s as well as made the novel (inevitably) his own. An avid reader and writer of the English language, Shahbaz has done a wonderful job of making both the content and form of the novel available to English readers in a way that it reads and feels like a book of and in itself. A text is a writer’s version, in many ways, and, translation is a hard thing to do; not to speak of Athar Baig’s prose.

Reading Athar Baig’s prose (in Urdu) is an ecstatic experience, where language becomes an end itself. Despite what I would call “the beautiful limitation”, Haider Shahbaz has successfully rendered the voice of Hassan’s state of affairs into English. Someone who has read the book in Urdu at first might find it hard to settle with “displaced sightseeing”, a translation of phrases that are key to my attachment to the memory of the Urdu text. On the other hand, there is such a mature artistic expression of language Shahbaz displays.

To translate is not just to represent. It’s also to re-present, if not to substitute one with the other. As best as a translator can get, Shahbaz, a native Urdu speaker himself, has maintained the beauty of the two worlds, while re-presenting this remarkable piece of literature to a wider world of English readers. Just as an example, see the names of the chapters: Horror Story; The Editorship of Wonder or Hassan’s Wonderlogue; and Junkshop or Everything Thrown in Trash is not Trash, to name but a few here.

It is important to note the “or” in the titles. Here, through “or”, what Shahbaz is suggesting is that this is the literal translation but you can also read, or take, it this way. Reading, either way, one can’t wait to open up the book and get into the stories the titles evoke in the imaginative eye. 

Hassan’s State of Affairs

Writer: Mirza Athar Baig

Translated by: Haider Shahbaz

Publisher: Harper Perennial, India

Pages: 618

Price: INR 699