constructing pathways to translation - Higher Education Commission

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Hussain, translating the literary work of western writers. This helps to clarify the
controversial issue whether translation is creative work, and the translator as an artist has
an inner urge and flair for it. Through translation, the artists creative potentials are
expressed and further enhanced, as translation provides an opportunity to orient his
language to a new literary taste, rhythm, vocabulary and tone. Thus new dimensions in
style and expression, sentence construction, and new connotations are introduced in the
artist’s own language, finally channelising his/her creative impulse in ever expansive
ambience.
At the surface level, the problems and difficulties in translating literary prose are similar
to those encountered in translating any foreign language into ones own. But at a deeper
level, the translation of a literary prose does require special talent and skill: creative
imagination, besides linguistic competence. The translator should have ‘negative
capability’, so as to be able to merge empathetically in the Source Text Language and
Culture , in order to translate in the Target Language, competently.
Every great writer possesses ‘negative capability’. It has been said about Mirza Ghalib,
that he used to think in Persian, but write in Urdu. Thus, the artist during the process of
literary translation, merges through imagination in both the languages in such a way,
that
he transfers the spirit and matter of the Source Language into the Target Language. Here
spirit stands for meaning and matter for the style.
This discussion does not necessarily imply that only creative artists with creative
imagination are eligible for literary translation. It only meant that creative literature like
the novel should be translated at the creative and aesthetic level, and not just with the
help of translation terms. Research has proved the fact that translators like Dr Naeem
Klasra (Tanhaee ke Sao Saal: 2000), Abdullah Hussein (The Weary Generations) and
many more, though not professional translators, but by virtue of their vast reading,
refined taste and ingenius thinking, have been able to produce standard literary
translations.
The reasons for the non-existence of translators to translate the prose, especially the
novel, can be attributed to the problem of publication. No publisher undertakes the risk