Translating Premchand's many moods

Premchand: The Complete Short Stories is a massive, massive project, its scale veering almost towards audacity. Arranged in a box set of four volumes, each book runs to more than 700 pages. Taken together, the box set forms a massive tome over 3,000 pages long and contains the complete short fiction, numbering almost 300 pieces, by Munshi Premchand in English translation. About 60 translators are credited, though M Asaduddin, the editor of the series, has rendered almost 100 stories to English. Harish Trivedi has written the foreword and the book covers have been beautifully designed by Ahlawat Gunjan and illustrated by Shruti Mahajan. The translation project was undertaken at Jamia Millia Islamia over a period of four years and the books are dedicated to the university.

Many of the stories in the collection are popular and have been translated multiple times over the years. However, many more are obscure. This is par for the course for a writer of Premchand’s stature. Once a popular writer gets absorbed into academia, there is an impulse to compile his/her “best works”. The readership for some of their works grows while the other works lose out. Premchand: The Complete Short Stories, for the first time, brings together all the short stories of the master storyteller. Many of the stories have been translated into English for the first time. Since the stories were translated at a university and most of the translators are academicians, a lot of effort has been put into verifying and double-checking the translations to make them stylistically consistent and true to the originals. Premchand wrote in both Urdu and Hindi, gravitating towards the latter during the later part of his life. He often translated his own stories from one language to the other and sometimes edited them during translation, which means that some of his stories exist in two versions. As Asaduddin and Trivedi write in their introductory essays, an attempt has been made to locate all the existing versions of the stories and reconcile them in Premchand: The Complete Short Stories. 

Premchand: The complete short stories; Author: Premchand (translated by M Asaduddin and others); Publisher: Penguin; Price: Rs 2,999

With prolific writers like Premchand, there is usually a reason why the “best of” compilations are made. Premchand’s stories are certainly all-encompassing, but they can also be placed on a scale with some being better than the others. Among the stories I translated for the collection, “The Tree of Love” (“Kamna Taru” in Hindi and “Nakhl-e-Ummeed” in Urdu) is a deeply sentimental story that might not be as well-appreciated as “Kafan” or “Thakur ka Kuwa”. While translating it to English, I had to constantly remind myself not to temper with the language to make it, in my blasphemous opinion, more appealing. In his introduction, Trivedi says that many of the contradictions within Premchand come from his own preoccupations with his art. How strongly did Premchand’s socialist concerns dictate his art? Did his preference for Urdu in the early part of his career and Hindi in the latter part have much bearing on the stories he wrote? The lay reader may read the stories without bothering with these questions but for readers more interested in Premchand, the short introduction is an excellent entry point.   

Trivedi’s introductory essay brings out the traditional binaries in Premchand — the binaries between the writer and the person, the cities and villages in his stories, Urdu and Hindi, the two languages he wrote in, his issues with realism and idealism, and so on. At the end of each book, just before the glossary, is a record of the publication history of each short story. In the case of stories that have been published in both Urdu and Hindi, the differences between the versions of the stories is discussed and enlarged upon. This will be of immense help to Premchand scholars not just to locate the stories in current publications but also to locate the differing texts and try to understand what happens to the same story in two different landscapes of language. 

One refreshing feature of the volumes is the extremely short glossary. For each volume seven hundred pages long, the glossary is barely six or seven pages long. It means that most of the words and phrases have been translated into English or into their nearest English equivalents. This helps the reader maintain his pace without having to constantly turn to the glossary. 

It is often said that the greatest trick in translation is to make the reader overcome the realisation that he/she is reading a work written in another language and identify with the essential humanism at the root of the work. A long glossary or numerous footnotes interfere with the illusion. Premchand: The Complete Short Stories avoids this obstacle as much as possible. For words that are practically untranslatable or too rooted in the social context, exceptions are made. In short, the tastefully designed box set is a treat for admirers and scholars of Premchand and a gift for someone interested in an introduction to the works of the master storyteller.