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BOOKS
Premchand's
Embezzler
Political,
anti-colonial drama marred by awkward translation
By
Harish Trivedi
Gaban
ByPremchand
Tr By Christopher R. King
Oxford
Price: Rs 445
Pages: 320 |
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Of
the 13 novels Premchand wrote, Ghaban is only the third to be translated
into English, after Godan and Nirmala. In the current state of our postcolonial
discourse, in which a literary work is deemed not to exist unless it exists
in English and "Indian literature" is regarded as being no more
than the sum of works written originally (or else translated conveniently)
into this language of global preference, the Premchand corpus in English
goes up by 50 per cent. Translating Premchand is a tricky task perhaps
because he is not a realist writer. He treats large urgent themes with
a moral dimension, and goes for idealistic endings in which characters
must repent, reform and reconstitute their lives and themselves before
they can live happily ever after. The cliché is not for Premchand
a mere trick of the plot; it is the essence of his radical humanist vision.
Ghaban (1931)
begins with a little girl coveting an imitation necklace, which foreshadows
her obsessive lust for gold ornaments when she grows up. It nearly ruins
her and her husband too, except that half way through, the novel takes
an unexpected turn. The hero, absconding after he has embezzled government
money, is abruptly forced by the police to act as an approver in a case
against nationalist revolutionaries. Here, the shadow of the Meerut conspiracy
case (1929) has fallen on the book, and what began as a novel of social
reform is transformed into a political anti-colonial novel. The hairline
fracture in the plot is bound and healed by Premchand's pervasive concern
with appearance and reality, with ostentation and simplicity, with social
and political justice, and with truth and falsehood.
In Christopher
R. King's translation, much of what makes Ghaban a highly engaging and
complex novel is consistently lost. King is a retired Canadian academic
who earlier published One Language, Two Scripts (1994), an oddly myopic
and cantankerous book on the struggle between Hindi and Urdu. To start
with, he glaringly misspells the title of this novel, which is Ghaban
and not Gaban, an error that no one at Oxford University Press seems to
have thought of setting right. He is often so literal as to be gawky,
he misinterprets idioms and misses irony, and even little colloquialisms
like jao bhi, meaning "get off", are mistranslated by him as
"go right ahead". There are palpable errors on nearly every
page, and on some (page 92, for instance) there are more than half a dozen.
On top of it, King has the audacity to claim that Premchand's title is
inapt because no ghaban or embezzlement ever takes place in the novel-this,
when Premchand portrays the deed, upon which the whole plot rests, before
our very eyes. Often described as a form of appropriation, the translation
in this case is an act of misappropriation, a ghaban of Ghaban. Is it
as a willing accomplice that Oxford (in a blunder more dreadful than any
by King) have put only the purloining translator's name on the title page,
ignoring the rightful owner Premchand altogether?
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