Who isn’t familiar with Fyodor Dostoevsky, the globally acclaimed Russian novelist, writer and philosopher! The son of a doctor, Dostoevsky, was among five children who spent their life in only two rooms because of their poverty.
He became an engineer, but his first work “Poor Folk” won him accolades. Within a short period of time, he became a celebrity. However, he was arrested in 1849 for being a revolutionist, though he wasn’t one, neither by temperament nor by conviction.
He was sentenced to death, but when the police were about to shoot him and others, the sentence was commuted to hard labour imprisonment. Imprisonment had a debilitating impact on his nerves.
Later on, he was sent to Siberia for four years before he was allowed to return to Russia in 1859. On his return, he started a journal which was banned. He made a speech at a public meeting which was received so well that he became a household name in Russia.
Crime & Punishment was published in 1866, first in instalments and then as a book. It has already been translated into 170 languages. The original is in Russian.
Translating any work from the original language into another language has its own disadvantages, especially if the source and the target languages aren’t related to each other.
As is a known fact that languages are culturally bound and creating cultural nuances in the target language is next to impossible. This becomes too clear when we open the Kashmiri translation of Crime & Punishment done by a famed writer of Kashmir, Shamshad Kralwari.
For instance, when we open the English version, we start reading: “On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he [sic] lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge” which is translated as (I am using Romanised transliteration): “atsvani julai retini aki greshma tsanji hindi dohki shaamach kath che zi akh javaan yus bamuqam-e- “siin” aki ‘imaraets hinzi braerkaeni hindis sasta kiraayi vaelis kamras manz rozaan oas draav sadki peth ta pok sath-haey aavasemtev qadmav yohai begarz paeth “kaaf” kaedlas kun”. Two words must have caught your eye in the original: “S. Place” and K. bridge” which the translator has translated into “ba-muqam-e-siin” (siin is the 18th letter in the Urdu alphabet) and “kaaf” kaedlas (kaaf is the 28th letter in Urdu; kaedl is a bridge), respectively.
Dostoevsky used the two expressions, respectively, for “Stolnyarnyi Pereulok or Carpenters’ Place” and “Kameny Bridge”, both of whom are historically very important in Russia. In fact, S. Place is used as a symbol for St Petersburg that represents the state of society, with all of its inequalities, prejudices, and deficits.
The Urdu “siin” and “kaaf” are the most inappropriate forms of the abbreviations used by the translator. Could he have used some other words, instead? Here lies the difficulty in choosing an appropriate expression from the target language that would bring in the taste of the original.
The translator has misunderstood “S. Place” as a ‘place’ (muqam) called “S” which is why he has used “ba-muqam-e-siin” whereas the fact is that “S. Place” and “K. bridge” have to be taken as single entities, respectively. That is the problem in translating from one language into another. Another example of how translation could lead to confusion is the beginning of Chapter 2 of Part I.
It begins as: “Raskolnikov was not used to crowds, and, as we said before, he avoided society of every sort, more especially of late.” In this, “used to” means ‘not in the habit of’ but the translator has understood it as ‘not wanting to’ (lob rozun yetshaan). Similarly, “society” has been translated as ‘social relations’ (samaejii rishta) whereas in the original it means ‘any company’.
These difficulties notwithstanding, translations have been done and, today, machine translation has become a reality, despite the fact that it might not be as accurate as one expected. Shamshad Kralwari’s translation of Crime & Punishment into Kashmiri is a yeoman’s service in the sense that he has added a book to our language that has already been read in most of the world languages.
Kralwari has used the same English version that I am using for reference–Constance Garnett’s translation. Kashmiri version ‘jurum ta saza’ (‘jurum’ stands for ‘crime’ and ‘saza’ for ‘punishment’) is an 853-page book (The English version has only 366 pages), published by Kamran Publications at Srinagar, Kashmir, and is priced 735; it was published in 2014.
The novel is divided into seven parts: Parts I and II have seven chapters each, Parts III and IV have 6 each, Part V has 8 chapters which is followed by an ‘Epilogue’ which has two sections—I & II. Kralwari has translated ‘Part’ into ‘laend’ and ‘chapter’ into ‘baab’. However, the English and the Kashmiri versions differ in this scheme.
In the English version, chapters are subparts of Parts I-VI whereas in the Kashmiri translation parts have been made subservient to chapters. ‘Epilogue’ is called ‘und laend’ (end part). Krawalwari says that he had been advised by his former colleague at Radio Kashmir, Motilal Saqi, to translate this novel (page 8).
The translator feels that this novel should have been translated long before but the elders here didn’t pay any attention to the novel’s value in literary history of the world. He feels happy that he got the chance to translate the novel and hopes that the translation would prove a training workshop for the new writers here (Page 8).
He admits that the Russian names are rather difficult to pronounce. However, as one would read the novel, the names would become familiar and easy to say: “I did try to change the names, but they became unidentifiable. Also, I thought it a dishonesty in literature [to change the names]. Some names were, nonetheless, shortened so that they could be pronounced easily” (page 9).
It is fact that Kralwari has tried to use the most familiar idiom that has made the book quite readable. Since it is a huge book, I don’t know how many Kashmiri readers have felt interested in reading it, and whether or not the book has achieved the purpose for which it was published—as a workshop for new writers.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK.