انشائے غالب یا منشائے غالب ؟ (مکتوبات فارسی غالبؔ ,تراجم کے سلسلےمیں پرتو ؔروہیلہ کی ترجمہ نگاری کا تنقیدی جائزہ)

Ghalib’s Style or Intended Meaning? A Critical Analysis of Partav Rohila’s Translation of Ghalib’s Persian Correspondences

Abstract

Translation is an art that requires skills for the transference of meaning and sense of a text from one language to another. Literary translation is more subtle and, as such, requires more adeptness when it comes to the conveying of a writer’s intended meaning to the readers in a different language. The letters written by Mirza Beg Asad Ullah Khan (1797-1869) aka Ghalib are of seminal importance for the researchers in the field of Urdu literature as they depict not only Ghalib’s views and events of his personal life but also provide valuable glimpses into the sociopolitical landscape of Indian Subcontinent of the nineteenth century. However, the ones that he penned down in Persian remained out of reach for his Urdu readers for a very long period of time due to the dearth of standard translation that would simultaneously retain the aesthetics of his Persian letters while translated into Urdu and the equivalence of difficult words and phrases that would be relatable to the ones rooted in the culture of Indian subcontinent. From 1996 to 2015, Partav Rohila (1932-2016) undertook this momentous task of translating all the letters written by Ghalib, in Persian, to different addressees during his life into Urdu. Over the span of these 19 years of rigorous research into Ghalib’s correspondences in Persian language, Rohila compiled five collections of the letters that were earlier published but lacked the hallmarks of a satisfactory translation as the comparative analysis of the translation of some of these letters cited in the present study suggests. This study is an endeavor to critically evaluate this seminal contribution of Rohila towards the enrichment of Ghalibian Studies. In this connection, the researcher has taken care of analyzing the translation done by Rohila by keeping in mind the main criteria of literary translation i.e. it should not sacrifice the aesthetics of the source text for dragging the meaning from the source language to the target language, it should not leave any lacunae which may confound the reader of the target text and it should be in accordance with the writer’s intended meaning, style and desired impact. The significance of the present oeuvre of the researcher lies in the urgency of the authentic works of translation which are vital not only for widening the canon of Urdu literature and the works of stalwarts like Ghalib but also for globalizing, hitherto, the lesser-known works.