Review of ‘The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature’

• The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature features both published and unpublished writers from Kashmir and about 30 translators.

• Why does this anthology seem bigger than it is? Because it is not just Kashmiri literature but also the condition via which a literature remembers itself.

• Beneath each sentence translated into English on the pages, another sentence continues to breathe.

Some books are compilations and others are crossings. The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature (Penguin Random House) edited by Onaiza Drabu is both, but neither word quite contains it. It is a book of poems, songs, plays and stories; but beneath these forms moves something older and more difficult to name: the memory of a place speaking through time. Kashmir appears not just as a physical landscape but as a psychic one here: river, mountain, shrine, street, courtyard, exile, longing, prayer. A literary culture is ascendant, imbued not as a monument but as a living thing.

Translated works are like money: one language gives, another one accepts. Literature does not travel so smoothly. Every word comes with a kind of weather. It comes with the room where it was first uttered, with the grandmother who made use of it, with the proverb that shadowed it, with the history that distorted its sound. Kashmiri, with its layered inheritances and extraordinarily rich oral traditions, carries precisely such accumulations. Translating these into English is therefore not simply transferring meaning. It must sense out loss, resonance, rhythm and silence.

Shahnaaz Rashid’s ‘Beneath the Birch Tree’, translated into English by Ashaq Hussain Parray, recounts a birch spotted in solitude after descending from Koker Nag and Sinthen Top. The tree appears to be outside of time. If the pen had chanced upon paper, probably it would have recorded us as “sovereigns” and remembered who “deformed our gold into copper”. This is a deceptively simple image. What is it that the translator must carry across? The silver birch forest, the historical wound, metal gold into copper, and under its weight, the pain of looking back through the eyes of a tree.

Thus, the translator confronts an impossible question: how much of a world can a sentence carry?

In Arjan Dev ‘Majboor’s ‘Darkness at Noon’, translated by Abid Ahmad, the problem changes from metaphor to atmosphere. The tiger lady wears a pheran, drinks kahwa, and spends time strolling about at her home like an everyday Kashmiri. It is the little things that seem simple, until one moves them through language. A pheran is more than just a dress. Kahwa is much more than a drink. These are full of geography and memory. The translator upholds the cultural temperature of a scene without making it an ethnography. But if you explain everything, the world becomes flat.

Mahmud Gami’s mystical poem, ‘Poompur Nama’ (The Moth’s Tale), translated by Mufti Mudasir, renders the difficulty all the more acute. Light and dark interplay between candle and moth are recurring figures to convey spiritual knowledge. The work divides Platonic thinking of absolute presence and absence. What is absent becomes presence and ‘dark’ is a condition of seeing. Language encircles an experience that cannot be wholly articulated. The translator cannot just repeat meaning here. Essence is always unstable. The task is to create an atmosphere where meaning can happen. And this is where the translator has succeeded.

On the one hand, the anthology makes Kashmiri literature available to English readers. On the other, it keeps reminding readers that they must not turn it into domesticity. A translated literature shouldn’t be too close. It ought to leave the door ajar.

‘The Pilgrimage for Our Time’ by Moti Lal ‘Saqi’, transcreated by Sonam Kachru, shows this crossing in particular. The language travels through departure, roads, deserts, and mountains. The phrase “There are always mountains” contains the simplicity of an axiom, but its resonance could only be conjured by what surrounds it: journey, interruption, landscape, barriers and the potential of what is to come. Kachru calls the work a ‘transcreation’ which is significant. It recognises that some poems must be created anew in the receiving language without releasing the pressure of the original.

Naseem Shafaie’s ‘Tale of a City’, translated by Niyati Bhat, presents another kind of challenge. The city and the Vyeth begin to exchange identities. The people who lived by the riverside seem to be enveloped in shame; shawls, pashmina and silk brocades are now the rags of an evaporated social world. The city seems to collapse into the water. Translation here has to preserve not merely narrative but metamorphosis: the moment when geography becomes memory and memory becomes elegy.

Roop Krishen Bhat’s ‘The Address’, translated by Bhat himself, turns the idea of residence inward. Rooms, houses, newspapers, the Vyeth, the neighbourhood—all become unstable coordinates through which belonging is measured. An ‘address’ should tell us where someone is. However, in literature, one can witness how precarious it is to be anywhere—the tension between location and dislocation.

This might explain why the anthology seems bigger than it is. This is not just Kashmiri literature but also the condition via which a literature remembers itself. The translators play a key role in that discovery. A single translator could never provide a single adequate English needed for an entire literary civilisation. Different translators listen differently. Each translation has its own distinct footprint. Because a translation is not a conquest, but eavesdropping.

The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature asks readers not to imagine that they have ‘understood’ Kashmir but rather to listen differently to a literature whose histories, idioms and silences have travelled a considerable distance to reach them. It is more than a bridge between Kashmiri and English. Once the fortification has been established, the two banks can be traversed with equal ease. What translation offers is passage. This anthology does not make Kashmiri literature completely transparent to English; instead, it leaves its opacity luminous. It opens a door, but does not pretend to have removed the room beyond it. Beneath each English sentence, another sentence continues to breathe. That is the miracle—and the burden—of translation: to lose, perhaps, but also to gain; to cross a line without abolishing it.

(Wani Nazir is the author of two collections of poetry: ‘…and the silence whispered’ and ‘The Chill in the Bones’. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Education, J&K and writes prose and poet