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Monday, April 25, 2011
Ibn-e Safi's Jasoosi Duniya, now in English
 I’ve
been relishing
Blaft’s
English translations of
four
“Jasoosi Duniya” thrillers
by the legendary Urdu novelist
Ibn-e
Safi.
Will be writing a longer piece about these books soon, but briefly:
the central figures in the series are the unflappable crime-fighter
Colonel Faridi and his assistant Captain Hameed. The world they
inhabit is an intriguing one – though Ibn-e Safi was living in
pre-Partition India when he began the series (and in Karachi when he
wrote these four books in the mid-1950s), the setting is highly
westernised in many ways, with the action moving between posh
nightclubs and harbours, skating rinks, the hillock-and-cave-ridden
“Fun Island”, and so on. Notorious international criminals flit in
and out of sight, and the original cover art features blonde women
in flouncy skirts and archers who appear modelled on Errol Flynn’s
Robin Hood.
Much of the likeability of these novels comes from the Hameed
character who, though a resourceful sleuth when the stakes are high,
is also a practical joker with a strange and inappropriate sense of
humour. Some of his antics put me in mind of
Amar
Ayyar,
the prince of tricksters in the Hamzanama.
At one point we are informed, quite casually, that Hameed has a pet
goat named Bhagra Khan, whom he takes for long drives in Colonel
Faridi’s air-conditioned Lincoln. Upon which I present you with the
following mini-excerpts:
It so happened that around this time, pet billy goats had become
very fashionable and the city was teeming with them. Many
college students were now keeping billy goats, and they would
walk them on the streets, equipped with all the latest modern
accessories for billy goat keepers [...] Many respectable
persons gave up wearing ties and felt hats, because they were
simply unable to cope with the stylish ties and felt hats
sported by the billy goats [...] Students would insist that
their goats had just as much right to enjoy the silver-screen
antics of Raj Kapoor as they did; that the goats were just as
interested in chewing up and regurgitating the serious social
messages addressed in these films.
[...] Hameed was of the opinion that if everybody in the world
tried to study the newspaper with such concentration, at least
half of them would go mad. Therefore, instead of reading the
newspaper, he spent his mornings reciting ghazals to his billy
goat, and lecturing it on progress and morals.
The critic and writer
Shamsur
Rahman Faruqi
has done an excellent translating job. You get a sense of the spirit
in which the original novels were written (and the spirit in which
they must have been received by their readers), but these read like
stories freshly written in English - transcreations rather than
laborious sentence-by-sentence translations. (At the Delhi launch
recently, Faruqi mentioned that he was reluctant to do the
translations when Blaft first approached him, "because these books
are so steeped in the local idiom and culture". He also made the
very dispiriting proclamation that he wouldn't have the time to
translate any more of the novels. Hope he changes his mind.)
More on the series soon. Meanwhile, here are some earlier posts
about Blaft titles:
Tamil
pulp fiction,
Tamil
folk-tales,
Kumari
Loves a Monster.
And
here's
a fine website on Ibn-e Safi's life and work.
http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2011/04/ibn-e-safis-jasoosi-duniya-now-in.html
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