Poisoned Arrow, Smokewater, The Laughing
Corpse, Doctor Dread
Ibne Safi, translated by SR Faruqi
Blaft, with Tranquebar
Rs 295 each
Most, if not all, artists savour the idea
of living in perpetuity. Their work, they fondly hope, will remain
interesting even when they are not around. If that truism works,
then Ibne Safi, a prolific and popular writer of Urdu crime fiction
who passed away in 1980, would have been a happy man today. Even as
the activities of the alleged CIA operative Raymond Davis unravelled
recently in Pakistan — where the Allahabad-born Safi had migrated to
in 1952 — the blogs came alive, with young people quoting from his
novel Aadha Teetar, which described how foreign intelligence
agencies functioned in that country.
“Among booksellers, Ibne Safi’s books were
known as ‘currency notes’,” says Ahmad Safi, Ibne’s son and an
engineer by profession, here in Delhi to launch a set of four of his
father’s novels, translated into English and published by Blaft
Publications in association with Tranquebar. His body of works is
extensive: around 125 novels in the ‘Jasusi Duniya’ series dealing
with the exploits of Colonel Ahmad Kamal Faridi and his sidekick
Captain Sajid Hameed and another 120-odd books dealing with Imran,
the blundering buffoon who is actually a secret service chief.
Through the 1950s and 60s, people in India and Pakistan used to
queue up at the local ‘anna library’ to devour the latest mystery on
offer; his books were also available in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and
Telugu.
The English translations (Poisoned Arrow,
Smokewater, The Laughing Corpse and Doctor Dread) deal with the
one-upmanship between an American criminal Dr Dread and his
diminutive bęte noire, Finch. The covers are but improved and
modified versions of the original, with the front-cover surprisingly
flaunting a quote from AQ Khan (of the nuclear racketeering infamy).
The plots are woven out of tales of intrigue, kidnapping, murder and
blackmail in the upper echelons of society, though, as Shamsur
Rahman Faruqi, Safi’s translator, points out, the plot as well as
the police methods and detection practices appear rather dated at
times. The language presents no such problems, Faruqi says, as
formal Urdu changes very slowly. A literal translation of an
idiomatic tongue, however, can throw up strange sentences like “Sir,
you can cut off my tongue. But I am not a philosopher like you.”
There have been efforts, of late, to locate
literary merit in these works. A recent publication called Psycho
Mansion has its writer Khurram Ali Shafique excerpt around 40
passages from Safi’s books that stand apart due to their sheer
literary value. Rakesh Khanna, founder and publisher, Blaft, feels
that Safi’s works are ideal candidates for postmodern studies of
popular culture pursued in universities. “Research done in the
American universities seems skewed towards Sanskrit texts and
diaspora writers,” Khanna says.
Further translations will depend on how the
four titles do in the market. As sales of Agatha Christies and Erle
Stanley Gardners show, the demand for old-fashioned police
procedural never really disappears, points out Gautam Padmanabhan,
CEO, Westland. With Ahmad Safi open to Bollywood adaptations —these
are 245 readymade scripts, he says — a fresh lease of life is always
around the corner.
http://books.hindustantimes.com/2011/05/pakistani-thrillers-translated-in-english/
