20 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
like a scream. That is why his stories seem to have the structural sharpness of barbed-wires and broken shards — and like them they can wound those who are not alert to their existence. Instead of being problematic, the narrative quirkiness of his stories ought to be exciting for any contemporary translator who is conscious of their jaggedness and fissures, their sudden shifts and silences, their blank spaces and absences.
There is, however, one aspect of Manto's literary intelligence which can prove fatal for any translator of his stories. Manto's language may be economical, but it has the sting and precision of a whiplash. An English translation of his stories may be accurate, but may still fail to capture the grating roughness of his diction, the sardonic irony of his images and the harsh rhythms of his prose. In order to be effective, it would have to cause the same nightmarish pain, the same sharp lacerations on the reader's soul as Manto's Urdu original. Otherwise, he can appear to be either sentimental, or merely obscene and cynical, instead being a writer who has a deeply troubled, but profoundly moral, concern with human experiences and actions in a world which has lost its political sense and social reason.
Khalid Hasan is the best-known and the most well-regarded of the translators of Manto into English. Unfortunately, his collection, Mottled Dawn: Fifty Skethes and Stories of Partition^ by Manto, is deeply flawed. There are two serious problems with the book. One, its translations are highly inaccurate and disfigure the original. Two, it has no recognisable editorial policy. The result is a lazy and an unimaginative book which fails to deal with the range of Manto's responses to the partition. If his initial response to the partition was that of disgust at the brutality, he later tried to make a more historically self-conscious attempt to understand its causes, and then find a way towards a different kind of politics which could assert that citizenship is the right of anyone who has lived for long within certain boundaries and feels at home within its cultural spaces.
Mottled Dawn is, with one minor change, an unrevised reprint of Partition: Stories and Sketches published by Penguin in 19912. It contains only one new text — "Mere Sahib" (Jinnah Sahib). Otherwise, the new edition retains all the problems of the previous version. Hasan makes no attempt to explain his selection of stories nor does he offer any explanation for his radical transformation of their structures into their new avatars. Thus, for example, we are not told why the story "Naya Kanoon" (New Constitution) has been included even though it has nothing to do with the partition. The