THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION 21 story was written in 1937, a few years before the demand for Pakistan was raised, and refers to the promulgation of the India Act of 1936. What makes the choice strange is the fact that well-known pieces about the partition like "Gurmukh Singh ki Vasihat," "Ramkhilavan" and "Shahay," find no place in the volume. Since the selection is obviously whimsical, it is not surprising that Hasan doesn't translate Manto's later and more complex stories. He doesn't, for example, include "1919 Ke Ek Baat," a difficult and bleak tale in which Manto seems to conclude that, despite the presence of Gandhi, the foolish and the brutal characterised every instance of our nationalist past.3 Nor does he include tales like "Fauda Haramda" and "Shahdauley Da Chuha," where Manto suggests that a disparate group of exiles, who have neither shared myths nor a common language, can never come together to form a nation; carrying nothing more than their different memories, they can only live in the half-lit spaces of nostalgia. What is editorially most puzzling, however, is the manner in which twenty-eight of the briefs sketches included in the volume are presented. Hasan doesn't mention the fact that they form a part of a strange and unique text called Siyah Hashiye (Black Margins), which is actually made up of thirty-two pieces designed to be read together. There is, of course, no reason given for the exclusion of the remaining fragments. Hasan's procedure is misleading and damaging, because Manto deliberately composes a splintered text in order to convey his terrified sense that the partition was a time of phantasmagorias. All the thirty-two pieces in Siyah Hashiye together create a nightmare landscape of random violence; a scandalous world where victims and predators interchange places endlessly and unpredictably. To present them as unrelated and individual sketches is to rob them of their cumulative irony and their abrasive force. If Hasan as an editor offers us a Manto whose writings on the partition are considerably diluted, as a translator he recreates for us a Manto who is substantially compromised and damaged as a writer. Not only does he give to Manto's stories English titles which have no recognisable relationships with the original ones in Urdu, he also dismembers and scramble their structures, deletes paragraphs, summarises significant dialogues, omits details about characters, transforms long monologues into comfortable paragraphs, converts broken sentences and hesitant speech into smoothly flowing prose, and adds information about Islamic history and the formation of Pakistan for Kafirs, so as to make Manto both into a communal partisan and a weak storyteller.4 Hasan doesn't trust Manto. He forgets