Book Review: Of Language, Longing, and Liminality- On “Baal-o-Par” of Gulzar and the Alchemy of Rakshanda Jalil’s Translation 

Wani Nazir reviews Baal-O-Par (Originally written in Urdu by Gulzar and translated into English by Rakshanda Jalil).

Translation is a very demanding and onerous job that entails more than just switching words across languages. It necessitates figuring out the complicated web of cultural, historical, and aesthetic factors that give things meaning. Roman Jakobson calls the things that translators have to deal with all the time the “untranslatable”. These include words that are idiomatic, references that are peculiar to a culture, and grammatical structures that don’t have a direct equivalent in the target language. George Steiner refers to these as “inescapable losses”, which complicate the straight transfer of meaning. Walter Benjamin says in The Task of the Translator that the main goal of translation is not just to pass on information but also to find a “pure language” that is between languages. This goal highlights how language systems are distinct from each other, not how they are alike. Lawrence Venuti goes into more detail about the moral and cultural difficulties that come with translation. He says that “the translator can never be invisible” since every choice they make about tone, register, or meaning impacts how well the source culture is understood and how visible it is. So, translation is a careful balance of language skills, cultural negotiation, and moral reasoning. It is a place where the need for truth, clarity, and responsibility all meet and sometimes clash. This shows how hard it is to do both as an art and as a way of thinking.