Every day, after lunch, I sit at a desk and translate a page of Rumi’s Masnavi. I have been doing this since last year — which is something a man can confidently say in February. I use the version of the poem translated from Farsi to Urdu by Qazi Sajjad Husain, principal of Madresa-e-Alia Fatehpuri, in Delhi. It is six volumes of thick, handmade paper and printed legibly, which is rare for cheap Urdu books.

I translate it from Urdu to English, copying each verse first and then writing my translation under it. I write in a notebook of unruled, long paper that was called foolscap when I was a student though now it might be called something else. I use a fountain pen, because it invests the act of translation with something approaching ceremony. And I like the ritual of carefully filling black ink from a bottle, and even of unscrewing and screwing back on the pen’s metal cap. I like looking at my words in ink, though my writing isn’t particularly good.

On days when I wear a pocketless shirt, and am not carrying my fountain pen to work, I use a ball-point, or, if one is handy, a gel pen of red or green ink. This makes the book look prettier, more laboured upon when I flip through its pages, which I do every afternoon when I am done, to admire my work. I translate 13 couplets, and so I write 52 lines in all, which takes me about 40 minutes. This is one page of Qazi Husain’s book and it takes up two and a half pages of my notebook. If I continue at this pace, I will have finished the poem in the middle of the year 2015.

My translations are quite poor, and a couplet is unrelated in meter, and rhyme, to the one above it. That is fine, however, because quality is not the point. I translate so that I can improve my sight-reading of Urdu. This is best done by writing it, a teacher taught me once, and he was right. I can now read a line and, most times, reproduce it without looking again.

Qazi Husain’s translation is simple and elegant. He renders the opening couplet thus: ‘Baansuri say sun, kya bayan karti hai: Aur judaiyon ki kya shikayat karti hai.’ I translate it: ‘Listen to it from the flute: Hear her sing the song of separation.’

Every so often, perhaps once in two pages, there is a word that I cannot understand at all. It is foreign. When I look up at the line above it, almost inevitably the same word is in the Farsi original as well. My guess is that Qazi saheb’s Farsi is not as perfect as he might wish it to be, though I could be wrong and these might be words of common usage in Urdu. I am Gujarati and Hindi/Urdu is not my language. But I am grateful to him for the simplicity he otherwise uses, because without it I would not have started off on the exercise, and certainly I would not enjoy it as I do. For the sun, a word Rumi uses often, Qazi saheb substitutes the Hindustani souraj instead of the purer shams, and that says something about what he’s trying to do.

Translation is not just rendering words into another language, though that is of course what I am doing. True translation communicates the sum of the words’ meaning, and that is difficult to do between unrelated cultures.

One of the most translated authors of India is the Bombay-Lahore writer Sa’adat Hasan Manto. He is for me the most entertaining of Indian writers and by far the most perceptive. I have his anthology in six volumes, compiled by a man from, of all places, Bokaro Steel City. It is quite handsome, but indexed in a complicated way, so it’s difficult to find a story quickly unless you have memorised the sequence of the Urdu alphabet (alif-be-pe-te…).

When I come across a new Manto translation, I often go back to his original to see how the words have changed from Urdu to English. A recent translation of Manto’s most famous short story, Toba Tek Singh, has been done by the Indian writer Aatish Taseer, son of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer. The story is set at the time of Partition, as many of Manto’s stories were, and in a lunatic asylum in Punjab. Should the asylum’s inmates be partitioned also, and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics sent to India? That is the plot, and the story is narrated through the lunatics, not those who observe them. Manto is the only observer. He is superb, and one line of gibberish by a Sikh lunatic (‘Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain’) has been used as a refrain by Salman Rushdie in one of his novels.

Another lunatic asks his friend: ‘Maulvi saab, yeh Pakistan kya hota hai?’ The man thinks it over, and replies: ‘Hindostan mein aik aisi jagah hai jahan ustre bante hain.’ Taseer translates this line: ‘An area in India where razor blades are manufactured.’ The word ‘blades’ qualifying razors is unnecessary, and takes the menace out.

The famous editor and writer Khushwant Singh translated this story earlier and his version reads: ‘The name of a place in India where cut-throat razors are manufactured.’ Singh adds ‘cut-throat’ because he has weighed the line and sees its potential. I think Singh’s addition isn’t needed, but it’s better than Taseer’s ‘razor blades’.

Singh has also translated Allama Iqbal’s poem Shikwa in a booklet, but it’s quite unreadable. That is because Shikwa is an emotional poem, and emotion does not translate well. Shikwa is better communicated in song, like the version in the great Live at the Kufa Gallery recording of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

The man who translated Manto best was Khalid Hasan. He was a great translator because, though he kept his prose spare and clean, he had the ability to relay the writer’s emotion, which is important in our languages. Hasan did a series called ‘Lahore, Lahore Aye’ for the Daily Times, the paper owned by Governor Taseer, when it was edited by Najam Sethi, where he translated the pieces of A Hamid. These are some of the best columns ever to be published in South Asia. Lahore comes alive under Hamid’s reminiscences and Hasan’s pen. I remember vividly the characters described in those pieces — Maulana Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, Shorish Kashmiri, Ibn Insha, Manto — and, because I am greedy, the writing about food — Pak Tea House, Nagina Bakery, the kababs of Arab Hotel, and Coffee House.

These are translations that really push the original’s message through to the reader. Often this is not done because the words used in translation have a broader, or narrower, meaning than the original word. Sometimes it might be the same word, but one that has lost meaning as it travels between cultures, because it is spoken differently.

I believe — I could be wrong — that words hold meaning in their sounds. In their alphabet, the ancient Greeks pronounced the letter Phi as we would do for phool in Hindi/Urdu.

This means that we mispronounce some of their words because they have travelled to English through Latin. We pronounce philosophy as ‘fee-law-saw-fee’, but what Plato was practising he would know as ‘phee-low-so-phee’. This sound makes the word, and the work, appear more rustic, more approachable, less intimidating.

Translation can make many texts intimidating. Homer is actually quite an easy writer to read, smooth and entertaining, like most of the Greeks and Romans. However, because he was first translated 400 years ago, his English translations are often formal and stiff. However, this has changed in recent years. The best translations of ancient Greek texts are by Robert Fagles, whose works are published under the Penguin Black Classics imprint. In India most (though not all) of the Penguin Black Classics are available for Rs250, which is excellent value. The same editions are sold in England for 10 pounds which is Rs800.

The series was begun by Rex Warner who translated Thucydides, Xenophon and Plutarch. Fagles’s translations are a triumph, especially the Iliad, which is a page-turner and compulsory reading at the American military academy at West Point in New York. It is best of course to access a culture in its own language. This is something we can only understand when we’re adults, but by that time it’s difficult to learn a new language. That’s why it’s so important that children be forced to learn all the classical languages early. It’s easier to learn in a classroom than it is behind a desk as an adult, however pleasurable that might be.

The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar@ hillroadmedia.com