It has been nine years since I was last awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for translation. The project for which I received the award in 2014 was Upendranath Ashk’s Hindi novel Falling Walls. It was to be my first full-length novel translation. My first translated book, a collection of short stories by the same author, was to be published later that year. I was barely able to make the required application threshold for previously published translations, and had to scavenge through my files looking for citations of long-forgotten short story publications from years past. With the current application, everything had changed. I had published nine novels in translation and was waiting for the tenth to appear. I had received multiple awards for my work, including the International Booker Prize in 2022, which has helped put translations from South Asian languages on the map in the Anglophone publishing world. But despite my successes, for which I am truly thankful, there is still a dearth of funding for translations of South Asian literature into English, and this particular project, which is close to my heart, is difficult, time-consuming, and almost completely unfunded, save for a small advance from my publisher in India, Harper Collins. The Urdu novelist Nisar Aziz Butt has never been translated into English, and it is both a tremendous honor and a huge challenge to be bringing her first novel, Wandered the Traveler (1955), into the Anglophone reading sphere. Since I applied for this grant, a new funding initiative for South Asian literatures in translation has come into being, the SALT initiative, thanks to translators Daniel Hahn and Jason Grunebaum, which will be the first ever resource for funding new translations from the region. Until such time as more such resources become available, the NEA is still one of our only resources, and I am deeply honored to be receiving my second award, as well as grateful that the NEA is able to provide such a large tent for translators at all different stages of their careers, working from a wide variety of languages.

About Nisar Aziz Butt

Urdu novelist Nisar Aziz Butt (1927-2020), the acclaimed Pakistani writer whose works have never been translated into English, was Pashtun and born in the mountainous Northwest Frontier Provinces of Pakistan. She grew up speaking Pashto as her first language, and later learned Urdu and English. Author of four novels and numerous other works, Butt was known for her densely crafted philosophical fiction. Her first novel, Wandered the Traveler (Nagari Nagari Phira Musafir), was published in 1955, seven years after the independence of Pakistan. The semi-autobiographical novel traces the journey of Afgar, a young Pashtun orphan, and is reminiscent of Eliot’s Middlemarch and Mann’s Magic Mountain. Very few Pashtun authors have been translated into English, and there are no novels represented in English written by Pashtun authors set in this specific region.