ABSTRACT
‘Koobad’ translated as ‘The Hunchback’ is a short story by contemporary Urdu writer Khalid Jawed that narrates a sexagenarian disabled man’s attempts to reconcile with his faith by accepting the rigid choreography of normative religiosity. What follows is a psychosomatic odyssey that inevitably ends in failure. This failure is pronounced and predicted at every step along the way by an omniscient narrator who becomes the able religious Self presenting to us the tragic tale of the condemned disabled Other. It is this testimony that the translator must relate. It is in Urdu that the narrator, who is once removed from the lived experience of the protagonist, is narrating his tale to an able audi-ence. It is in English that the translator, who is therefore twice removed from the lived experience, must translate a narrative already shaped by the limitations of the source language,into an entirely different vocabulary of the target language.By situating disability in the theological framework of Islam, the first two parts of this paper attempt to understand the place accorded to disabled subjects in the larger Islamic codes-of-conduct. The third and fourth parts situate these signifiers in the source and target languages to understand the liminality of disability in the respective chains of signification.
