ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the author's experience of translating three of Premchand's Urdu short stories. Each of the stories presents translation difficulties or problems of one kind or another, some of them being specific to a particular story, or type of story. The sense of translation as interpretation is so strong in Arabic that none of the medieval translations from Greek and Sanskrit into Arabic are literal. The translator freely interprets, putting in his own words to interpret what the original means. That Premchand's best-known works is described as texts of social realism is a commonly accepted opinion. Premchand was aware of the great task he was helping to perform the framing of an Indian national cum nationalist consciousness, trying to come to grips with the shapes and sounds that should define the emerging Indian nation. As Alok Rai observes, thinking and shaping common experiences and creating meaning out of diverse social facts and events were tasks that Premchand had set himself.
