“Umredraj se mangke laye the chardin
Do Aarjume kat gaye, do intejaar me” ~ Bahadur Shah Jafar
“I had pleaded for four days (of life) from God, two were spent in desiring, (the other) two in waiting.”
“Bal bikharte tuti kabronpe
Jaab koyi mehejabeen roti haiMukjhko afsar khayal aata hai
mout kitni hasin hoti hai” ~ Unknown
“(Laying) beside a damaged grave, when a beautiful lady cries letting her hair loose, the thought crosses my mind that instance; Oh! How beautiful is death!”
“Apni khushi na aye, na apni khushi chale,
lai hayat aye, kaajaa le chali chale” ~ Momin“(I) Haven’t come here (in this world) on my own will, nor will leave it on my own will. Life has brought me here, I came, death will take me away, I will go.”
“Meri akhon me ashuu tujse humdum kiya kahun kiya hai,
thahar jaye to angaaraa hai, bahe jaye to paani hai” ~ Fanee“How will I explain to you, love, what tears (of separation) in my eyes are, when they wait in my eyes they are like fire, when they flow they are just water. “
“Bhnmar se ladro, tund laheron se uljhoo,
kahan tak chaloge kinare kinare?” ~ Raja Hamdani“Fight against the tornado, grapple against the tumultuous waves, how long will you travel close to the shore?”
“Gayi thi kahke layegee julfe yar ki buphiri to badesba ka dimag bhi na mila” ~ Jalal
“On the way to you, (this) breeze told me he will bring back the fragrance of the locks in your hair, on the way back, he was so vain (for being so fragrant) he ignored me!”
Oh, the beauty of Urdu poetry! Going through my bookshelf at home, I rediscovered a little collection of Bengali translations of Urdu shayeree (couplets and lyrical poems) that I recall having relished reading over and over again in my teenage years. The inner page reads in Bengali, “On your first anniversary, a little token of love from your brother” and dedicated to my mother. I always find poetry to be an unique window into a culture, a language and a race. In poetry one can be unabashedly intimate, emotional, ambivalent, tormented and philosophical. This literary form concedes to such a spectrum of expression and thought! Poetic abstraction necessarily commands the nuances of the language and devises new allegories from cultural and regional references. Poetry’s strong oral tradition also adds to it’s tremendous appeal.
Many elements of Urdu poetry is very difficult to translate— a feature certainly not unique to the language. However, a mood of romantic melancholy and playfulness, self-indulgence in idealism and romanticism; a mood torn between separation and union, persistence and resignation, fatalism and activism is predominant in Urdu poetry. And like a lot of poetic traditions in the Indian subcontinent, its romanticism is saturated with a sense of the ephemeral and the ennobling of Love’s joy and suffering into a spiritual quest. This alchemy of an apparently futile human quest of feeling and expressing into an eternal longing for the Divine is quintessential in Urdu poetry. In poems where the Divine is not recognized, Fate, and her incomprehensibility of intentions, becomes a proxy. I think the Unknown is always in the cast and plays a lead-role.
Here is a translation of a poem by Faiz Ahemed Faiz (read about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faiz_Ahmed_Faiz) by Naomi Lazard. I have the Bengali translation of this poem translated by Amitav Dasgupta, amazing that the same poem can have such diverse appeal in different translations!
The day death comes
How will it be, the day death comes?
Perhaps like the gift at the beginning of night,
the first kiss on the lips given unasked,
the kiss that opens the way to brilliant worlds
while, in the distance, an April of nameless flowersagitates the moon’s heart.
Perhaps in this way: when the morning,
green with unopened buds, begins to shimmer
in the bedroom of the beloved,
and the tinkle of stars as they rush to depart
can be heard on the silent windows.What will it be like, the day death comes?
Perhaps like a vein screaming
with the premonition of pain
under the edge of a knife, while a shadow,
the assassin holding the knife,
spreads out with a wingspan
from one end of the world to the other.No matter when death comes, or how,
even though in the guise of the disdainful beloved
who is always cold,
there will be the same words of farewell to the heart:
“Thank God it is finished, the night of the broken-hearted.
Praise be to the meeting of lips,
the honeyed lips I have known.”(Translated by Naomi Lazard)
