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essays
The Rebel's Silhouette:
Translating Faiz Ahmed FaizBy Agha Shahid Ali
Insider/Outer
(A Definition of Translation)
By Sachidananda Mohanty
Language, Culture, Translation
By G N Devy
INSIDER/OUTERSIDER
Cultural Affinities and Distances
(A Definition of Translation)
By Sudhakar Marathe
The Rebel's Silhouette:
Translating Faiz Ahmed Faiz
By Agha Shahid Ali
This paper was presented at the Katha Colloquium as part of the first Katha Utsav in 1991.
My first sensuously vivid encounter with Faiz Ahmed Faiz: the voice of
Begum Akhtar singing his ghazals. She sang him and other Urdu poets as
no one has since her death in 1974, ten years before he died. Which other
singer can gift, the way she did, a raga to a ghazal and then make the
raga, that melodic archetype, feel grateful for being given?
Passion, color and attachment, something that has "the effect of coloring the hearts of men" – that is what the Sanskrit term raga literally means. (One interpretation of "ghazal" is "whispering words of love.") An incipient melodic idea that uses at least five tones of the octave, each raga has "strict rules of ascent and descent, prescribed resting places, characteristic phrases and a distinct ethos of its own. "What Begum Akhtar did was to place the ghazal gently on the raga till it, the raga, opened itself to that whispered love, gave himself willingly, guiding the syllables to the prescribed resting places, till note by syllable, syllable by note, the two merged into yet another compelling ethos. She, in effect, allowed the ghazal to be caressed into music, translated as it were.
You've
finally polished catastrophe,
the
note you seasoned with decades
of
Ghalib, Mir, Fair …
I said in my elegy for her. For unlike other ghazal singers, who clothed words till they can't be seen, she stripped them to a resplendent nudity. If she clothes them at all, it was in transparent muslins, like the Dacca gauzes: woven air, running water, evening dew.
Before the partition of the subcontinent, Faiz had stayed in our house in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir. Some decades later, Begum Akhtar too was to stay in our home, the summer before her death. When I was six or seven, he sent my father a copy from Lahore of his then latest volume – Zindan-nama. My father often quoted Faiz, especially his elegy for the Rosenbergs:
It's
true – that not to reach you was fate –
but
who'll deny that to love you
was
entirely in my hands?
So
why complain if these matters of desire
brought
me inevitably to the execution grounds?
I must have then begun to internalize Faiz, because I often found myself repeating these, as well as other lines, to myself. Without having any clear sense of what the lines meant, I still somehow felt the words, felt them through their sounds, through the rhythms of my father's voice. So perhaps my first sensuous encounter with Faiz was not through Begum Akhtar but at home, through my father's vivid voice.
In our home, poetry was part of the air we breathed. When I went to Srinagar in the summer of 1989 (during which my mother helped me translated Faiz), my grandmother, quite by chance, quoted Milton during a conversation. In English. She was then eighty-eight. Ever since I can remember, she could quote Ghalib and Faiz-in Urdu; Habba Khatun, Mahjoor, Zinda Kaul - in Kashmiri. But she'd never quoted Milton before. I was thrilled because I once again didn't need proof of my rights to the canonical English texts. Significantly, not only was all my training in school in English (I mean I grew up with English as my first language), but, paradoxically, my first language was/is not my mother-tongue. Which is Urdu. When I wrote my first poems, at the age of ten, it was in English. I did not "choose" to write in English. It happened that way naturally.
What is someone of nearly two equal loyalties to do but lend, almost gift them to each other and hope that sooner or later the loan will be forgiven and they will become each other's? When I was thinking of a title for my volume of Faiz translations, my double loyalty rescued me rather than hampering me - by gifting me The Rebel's Silhouette. In "About the Title," a prefatory note to the book, I said: "Thought the poems here are taken from various Faiz volumes, for my selection (which is arranged chronologically) I have chosen to adapt the title of his first volume, Naqsh-e-Faryadi (Sketch of the Plantiff or outline of the Plaintiff or Feature of the Plaintiff) – a phrasing that captures the spirit of his entire output. However, because Faiz does not recognize the moral authority of man-made courts, he is a plantiff only in the courts of the universe. Clearly, a rebel. "This explanation should reveal, quite obviously, my love of Urdu and my love of English. Neither love is acquired – and that key point may separate me from many other translators, for I was brought up a bi-lingual, bi-cultural (but never rootless) being.
These loyalties, which have political and cultural and aesthetic implications, became so entangled in me that they led not to confusion but to a strange, arresting clarity. I thus now qualify an assertion I made, at twenty, in a poem:
Call
me a poet
dear
editor
they
call this my alien language
I
am a dealer in words
that
mix cultures
and
leave me rootless
Rootless? Certainly not. I was merely subscribing to some kind of inherent mode, an inherent one. But it seems even then I had begun to protest this notion of English as alien to the subcontinent, questioning the "they." Perhaps I was subconsciously aware that English would have to be renewed and reworked, "translated" even, before it could be used by poets like me to meet the demands of a "hybrid" cultural situation?
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Why did I choose to translate Faiz? Oh, for a mess of reason (I use "mess" not to suggest any confusion but merely to echo Yeats's "mess of shadows" – a phrase that has never left me). Some of these reasons were quite naturally concerned with the poetic ego. Would I be able to make English behave outside its aesthetic habits? But more immediately: When I came to the United State in the winter of 1976, no one seemed to have heard of Faiz (at that time, some people had begum to hear Nazim Hikmat – a friend of Faiz's and like him a winter of the Lenin Peace Prize for Literature; Faiz had translated some of Hikmat's poems into Urdu). To have to introduce Faiz's name seemed a terrible insult to a very significant element of my culture. As Edward Said says,
The crucial thing to understand about Faiz … is that like Garcia Marquez he was read and listened to both
by the literary elite and by the messes. His major – indeed it is unique in any language – achievement was
to have created a contrapuntal rhetoric and rhythm whereby he would use classical forms (qasida, ghazala,
masnavi, qita) and transform them before his reader rather than break from the old forms. You could hearold and new together. His purity and precision were astonishing, and you must imagine therefore a poet
whose poetry combined the sensuousness of Yeats with the power of Neruda. He was, I think, one of the greatest
poets of this century, and was honored as such throughout the major port of Asia and Africa.
So here was this poet whose work I had grown up reciting and hearing recited by heart, a poet who has continued to be sung by the leading singers of the subcontinent, a poet who was such a master of the ghazal that he transformed its every stock image and, as if by magic, brought absolutely new associations into being. (For example, the Beloved – an archetype in Urdu poetry – can mean friend, woman, God. Faiz not only tapped into these meanings but extended them so that the Beloved could figure as the Revolution. The reader begins to infer, through a highly sensuous language, that waiting for the Revolution can be as agonizing and intoxicating as waiting for one's love). And yet here was a poet just known in this part of the world. So I began attempting some translations, imbibing a few of the methods Adrienne Rich often echoed, but my attempts were somewhat feeble, my result uneven.
And then, quite by chance, I came across five of Naomi Lazard's translations in Kayak, which immediately struck me as excellent. I was eager to find out more about her. Because the world - certainly of poetry - is delightfully small, a series of coincidences led me several months later to a phone conversation with her and, shortly after that, a meeting in Manhattan. I learned that she had met Faiz at an international literary conference in Honolulu in 1979 – one of the only two times he was allowed into the country. Otherwise, the McCarran-Walter Act had kept him from these shores. As Carlo Coppola says, "A spokesperson for the world's voiceless and suffering peoples - whether Indians oppressed by the British in the '40s, freedom fighters in Africa, the Rosenbergs in cold-war America in the '50s, Vietnamese peasants fleeing American napalm in the ’60's, or Palestinian children living in refugee camps in the 1970s – Faiz wrote painfully, stunningly and compassionately of the human aspiration for freedom: a hallmark of his verse and, more than once, an excuse to refuse him entry into the United States." On meeting Faiz, Lazard says, she immediately knew she was in the presence of a poet of world stature, one who must be brought to the attention of her compatriots. And so the translation process began, right there at the conference. Lazard writes:
We established a procedure immediately. Faiz gave me the literal translation of a poem. I wrote it down just as he dictated it. Then the real work began. I asked him questions regarding the text. Why did he choose just that phrase, that words, that image, that metaphor? What did it mean to him? There were cultural differences. What was crystal clear to an Urdu-speaking reader meant nothing at all to an American. I had to know the meaning of every nuance in order to re-create the poem.
What were these cultural differences? I presume Lazard had to learn the nuances of images that would seem to lush to an American poet - images that recur and recur in Urdu poetry, among them the moon, the rose, the moth, the flame. She needed to learn their modern implications while imbibing their use over the centuries. A formidable task! As the distinguished historian Victor Kiernan, the first to translate Faiz into English, says:
"Of all elements in foreign poetry, imagery is the easiest to appreciate, except when, as often in the Persian-Urdu tradition, it has symbolic and shifting meanings." Lazard's translation process continued across continents, through the mail; on a few occasions she was able to meet Faiz during his visits to London. When he died, she already had enough poems for The True Subject, her volume of Faiz translations. As an instance of yet another kind of translation, if one may mystify a bit, let me offer the ring of quotations regarding the true subject of poetry that Lazard offers by way of an epigraph to her book:
Faiz
Ahmed Faiz to Alum Lewis, Burma, circa 1943:
"The
true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved."
Alum
Lewis, in a letter to Robert Graves
Before
Lewis was killed, Burma, 1944:
"The
single poetic theme of Life and Death - the question
of
what survives of the beloved."
Robert
Graves, in The White Goddess,
quoting
Alum Lewis, 1947:
"The
single poetic theme of Life and Death-the question
of
what survives of the beloved."
Naomi Lazard to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Honolulu, 1979
(having read The White Goddess many years before
and
misquoting
the
line attributed to Alum Lewis):
"The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved."
This is then perhaps the right moment to interject with some biography: Born in Sialkot, in undivided Punjab in 1911, Faiz earned a Master's degree in English literature, and another in Arabic literature. In a sense, he was embarked on his own inner translations and, later, did translate into Urdu, the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and the Kazakhastani poet Omar Uljaz Ali Suleiman. I don't know whether he translated any Arabic writers though he counted several of them, including the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, among his personal friends. After independence, which accompanied the partition of the subcontinent (1947), he chose to live in Pakistan and became editor of The Pakistan Times. In 1951, along with several left-wing army officers, he was arrested on the charge of planning a Soviet-sponsored coup. He spent four years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement, under sentence of death, but was released in 1955. He returned to work on The Pakistan Times.
In 1958, he was removed from that post and also jailed when Arub Khan's military government took over. Interestingly, when UNESCO was approaching governments to nominate the representative writers of their countries – so they could be translated into various "major" languages – the first name Arub Khan mentioned was Faiz. After translations of his work appeared in Russian, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (1962). Appointed Chair of the National Council on the Arts during Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's prime ministership, he lost that position after Bhutto's overthrow by Zia ul-Haq. He lived in Beirut – till the Israeli invasion of 1982 – and edited Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writer's Association. His death in Lahore in November 1984 was reported, sometimes in banner headlines, in the first pages of newspapers in India, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, and throughout the Middle East.
Given Faiz's political commitments, particularly his Marxist understanding of history, audience may hastily assume that he was a poet of slogans. His genius, however, lay in his ability of balance his politics with his (in some ways stringently traditional, often classical) aesthetics without compromising either. He once advised a poet to avoid didactic and rhetorical gestures. He also said that "the future of the ghazal, like the future of all poetry, depends above all on the talent of its future practitioners. Pedantically speaking, there is nothing good or bad in any poetic form, but that the poet makes it so. For some insight into the future of this much maligned and much admired form of expression, it would be best to look at its past. Not the distant past when its excellence was unquestioned but the recent past when its raison d'etre was first brought into question. This was in the mid-nineteenth century when, in Ghalib's phraseology, “the last candle of freedom anguished by the ending of the convivial night flickered and died”; when the last battle for liberation was fought and lost. In the breast-beating that followed, poetry, which was then synonymous with the 'ghazal' was denounced as one of the factors responsible for this debacle. But, Faiz emphasizes, the ghazal survived and continues to.
Here, it may be useful to explain the ghazal, a form that in its present shape is eight hundred years old but which traces its origins to pre-islamic Arabia. (Garcia Lorca wrote several ghazals, acknowledging in his usual catholic manner the Arabic influence on Spain.) Composed of thematically autonomous couplets that are linked together in a strict scheme of rhyme and metre, the ghazal, in its opening couplet, establishes a scheme that occurs in both lines. As John Hollander says, "For couplets the ghazal is prime; at the end/Of each one's refrain like a chime: at the end." Having seen this couplet, the reader would know that the second line of every succeeding couplet would end with "at the end" (called radif), the phrase preceded by a word or syllable rhyming with "prime" and "chime" (called qafia). "Thus, Hollander continues: "But in subsequent couplets throughout the whole poem,/It's the second line only will rhyme at the end." Hollander has done something remarkable here, for he seems to have captured the peculiar fragrance of the form (and no poet in English, to my knowledge, has done that). By having "at the end" as his radif, he has responded to the internal emotional logic of the ghazal, its constant sense of longing. Further, in subsequent couplets, not only has Hollander maintained the form but he has resisted the Western insistence on unity. (His one departure is that he has not maintained syllabic consistency in his line lengths.) The form of the ghazal is tantalizing because it gives the poet the freedom to engage with all kinds of themes, issues, attitudes, while keeping him gratefully shackled. Its "rigidity of form," in Faiz's words, "is coupled with an equal if not greater freedom in the use of not only Empson's seven but innumerable forms of 'ambiguity.’ The ghazal manipulates the "meaning of meaning, i.e., endowing a word or sign with a number of concomitant referents explicable only in a particular textual or social context." The form embodies, in Kiernan's words, "a kind of stream-of-consciousness, and might prove helpful to Western writes eaged in their framework of logic, which they have tried to break out from by discarding metre, and sometimes sense as well." One couplet of a ghazal may be political, another tragic, one religious, another romantic, and so on. Comprising at least four couplets, the ghazal has no maximum limit. Let me offer one more of Hollander's couplets: "You gathered all manner of flowers all day, /But your hands were most fragrant of thyme, at the end." Because translating a ghazal is just about impossible, I have adopted loose, free verse stanzas (along the lines of Merwin's versions of Ghalib) to suggest the elliptical power of Faiz's couplets. The magic of the form is missing, often heartbreakingly so.
Desperation can lead one to other ways of creating magic, and mine led me back to Aijaz Ahmad's edition of the Ghazals of Ghalib, a collaboration with Thomas Fitzsimmons, William Hunt, W.S. Merwin, David Ray, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, and Mark Strand. He simplified Ghalib into literal version and added necessary scholarly explanations – almost everything someone not familiar with the originals would need. He sent all this material to the poets, asking them to attempt versions of whichever ones they liked. What emerged was sometimes, spectacular, sometimes magical, sometimes passable – but always interesting. Merwin and Rich's efforts struck me as particularly compelling, some of which have inspired me in my attempts. They have done so by showing me how one may at times use free verse to capture the essence of a stringent form. One of my favourite couplets by Ghalib was transliterated thus by Aijaz Ahmad, who maintains the passive construction of the original:
To
him comes sleep, belongs the mind (peace of mind),
belong
the nights
On
whose arm you spread your hair.
This is how Merwin tackled it:
Sleep
comes to him
peace belongs
to him
the
night is his
over
whose arm you spread your hair
Adrienne Rich:
Sleep
is his, and peace of mind, and the
nights
belong to him
across
whose arms you spread the veils of your hair.
William Stafford:
Sleep
comes, peace, quiet of rest,
for
one who holds an arm under your hair.
None of these quite suggested the emotional desperation, however quite, of the original. How to convey that this person, because of whom your world is an absolute turmoil (the word for "spreading your hair" suggests that in Urdu), is undisturbed, absolutely in control, asleep peacefully while you lying restlessly with your head on his arm? Merwin made another attempt, one that always takes my breath away:
He is the lord of sleep
lord of peace
lord of nighton whose arm your hair is lying
Though "hair is lying" doesn’t quite do it, I cannot think of any way his use of "lord" could be improved upon. It conveys everything, for the passive voice in Urdu is not passive; rather, it can be quite imperious. "Lord" captures that imperial moment, the control this lover has, his habit of taking for granted the one whose hair is lying on his arm. How I wish Merwin knew Urdu so that he could realize his aesthetic victory here! How I wish he could hear Begum Akhtar's rendering of these lines in Raga Bhairavi and be put under a spell! This is quite an irony: someone who doesn't know the language he is translating from can never truly know the extent of his failure or triumph.
Faiz's regular poems (that is, not the ghazals) have proved somewhat easier for me to translate. But how to point out to exclusively English speakers the moment when what they see merely as exotic is actually challenging the "exotic"? In a very famous poem, "Don't Ask Me For That Love Again," Faiz breaks radically from Urdu's usual manner of looking at the Beloved, asking her to accept his social commitment as more important than their love
That
which then was ours, my love,
don't
ask me for that love again.
the
world then was gold, burnished with light –
and
only because of you. That's what I had believed.
How
could one weep for sorrows other than yours?
How
could one have any sorrow but the one you gave?
So
what were these protests, these rumors of injustice?
A
glimpse of your face was evidence of springtime.
The
sky, wherever I looked, was nothing but your eyes.
If
you'd fall into my arms, Fate would be helpless.
All
this I'd thought, all this I'd believed.
But
there were other sorrows, comforts other than love.
The
rich had cast their spell on history:
dark
centuries had been embroidered on brocades and silks.
Bitter
threads began to unravel before me
as
I went into alleys and in open markets
saw
bodies plastered with ash, bathed in blood.
I
saw them sold and bought, again and again.
This
too deserves attention. I can't help but look back
when
I return from those alleys – what should one do?
And
you still are so ravishing – what should I do?
There
are other sorrows in this world,
comforts
other than love.
Don't
ask me, my love, for that love again.
This was a revolutionary poem, envied by many Urdu poets who wished they had first brought the socialist Revolution into the realm of the Beloved, setting the archetype against itself, as it were. In this poem, Faiz announces that poetry, without dismissing tradition: the poem clearly established the importance of the Beloved and her beauty. But it does some plain speaking (almost like Cordelia to Lear), granting love its due, but no more. That Faiz had emphasized political commitment here did not, mean that he would not, in other poems, address the Beloved in the manner of "love-poetry," showing how the speaker's life depended entirely on her or him. But then often when he addresses the Beloved, he is also addressing a figure that may very well be the Revolution - as lost lover, or a cruel lover refusing to return.
In translating this poem, I took two recognizable liberties. One of the lines, literally translated, could read: "When there's your sorrow, what is this struggle of the world?" "Your sorrow" in Urdu can mean both "The sorrow you've caused me" and "The sorrow you feel." Further, "Struggle of the world" does not quite suggest the nuances Faiz was striving after. I enlarged that one line into three:
How
could one weep for sorrows other than yours?
How
could one have any sorrows but the one you gave?
So
what were these protests, these rumors of injustice?
I also bypassed two lines of the original, which Victor Kiernan has translated as:
Bodies
that have emerged from the ovens of diseases,
Pus
flowing from rotten ulcers –
Later, I was delighted to discover that in subsequent editions Faiz himself had ejected those very two lines. Did he also find them excessive, if not outright gratuitous? There is this kinship among poets, I will insist, this ability at times to see through craft, paradoxically often because of the craft, to the essence.
In "Don't Ask Me For That Love Again," Faiz, one may argue, draws a line of demarcation between the political and the romantic. But many times a mingling of the political and the romantic pervades his poetry. Sometimes the two, especially in the ghazals, are entangled in such a way that there is no point trying to separate them: the political meaning informs the romantic and the romantic, the political. Nevertheless, Faiz, a man who was jailed for his beliefs, certainly does have poems, many in fact, that are exclusively political. Among them one can list his three Bangladesh poems. And then Faiz had political poems that are not direct; instead, they are richly symbolic. (One could argue that translation takes place at yet another level here, within the same culture, when one cultivates a manner to suggest the actual without being literal - hence, some uses of these stock figures.) And their being symbolic is sometimes in itself a political statement. Indeed, Urdu has a long enough tradition of concealing politics in symbols. In nineteenth-century Urdu poetry, the stock figure of the Executioner often represented the British (a way of dodging the censors as well as the gallows: in the summer of 1857, the British had hanged twenty-seven thousand people from the trees of Delhi to terrorize the population and punish it for what is often called the Mutiny and which the Indians call their first national revolt against the British.) In Pakistan, under the censorship of various military dictatorships, it was often impossible to name things exactly.
My translation process, as is clear, was quite different from Lazard's. I knew, both because of her Faiz and because of Merwin and Rich's Ghalib, that not knowing the original is not necessarily a handicap. Not knowing the original may even be an advantage of sorts as long as one is working with very good literal versions. Merwin, after all, had set a standard for me with one line, against which I had to measure myself. My distinct advantage was that I could "hear" and say the originals to myself, as I translated, something Rich and Merwin just couldn't have. My particular problem was how to "pretend" that I was not burdened by a dual-loyalty, to ignore that I was negotiating the demands of two cultures, both of which I felt in my bones, that I was responding to the sounds of two languages simultaneously? What I am trying to say is that even though the final product, I hope, does not show it, I was constantly aware of my dual loyalties. But I decided: wasn't this absence of a pure agenda an advantage? I had an inwardness with two languages: my loyalty to Urdu made me want to bring across its exquisite power to away millions of people with its poetry, and my loyalty to English. To what extent would I compromise Faiz's voice? I finally attacked the poems with no theoretical inhibition, letting each dictate its own agenda. I could always hear the music of the original, and that has been fruitful, for many people have found a metrical feel to my translation (of which I was quite unaware). Someone has pointed out that I have fashioned for Faiz an English that is by turns dry and lyrical.
I wrote to Faiz (in 1980), having got his address from Victor Kiernan. He was in Beirut, exiled by the military regime of Zia ul-Haq. He had, in the words of Edward Said, "found a welcome of sorts in the ruins of Beirut. His closet friends were Palestinian." Besides asking for permission to translate him, I told him that I would be taking liberties with the originals. But what I really did was to bride him with a sort of homecoming. I reminded him that he had, years before my birth, stayed in our home in Kashmir. I created nostalgia: Begum Akhtar, too, had stayed in our house. I tempted him: I had rare tapes to Begum Akhtar singing his ghazals in private concerts. Within two weeks he wrote back: he, of course, remembered my father and knew my uncle in Lahore. "Please send the Begum Akhtar recordings," he added.
In the winter of 1984-85, I wrote my elegy for him. It highlights my experience as a translator and also reveals some of my strategies as a translator. In one stanza, I incorporated a couple of Ghalib's in the following manner:
You
knew Ghalib was right:
Blood
must not merely follow routine, must not
just
flow as the vein's uninterrupted
river.
Sometimes it must flood the eyes,
surprise
them by being clear as water.
Ghalib's two lines may be transliterated: "I do not approve of mere running and loitering in the veins. / If it isn't spilled from the eye, then how can it be called blood?" My weaving it into my poem meant explaining it – "You knew Ghalib was right" – paraphrasing it even. Explanation is sometimes the only way to translate. But I've been heartened that most of my acquaintances who know Ghalib in the original recognized the buried couplet immediately when I recited "Homage" to them.
As another illustration of explanation as translation: here is my literal version of one of Faiz's couplets: "Got an occasion to sin, that too for only for days./ I've seen the courage of God Almighty." I had to fill in the elliptical moments. I adopted a five-line free verse stanza:
You
made it so brief our time on earth
its
exquisite sins this sensation Oh Almighty
of
forgetting you
We
know how vulnerable you are
We
know you are a coward God
I have adopted such a strategy quite often with the ghazals.
Will something be borne across to exclusively English readers through my translations? I hope so. I also hope that those who know both languages will some pleasure in my moment of literal fidelity to Faiz as well as in those moments (of fidelity I insist) when I am unfaithful. As for purists, I hope they will be generous and welcome the times when I had no choice but to adjust, especially in the ghazals, the letter of Faiz's work – a letter to which I have en emotional, even a sentimental, attachment. But only in the original Urdu. Salman Rushdie say in Shame: "Omar Khayyam's position as a poet is curious. He was never very popular in his native Persia; and he exists in the West in a translation that is really a complete reworking of his verses, in many cases very different for the spirit (to say nothing of the content) of the original … It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion – and use, in evidence, the success of Fitzgerald-Khayam – that something can also be gained." If my translations convey some of Faiz's magic and fraction of the complexity that resulted from his political and cultural background, I will consider myself as having managed a modest tribute to his immense art and humanity.
In my elegy for Begum Akhat, I said: "Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow, /sobs in dingy archives, hooked to you. /she wears her grief, a moon-soaked white, /corner the sky into disbelief." I could use the same words for Faiz. Begum Akhat comes back to me in strange moments. As does Faiz. Often, the two come back together.
In a recent poem, "Snow on the Desert," I narrated driving my sister to Tucson International in a terribly thick January morning fog. Suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street, the sliding doors of the fog opened, and the sun-dazzled snow, which had fallen all night, blinded us. All the cactus plants were draped in a snow that looked like cocaine. I told my sister to imagine that we were driving by the shores of the sea, for the Sonoran Desert was an ocean two hundred million years ago. At the airport I started after the plane till the window was again a mirror. And then suddenly,
As
I drove back to the foothills, the fog
shut
its doors behind me on Alvernon,
and
I breathed the dried seas
the
earth had lost,
their
forsaken shores.
I thought for months that I had nothing to compare that moment with, nothing to contrast it with. How could I translate that moment? Months later as I struggled with the poem I remembered.
another
moment that refers only to itself:
in New Delhi
one night
as
Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out.
It
was perhaps during the Banglades War,
perhaps
there were sirens,
air-raid
warnings.
But
the audience, hushed, did not stir.
The
microphone was dead, but she went on
singing,
and her voice
was
coming from far
away,
as if she had already died.
And
just before the lights did flood her
again,
melting the frost
of
her diamond
into
says, it was, like this turning dark
of
fog, a moment when only a lost sea
can
be heard, a time
to
recollect
every
shadow, everything the earth was losing,
a
time to think of everything earth
and
I had lost, of all
that
I would lose,
of
all that I was losing.
The only way to translated that moment was to find one that could not be compared with or to another. But in that untranslatable fraction of time, I did manage a translation – perhaps by pointing out the impossibility of translation.
Was Begum Akhtar singing Faiz when the lights went out? He is always with me, often in her voice. I have brought them with me to America, with absolute ease, taken them back to the subcontinent, then again brought them back to America. I have not surrendered any part of me; rather, my claims to both Urdu and English have become greater. The way the raga and the poem became each other's for Begum Akhtar, so have Urdu and English become for me. My two loyalties, on loan to each other, are now so one that the loan has been forgiven. No, forgotten.
Begum Akhtar stripped words till they were revealed in the glory of their syllables, each syllable made integral note of her chosen raga – so often a tantalizingly uncliched Bhairavi. (No translation can hope to do that.) She knew the ghazal at its heart has a circularity of meaning, created seductively by its qafia and radif in couplet after couplet. She knew how to time this circularity, so it seemed we were at the still point of the revolving circle, especially when she was interpreting a great poet. For me, translating Faiz had led to its own – caressing – moments in which I am sometimes at the still point of the turning circle, sometimes part of its revolution. Sometimes the circle comes to a dazzling halt, and I manage to find my meaning as a translator.
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Agha Shahid Ali (4th February, 1949- 8th December 2001) was an English poet of Kashmiri ancestry and upbringing.
He has several collections of poetry and a collection of English ghazals to his credit. Ali was also a translator of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems) and editor (Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English). He was widely credited for helping to popularize the ghazal form in America.
Ali taught at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as creative writing programs at University of Utah, Warren Wilson College and New York University. He died in December, 2001.
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