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Love Sonnets of
Ghalib.
One of the major hurdles in translating Ghalib is to render his highly resonant language into a medium that as well as retaining the suggestiveness of the original offers an equally suggestive but readable text in another language. Ghalib’s Urdu is a resource, which not only embodies his personal thoughts and feelings, but also reprises a whole tradition of Persian/Urdu literature with its specific myths and poetic conventions. The metaphoric weightiness of the ghazals clamours for elaborate elucidation that a run-of-the-mill translation never manages to address. It is here that Dr Niazi’s translation scores over other recent efforts. To give an example: a recent translation renders the pregnant line ‘mudda’a unqa hai apne alam-e taqrir ka’ as ‘phoenix-like purport’. This is not a plausible translation, much less a creative one. Niazi explains the significance of the mythic bird unqa and makes his rendering accessible to the reader. Through his notes we can also look at the deeper significance of the allusion. There are numerous instances in the text where Ghalib’s implicit meanings are suggested by cross-references to the prosodic forms of Persian poetry, which influenced the poet. Niazi’s scholarly skills, displayed in a substantial glossary as well as an extended afterward on the themes of the poet, contribute to the accessibility of the poems for both the general reader who is not familiar with the original, and a scholarly analytical one who looks for more than a mere literal rendering. To one interested in placing Ghalib in the context of world literature, these sonnets recall the metaphysical poetry of John Donne and Holderlin. There is here the same composite of levity and seriousness, the same alteration of moods from the buoyant to the gloomy and the same exaltation of romantic earthly love to a mystical pedestal — that marks Donne’s work. When Ghalib writes, ‘rahe na jan to quatil ko khunbaha dije/kate zaban to khanjar ko marhaba kije’, we at once recall Donne’s love plaints and his witty ways of dealing with them. Similarly, as Ghalib indulges his paradoxes (‘milna tera agar nahin asan to sahal hai/dushvar to yahi hai ki dushvar bhi nahin’), we think of Holderlin’s instinct to load deceptions behind seemingly innocuous words, setting the reader on a critical-exegetical trail. Even when he speaks through his immediate Persian-Urdu inheritance, his universalism never fails to shine through. Ghalib is a difficult poet in that he constantly invokes connections with some of the more intractable aspects of living and thinking. His difficulty usually borders on the abstruse, as in ‘dil-o-mizghan ka jo muquaddma tha/aj phir us ki rubakari hai’. Dr Niazi’s translations and succinct explications, far from making the abstruse commonplace, succeed in guiding the discerning reader through the intricacies of the poet’s themes and techniques. And that is no mean achievement. |
IN the concluding stanza
of his last ghazal translated here, Mirza Ghalib sets a tantalising task
for his readers: "adae khas se Ghalib hua hai nuktah sara/salae
am hai yaran-e nuktah dan ke liye". Having planted subtleties
galore in the sprawling harvest of his verse, he now dares his exegetes,
‘connoisseurs of subtleties’, as he calls them, to unravel his
meanings. So the egg-heads have kept busy offering explications,
commentaries and, of course, new translations of the work of one of the
most allusive and enigmatic poets of all times. The fact that newer and
more audacious interpretations hardly ever exhaust Ghalib’s densely
layered poetry speaks of the inability of the critical and exegetical
labours in accounting for the uniqueness (adae khas) of great
literature.