This blog will probably soon turn into a bookmark folder, but what is the fun of having a single-owner blog if you can’t do with it what you will? I found this poem today and have been ODing on Robert Duncan’s poetry all day. I tend to behave obsessively on days that I have to travel. I am sure there is some nice bit of psycho-analysis to be had there.
But I wanted to continue where I left off so this goes up for future reference and for pleasure.
Poetry, A Natural Thing
by Robert Duncan
Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. “They came up
and died
just like they do every year
on the rocks.”
The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.
This beauty is an inner persistence
toward the source
striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,
I was in Mumbai recently.I have always been fond of Bombay with the detached interest of someone who has never been tempted to live there. But I was morbidly aware of it this time as I suppose was natural. Mumbai bustled as usual. But every taxi I took was stopped for inspection. Every taxiwala I spoke to was getting on with his life, on alert. I was in the south of the city which is beautiful and old always, but seemed to my eyes as newly fragile. I felt like hanging garlic or pumpkins on every lovely building facade to ward off evil eyes.
Mumbai doesn’t represent home to me; to me it is a fascinating big city. But when I saw the everyday faces of Mumbai I felt a little of what they must feel.
This Faiz nazm that I am putting up I came across the day I left for Bombay. With Faiz almost always the mahboob is a metaphor for the beloved homeland. This poem Faiz (a fervent communist himself) wrote inspired by the letters of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. But like all good poetry it stands independent of context, moulding itself to shifting temporal atmosphere and inclinations. So here, supplant the repression of the communist ideology with the acts of hatred against capitalist Mumbai or violence in your homeland , and you still have a pretty powerful poem. It is not the best Faiz poem I have come across but in this instance its quotability is very high.
Ham jo tariik raahoN meN maare gaye
tere honToN ke phuuloN kii chaahat meN ham
daar kii Khushk tahnii pe vaare gaye
tere haathoN kii shamm’oN kii hasrat meN ham
niim taariik raahoN meN maare gaye
suulioN par hamaare laboN se pare
tere hoNToN kii laalii lapaktii rahii
terii zulfoN kii mastii barastii rahii
tere haathoN kii chaaNd sii damaktii rahii
jab khulii terii raahoN meN shaam-e-sitam
ham chale aaye, laaye jahaaN tak qadam
lab pe harf-e-Ghazal, dil meN qandill-e-Gham
apnaa Gham thaa gavaahii tere husn kii
dekh qaayam rahe us gavaahii per ham
ham jo taariik raahoN meN maare gaye
naa rasaa’ii agar apnii taqdiir thii
terii ulfat to apnii hii tadbiir thii
kis ko shikvaa hai gar shauq ke silsile
hijr kii qatl-gaahoN se sab jaa mile
qatl-gaahoN se chun kar hamaare ilm
aur nikleNge ushshaaq ke qaafile
jin kii raah-e-talab se hamaare qadam
muKhtasar kar chale dard ke faasile
kar chale jin kii Khaatir jahaaNgiir ham
jaaN gaNvaa kar terii dilbarii kaa bharam
ham jo taariik raahoN meN maare gaye
Faiz Ahmed Faiz Montogomery Jail
15 May 1954
++++++++++++++++++++
The site from where I have done this cut and paste also has a translation by Agha Shahid Ali, It really is not very good but here it is. In fact I have never found that I have liked any of his translations that I have read. What is the point of making up your own stuff in a translation, I say? As it is one is losing out all the lyricism; why maul meaning? Not to mention sequences and constructs. Don’t know if I am just being fuddy-duddy but it gets my goat.
Update
I’ve tried a translation of my own. I’ve tried to stick close to the original. Here it is.
We who were slain on the darkest lanes
In longing for the roses that are your lips
Hung from the dry branch of the gallows
In seeking the lamps of your palms
Killed in twilit lanes
Distant from our lips within the noose
Colour danced in yours
Your hair rained flavour
Your moon-hands shone
When the dusk of terror rived your lanes
We came as far as feet carried
A poem’s fragment on our lips, fuel of sorrow in the heart
The sorrow that evidenced your beauty
Look ! we still yet stand witness
We who were killed in the shadowy lanes
If love’s consummation was not our fate
Remember that love was a self-fashioned ideal
Who complains then if all love’s strains
Meet in cubicles of death
We glean our knowledge from those same cells
And set forth a procession of lovers
On whose pathways of desire we will walk
Diminishing the distance of pain
For whom we conquered a world
Bartering our lives for your love
We who were slain in the darkest lanes
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I think it is interesting how the ‘we’ in this poem is interchangeable with the ‘I’. In fact I had a long time deciding whether to speak in the singular or plural. But I felt keenly that the spirit of community fairly pulses from the lines.The mass, the power and spirit of the bonded many, is very integral to Faiz’s poetry. Which is probably why I am seeking his poetry so often nowadays. I am afraid like everybody else that we may dust away the pain a little too soon. I feel the need to be connected for a little longer. We will take ourselves back to our individual lives as we must but in doing so I sincerely hope we, each of us, leave a little of ourselves boiling in the cauldron that is perhaps brewing a revolution.
Fractals be damned. I have no patience with patterns too large to see. I find I can’t wait for revelations. I want to make sense of it now.
Even as I write, even as I grasp at the air-framed hour-glass of reason I find my faith ebb from me; along with it all my peace.
I look in other directions.
I look then not for answers but for empathy. I look for other times that have known our despair; other hearts that have winced in similar pain. I look perhaps for patterns.
A flicker of despair arrived at a coophole of memory. It revealed what had been well-liked but preserved unowned. Perhaps because only that which is truly known is truly owned. And when I had first come to it-this poem - I had not the resource of empathy to know it by. I leaned out to it today armed with fresh dry grief. I felt a linking of hands and a banding of arms. It was a sudden solace that you, I and Faiz are caught in a pattern that perhaps, is somehow beautiful from up there.
Hum Log
Dil ke aiwaan mein liye gulshuda shammon ki kataar
Noor-e-Khursheed se sahme hue, uktaaye hue
Husn-e-mahboob ke sayyal tassavur ki tarah
Apni tareeki ko bheinche hue liptaaye hue
Gaayat-e-sood-o-zayan, soorat-e-aagaaz-o-ma’aal
Wahi besood tajassus, wahi bekar sawaal
Muzmahil saa’at-e-imroz ki berangee se
Yaad-e-maazi se gameen, dehshat-e-farda se niDaal
Tishna-afkaar jo taskeen nahi pathe hain
Sokhta ashq jo aakhon mein nahi aate hai
Ek kada dard jo geet mein Daltaa hi nahin
Dil ke taareek shigaafon se nikalta hi nahin
Aur ek uljhee huee mauhoom si darmaan ki talaash
Dast-e-zindaan ki hawas, chak-e-girebaan ki talaash
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Update-
I did this translation of sorts at my mother's request. It is not literal or particularly lyrical but its there for what its worth.
We the people
Extinguished flames that line the corridors of my heart
Frightened, tired by the sun’s incandescence
Like the liquid beauty of a phantom lover
Shrouded, wrapped in an intimate darkness
Enormity of gain and loss, sequences of causation
The same gainless quests, the same useless questions
Depleted by present disenchantments
Grieved by the past, petrified in fear of tomorrow
