Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Salaam Machhli Shehri
Salaam Machhli Shehri
I every decade since the seventies, I have been lucky to spend some time
both in Pakistan and in India. Pakistan, to my mind, is the only country
in the world where the doings of poets can be, in many ways, of more
import than the doings of politicians. It makes living there seem a bit like
attending a huge literary debate wrought with characters, and pressure
groups, and gossip, preferably scandalous. Of course, saying this in an
Annual of Urdu Studies is simply to state what is obvious to all of us.
However, it is worth remembering how poetry and writing are burning
issues within an Urdu cultural milieu.
When I first lived in Lahore, I remember asking Pakistani friends
what poets they read. “Fai¤ . Gh≥lib . Mµr.” Those were the standard
answers. These were the answers in Karachi, too. But I found that if I
asked a few more questions, the answer became, “Oh, MuΩπaf≥ Zaidµ and
N≥Ωir K≥ mµ.” Poets were rarely spoken of in isolation—the poetic land-
scape was heavily populated and frequently recollected.
Over the years, both Zaidµ and K≥ mµ continued to be mentioned.
My informants could tell me that Zaidµ was well known as a young poet
in Allahabad before Partition, and had come with the rest of the millions
of Muslims to begin life in the created country. Later he became a mem-
ber of the Civil Service of Pakistan. Then, they told me, he had died in
some sort of suicide pact. Some of my friends who talked about him
seemed to see him as a metaphor for their own experience. N≥Ωir K≥ mµ,
too, was remembered as someone who spoke to the experience of Paki-
stan. He had written poems about the longing he felt for India, for the
past, and at the same time, he had re-infused the ghazal with a kind of
compressed energy created by a “±^媵 ba√r,” literally a small or short
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meter. “Yes,” people would continue, “MuΩπaf≥ Zaidµ was a na m poet,
and N≥Ωir K≥ mµ was a ghazal poet.”
I was very intrigued. So many poets, both well-known and sometimes
now almost forgotten, had stayed in India. There were S≥√ir Lud^iy≥nvµ,
J≥ Ni¡≥r Akhtar, ‘Alµ Sard≥r Ja‘farµ, Akhtaru ’l-∂m≥n and Sal≥m Ma±^lµ-
shahrµ, not to forget Maj≥z and of course, Jigar. The list was endless. The
story of Jåsh ’s move to Pakistan, another of the older generation, was told
in dire tones, a cautionary tale of disappointment and humiliation.
Meanwhile, Pakistan was producing poets in the generation after Fai¤ ,
and the two who stood out, MuΩπaf≥ Zaidµ and N≥Ωir K≥ mµ, were part of
that group. Neither was “progressive.” Zaidµ’s notoriety and his position
as a government official seemed to be a hindrance to his reputation as a
poet. N≥Ωir K≥ mµ’s personal life did not present the same problems, but
his deep mining and radical compressions of one genre—the
ghazal—appeared remarkable in the wake of the influence of either Fai¤
or N∑n Mµm R≥shid. Sometimes he would be compared to Mµir≥jµ. He
seemed unique, and yet utterly of the tradition.
As I began my own work on MuΩπaf≥ Zaidµ, except for Fai¤’s poems,
there were very few translations from this post-Partition group.
Researching Zaidµ’s life and finding out about the kinds of poems that
were being written in the fifties and sixties in Pakistan has been intellec-
tually stimulating. Poets both in India and Pakistan had so much to say,
as the subject at hand turned from the struggle for freedom from coloni-
alism to the experiences of Partition, and then to other subjects as well.
They had inherited so much—from Jåsh, from Fir≥q, and earlier, from
Iqb≥l, and Gh≥lib—but what was to happen to this inheritance? Poetry in
Pakistan, as exemplified by Fai¤ , was a dangerous occupation. To be a
poet was to be jailed and exiled. Parvµn Sh≥kir once told me about her life
and her struggles. Even though she was a middle-ranking civil service
officer, and thus financially secure, her life as a poet was not easy. How,
after all, could she be a poet in this environment? How did she manage to
use her creative energy so exquisitely? The force of her creativity seemed
to lie within the culture itself, allowing her to produce poetry of a very
high caliber in spite of tremendous obstacles, not least among them that
of being a woman in Zia ul Haq’s Pakistan.
Experiences and encounters like these engaged my deepest interest.
Questions about literature, art, language and politics converged. Often
the poems were astonishing testimonials to imagination and tradition.
When I read Anita Desai’s In Custody, I could tell that my outsider’s
obsession with Urdu poetry was a shared obsession.
• T A U S
1
A number of people have told me that Fai¤ said this at the memorial
service, but in Muhammad Ali Siddiqi’s (Ariel) column in Dawn ( November
), he quotes Jåsh as the speaker who said this. I have the memorial service
program, and Jåsh is listed there, though Fai¤ did, indeed, attend. It may be that
this “poet of the future” remark was said and repeated by a number of people.
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One can sometimes see the attractive perversity in the contrarian idea
that poetry is better in translation. After all, the translated poem is exotic,
mysterious (not the rightfully mocked orientalist mystery of the
East—rather, the mystery of the barely comprehensible) and often cum-
bersome. It is a true stranger in our midst. Like a stranger barely speaking
the language, a translated poem is intriguing. One struggles to under-
stand, to place. Confronting a translated poem, one knows that one will
never have the original linguistic and aesthetic experience of the native
speaker, and in that gap lies something unfathomably interesting. After
all, one then has to imagine the original, and one can always imagine a
better original.
My own concerns for translations center on the functional aesthetic. I
prefer translated poems that are printed beautifully on good paper. They
should float on the page just as they float in one’s mind. If one wants to
tear apart a poem in discussion, then it needs to be translated very liter-
ally, with plenty of notes. But if one wants to enjoy a poem, as the visual
(in our culture) and aural object that it is, then the translation should
invite an elegant and accessible reading, and the original text should be
provided, if possible, for those who can read it. The readers can then
enjoy as much of the experience as they are able. ❐
2
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, ), p. .
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The Traveler
A Quintet of Poems
[Translator’s note: The next five poems are the sequence of verses Zaidµ
wrote about his mistress, Shahn≥z Gul . These poems were written dur-
ing the summer of . Initially, when he began the affair, he still held
his position as a high-ranking civil servant and, of course, he was a well-
known poet. After his dismissal, he was no longer of any potential
pecuniary or social use to his mistress, or to her business cronies. He
became increasingly obsessed with her. The poems transcend this sorry
situation. Standing alone, they trace a love affair in which the mistress is
at first helper, next inspirer/muse, and then someone he wants others to
acknowledge as having been there for him, as having existed for him.
The poems limn the process of creation and track the precarious situa-
tion of the artist. The second poem, the ghazal in the group, with its
exploration of the relationship between love and creative inspiration, is
often quoted. The fifth and last poem forms a bitter coda to the affair,
and to memory. As I mentioned earlier, I left the syntax and the images
here less polished than those in “The Traveler.” With “Shahnaz V” I
used punctuation to capture the pattern of the refrain and changed the
couplet format into a three-line unit.]
S
S
I was a fire-worshipper
She shared every corner of the garden4
3
Kausar (kau¡ar) is the canal in Paradise that flows with wine; the wine of
the spirit as opposed to the wine of earthly love.
4
A.K. Ramanujan helped me with the organization and wording of this
translation. At the risk of disturbing the reading of the poem with explanation:
the third couplet was particularly difficult. The fire-worshipper (Zoroastrian) is
an infidel—worships idols, beauties, the flame of beauty, which consumes the
worshipper. The garden is the abode of beauty, full of colors and flame-like
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S
flowers. The contrast between the narrow devotion of the worshipper and the all-
encompassing beauty of the mistress is in the awkward word “angle,” which, in
the end, I omitted. The literal translation is “From one angle, I was a fire
worshipper/She shared the garden from every angle.” This fire-worshipper
reference calls to mind Gh≥lib’s “¥tish-parast kaht® hai ahl-e jah≥ muj^®” (“The
people of the world call me a fire worshipper”).
5
The crucifix and the noose refer to the two martyrdoms of Jesus Christ and
al-ƒall≥j, who was the Sufi mystic who declared “ ana ’l-ƒaqq ” (“I am the Truth”)
and was executed for this heresy in C.E.
• T A U S
S
S
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6
If the reader would like to become familiar with the work of an Urdu poet
who had almost slipped from view, three collections of Sal≥m Ma±^lµ-shahrµ ’s
poems, as well as a critical biography, were published in the nineties, almost
twenty years after his death. They are: Intikh≥b-e Kal≥m-e Sal≥m Ma±^lµ-shahrµ, ed.
by ‘Irf≥n ‘Abb≥s (Lak^na’u: Uttar Pradesh Urd∑ Ak≥≈emµ, ); Intikh≥b-e Sal≥m
Ma±^lµ-shahrµ, ed. by ‘Azµz Indaurµ (Dihlµ: Urd∑ Ak≥≈emµ, ); Kal≥m-e Sal≥m
Ma±^lµ-shahrµ, ed. by Saiyid Munta ar Ja‘farµ (Lak^na’u: al-Mumt≥z Sås≥’iªµ, NuΩrat
Pablisharz, ), and ∆≥kªar ‘Azµz Indaurµ, Sal≥m Ma±^lµ-shahrµ: ShakhΩiyat aur
Fann (Dihlµ: S≥qµ Buk ∆ipå, ).
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