Ghalib Ghazal in translation

First Published in Museindia

(Translated from the original in Urdu)

Why should it not be full of pain,
merely a heart not a hard block of stone?
We shall cry ourselves a thousand times,
take jibes at us, why should anyone?

Not temple nor mosque, the Kaaba or a harem,
neither at a doorway nor a tomb or entrance.
We sit at common trodden pathways,
why remove us O unknown?

She, of the heart warming beauty,
resplendent as the noon sun.
Herself a vision to blast all others,
then why hide in a veil, all alone?

Piercing coquetry, bane of (my) life,
stinging endless arrows of pride.
Why would it come in front of you,
even if the image be your own?

Imprisoned by life or captive of grief,
both of them are one and the same.
Can man before death, in life itself
ever find all his sorrows gone?

Beauty and, with it, self estimation,
saved my lusty rival from indiscretions.
She had confidence on herself,
why then would she try this glutton?

There, she is arrogant and brimming with pride,
here a humble humility about ourselves.
Where do we meet on the streets,
why'd she invite us to meets of her own?

Yes I know she does not believe,
given she is unfaithful even.
Those who prize faith and fidelity,
to her lane, why'd they be shown?

Without the broken Ghalib, this world,
would surely not come to a stop.
Why cry so bitterly then,
why make such a pitiful moan?




The original ghazal in Urdu

Dil hi to hai na sang-o-khisht dard se bhar na aye kyon
royenge hum hazaar baar koi hamein sataye kyon

Dair nahin haram nahin dar nahin aastan nahin
Baithe hain rehguzar pe hum ghair humein uthaye kyon

Jab woh Jamaal-i-dilfaroz, surat-i-mehr-i-neemroz
Aap hi ho nazaarah soz, parde mein munh chhupaye kyun?

Dushnae ghamzah jaansataan, naawike naaz bepanah
Tera hi aqsi rukh sahi, samne tere aye kyun?

Qaid e hayat o band e gham asl mein donon ek hain
Maut se pehle admi gham se nijat paye kyon

Husn aur uspe husn e zan, reh gayi bul hawas ki sharam
Apne pe aitmaad hai, ghair ko aazmayen kyun?

Waan wo ghuroor e azzo naaz, yaan ye hijab e paas e waza
Raah mein hum milen kahaan?bazm mein woh bulaye kyun?
Haan wo nahi kkhuda parast jao wo bewafa sahi
Jisko ho din o dil azeez uski gali mein jaye kyon?

Ghalib e khasta ke baghair kaun se kaam band hain
roiye zar zar kyaa kijiye hai hai kyon?

For it is you who put me in heat

It is always (and only) you
who turn me on
It is always (and only) you
who turn me on
With your first touch
and your icy caress
When you brush against my lips
your windy tresses
As you glide by
giving me
goosebumps
When in your bosom I am
and hid is the sun
As warm vapours escape
my open mouth
And your musky mist
does me surround
It is you indeed who make me hot
And every year put me in heat
Oh, the coolest, my very own,
My very own
The winter of Delhi!

22nd of November 2008

Wrote it while studying the Wasteland, i guess when "winter kept us warm" and after having read a poem someone linked me to: You bring out the UP wali in me

Unititled

When you opened the box,
O Pandora,
They say you let It go

Check its depths once again
I think they are mistaken

Ignore Donne, Death and Be Proud!

O Death be proud
Thou dost not die
You do live
With those whose kin you spy
Or have already abducted
Or on whom you stalk
Daily it is you
Who, with me, walk
It is you I see all around
In every moan and every sound
The screech is yours is the piercing scream
The burning pyres, still graves, flowing ashes in gushing streams
All things bloom only to wilt
All marry life so Consummatum est! / (it is finished!)

March 3, around 10 pm

They Have Dried Up

It is true,
indeed, she’d never been mine,
yet,
somehow did for me
what Bhagirath,
long back in time.

It had really flowed
each day, each night, each hour
every minute
quenching prosaic fields,
where I reaped rich,
blossoming fragrant flowers by the side,
with me as constant gardener,
sometimes little pansies of a few lines
purple
once a huge chrysanthemum,
a mellow yellow
another time, a lily- white
fragmenting which I’d play
“she loves me, or does not”

I have tried to build dams
to always gain control
to use to my advantage
channelise the flow
but ’twas its own master
rather I the thrall
not it at mine
but I at beck and call

Omnipresent, Omnipotent
it was my new God
this new Brahmaputra, this new Amazon

But then one day
it changed its course
began rubbing its sides
causing breaks in banks

I ran about frantic
to do best as I could,
but it was as if Thetis
I not half The Man.

What could I do as it fled away?
untie-able, nobody’s prey

It has left behind,
in its wake, just one lingering life
very desolate,
all my companions- my breathing words, my flowers
They have dried up!
as I now create
these with paper
origam-ous ones, that do not live
no smells exude.


3rd March 2008
12:10 PM, quite soon after waking up.

An Acrostic

Jug, jug, jug, jug, jug, jugging
Understanding or trying to understand
Society, myself, poetry and writing
Trying to figure out the nature of man

Feel like penning something down
Enlightening, foolish, fermenting furores
Encrypting etymologies, unleashing new sounds
Latching to words anew, to get around

Life itself, limericking lampoons
Intense satires, making buffoons
Knowing the unknowability of all
Embattling staleness, to clichés maul

With nothing I own truly mine
Rusty, used language
I am trying to define
Things my own way, a tradition find
I can call my own, to
None owe allegiance
Good, bad or of mediocre kind

Alas, ‘tis not easy to disown

Poets, stalwarts, giants who seem, to
Own all ways to speak, say, scream
Encaptured the word, leaving
Me obsolete, just to sit, and to mope and moan.

22 February around 8 PM

An Ode to Kilimanjaro

An Ode to
Kilimanjaro

What joy
in Everest, in K2,
mounts of this kind
when they merely build on
peaks around, the gradual incline?

O
Kilimanjaro
Thou massif supreme
Who rise head and shoulders
Above the Savannah surrounding
With wildebeest grazing golden greens
At your feet; rising up through woolly clouds
To heights ice covered, at Equator nature’s oxymoron

Making
Viewers giddy
With a sense sublime
Towering over the Black
Lording in your pristine White
The truest of nature, not a self-
Proclaimed Superior Foreign Light.

Your
Naked
Individuality
All glory your own
You need no PR, No
ladders on which to climb
Smacking of arrogance from
Your Solitary Throne, you do not
Conform, you are not conditioned
You rise, You rise; Your rise oblivious
Of the rest, you stare the Andes, Atlas, Alps and
Himalaya in their eyes, you see your own visions all alone
For you, O greater than Helicon and Vesuvius, the poets mind
Unique inspirations, sights, your own new kens, your own paradigms


7th of February, in the class after the Wordsworth one, where his encounter in the Prelude with trailing peaks was discussed.

I Am The Word

I
am the word:
Spoken, read, written
thought, imagined
uttered, smothered
in tears, in laughter
as an abuse, abused
as articulated, power
stringed together
for link-ins
even break ups

I am the affirmative
and the negative too
I am in ascent
and
decline
in prayers, I am God, Satan
uses me too.
I am conceived
as you are
hatching out of pregnant
wombs
of matter grey
or colourless
waves of sound
of ink that is
blue, black or brown
I can s p r e a d like fire
travel faster than light
It is I who amuse
I who delight
I am signifier
I am logos, I am speech
I who communicate
Because of me harmony
Because of me breach

God SAID and that is
why there was light
and because of me
all was Good
and you could ask for Eve
It was I -split at Babel
I would be Pralaya

I am thought that is why Descarte

Poignant am I
superfluous too
I am there in quarrels
comforting silences with you

You have but to think
and I come to your mind
Get rid of me you cannot
Know me not well
and are marginalised

In politics, I rhetort
lecture in class,
in courts litigate
on roads I brawl

I am bourgeois
communist, capitalist
colonial, coloured, communal,
casteist, classed and the
vice versa too

I soar, I plunge
I am codified, I am free
I am aliph, bĕ, pĕ
I am A, B, C

Beautiful I am
I am ugly,
I wrong, I write
Workman’s necessity
The connoisseur’s pride
You need ME to judge
as thou shalt be too

I AM POWER
use me well
and at the right time,
craft me to your glories
sculpt your successes of me

I am in prizes
and citations too,

in death sentences,

it is I who woo

I am the soul
of all arts
Science needs expression
I am the language
of Commerce
Of Osama, Bush and Narendra too

I am the Azaan
at birth
Epitaph
after death

I am creative
I am critic
In this poem I am
I form cultures and traditions
I am inherited and taught
I evolve, I metamorphose
I am maimed, wiped out
Still living like the phoenix
of unnumbered facets
I
perch on lips
hibernate
in hearts
brood in breeding brains
leave marks on paper, impressions
on psyches

So let me fly
never stop
I am consequence
Yet I am process too.


Written sometime around the 24th of January 2007

Ballimaran*

Said Ghalib,
’twas not his destiny
to be one with his beloved*

My lover too
Lives across his house
Is it something in the air?



Written at 4:01 AM, January 6, 2008
*Ballimaran is the locality in Chandni Chowk where Ghalib’s Haveli stands even today.
*"Ye na thi hamari qismat ke visaal-e-yaar hota"

Maharana Pratap

“And today I was
Maharana Pratap!

Imagine the horror
that was there
on their faces
as I came terrorising
through the field,

sword in my hand
an army following
and shouts of “Jai Siya Ram”
thick in the air.

“Take no prisoners
leave no one alive”
was our battle cry
by heavens justified.

We smoked them out
we burned them inside
their own houses, how
dare they build
mosques, on our land
pristine?

One hundred fifty to
two hundred we
ourselves staked in
the pits at Patiya,

bloody bastards buried
their dead,
now they know
the other extreme.

We dug out the dead
from their graves,
and the unborn out
of his womb,

and there it sat
as a plump trophy
at the zenith
of my towering
shamsheer,

let’s see now
how much more
they produce,
how many more
circumcised parasites
they breed.

And women too
we just slaughtered,
Me, the Maharana
I won’t touch
The women of Khan-i-Khana
though some of the Chhara
may have done more
they may have ravished,
slitting and knifing the cunts,
breasts they may have chopped off
just as they did
with the penis of men
(but what the hell those were
already slit beams).

But what an orgy
what a melee
what passion
what fun
it couldn’t have been better
even in the
best of my dreams

The public, police, politicians
prosecutors on our side,
who dare touch us?
This day we separated
the milk from the cream.

And I was at its head
Maharana Pratap I was
not just Babu Bajrangi

Now I wish that
God granting
I get another chance
then not just two hundred
but twenty

thousand I want to slay
under my own supervision
as I drive on huge hordes
of Ram’s own saffron fleets!”


4-5 November 2007
Written a couple of days after reading Babu Bajrangi’s interview in the Tehelka issue, on “Gujarat 2002”, of 3rd November 2007.

An Epic Creation

Lending order to the chaotic world
From all the material out there in flux
When brooding I had sat on it
While the two orbs had circumnavigated
Their Celestial pathways seven times each
And darkness and light
Had completed their patterns
To make themselves create days and nights heptad
Then I had found Grace
To be able to deliver
To complete my work of grand design
To accomplish what I had set out to do
Even if I had exceeded time

Lo and behold there it was
The paragon for all
To emulate
Marvellous in its scope
The benchmark for future posterities

What I had completed at last
After drawing out each element,
Sculpting each part of the body to be
So that in front of mine eyes lay

My MA assignment for ma’am Grace
For paper 3!

Written on 30th October 2007
When I was finally about to conclude an assignment for my tute that I was supposed to submit on 28th of October, to Ms. Grace.

The Sonnet of Darkness

For me the greatest fear’s to be blind
Devoid of sight, know left nor right
To never know colour, no stars no light
Life a constant nightmare: unending night.

To hear a chirping, know not whence it comes
To be burnt by fire know not what burns
Possess imagination greatly profound
Yet, unable to conceive any ground

Hats off to those for whom day and night
Always same: no night too dark, no day too bright
Yet in this world magnificently survive
Showing the world the way to fight

However to God they must be dear
So came epiphanies to the blind seer

Written in 2005, with a view towards technicalities of the sonnet form, the iambic pentameter...

Illustration by Ritwik Mukherjee

Akbar Allahabadi in translation

The following is my first ever attempt in translation from Urdu to English. I have attempted to keep rhyme and meter intact in the spirit of Urdu Shayari.

Akbar Allahabadi:

Batayen aap ko marne ke baad kya hoga
Pulao khayenge ehbaab, fateha hoga

My translation:

Allow me to tell you what will be after death
There'll also be prayers at the funeral banquet

Ibtedai- Trying To Tell A Story

Ibtedai
Or Initial or Introductory,

the names of my first blog and its first post, represent what is nearly my first real foray in to the open world with my acts of creation. Like Milton, I hope that it will "fit audience find, though few."

I begin with a self reflexive poem on the creative endeavour for me,

Trying To Tell A Story

I
Want to tell
The story of the Word
For which
Words enough
I haven’t
Found
Yet.

I grope in the dark
I read in the light
I search my soul
To be able to indite

Imagination
I don’t think
I lack,
It’s the words
That escape me
From
Me
Forever
In flight
I catch them
Now and then
As I run constantly
Pin them down
And
Scribble them
Or
Trap them
In my
Hard disk

But these are only
The feeble runners
The weak ones of the herd
Who fall prey to my
Inept snares

The fiery gazelle
Know no leaps
No bounds
Too high
On and on
they flee
from me

I do have tomes,
Trophies that
Hang
On shelves on walls,
The Advanced Learner’s
Has the whole lot
Neatly bound
By feeble threads
Alphabetically arranged
Barely three inches thick

Yet
these are not mine
to boast of!
A chaos of darkness
That I have not moulded
Into worlds of my mind
Into days and nights
Poems and novels
And stories
That I want to tell

My prized catch
Still remains
Far far away.



Written
1:30 AM Oct 12, 2007
Delhi