I must admit at the outset that it has been a truly rewarding and enriching experience to go through Prof. Anisur Rahman’s trailblazing The Essential Mir. The marked feature of this translation is its complete fidelity to the original text.
Translation from one language to another is a daunting task because of certain intricacies relating to cultural ethos, unfamiliar idioms and the linguistic nuances of the source language, in which these attributes are inextricably rooted and not easy to decipher. The translation of verse is even more challenging than that of prose and fiction on account of these considerations.
However, despite all these impediments, and despite the remarkable tradition of translation established by Ahmed Ali, Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, Prof. Rahman has retained his distinction. Besides its precision, the defining feature of this close, literal translation is its conscious scheme to shed light on each couplet through an elaborate comment on its distinctive artistic features and status of origin.
A Master of a Fractured Age
Mir, a truly representative poet of the eighteenth century, was a consummate artiste in his own right. He survived a crucial phase of history when there was hardly any social or cultural stability in society. Courts and kingdoms were collapsing, and the entire social and economic structure was in shambles.
Mir chose Rekhta (Urdu) as his poetic medium, a language still in a formative stage and generally only spoken, while Persian held centre stage owing to the patronage of the elite and the ruling class during the Mughal period. Mir proved his mettle to emerge as the greatest poet of his time, and gave a new lease of life to a language that was generally despised and neglected.
These were politically harrowing times of Mughal rule in India. Working within the limitations of his stock themes and characters, the most common motifs in the bardic tradition of his day, such as love, beauty, the rival, the rose, the nightingale, wine, the bartender, the tavern, the preacher, Laila, Majnun, Qais, Farhad and Shireen, all hallmarks of the classical ghazal, Mir, with his enormous creative potential, carved a singular niche for himself among his contemporaries. He excelled on account of the intensity of his emotions, his passionate love, and the melancholy born of continuous separation from the beloved.
From Image to Myth
In the realm of poetic imagination, the early stage is marked by a dwelling on raw emotion, by romanticising and embellishing, when the poet is generally tempted by the superficial, garish trappings of the world around him. This is manifested in his verses through a penchant for ornamental analogies and sensuous images. As he progresses, however, portraying his deep aesthetic feelings and ideals with growing success, he is carried away by the much stronger waves of his creative impulses, and this paves the way for deciphering the mysteries surrounding terrestrial life and beyond.
This elevation is achieved through the innovative handling of dynamic metaphors within the matrix of the verses. Even so, the poet still falls short of scaling the ultimate heights and aspiring to true sublimity, so long as he cannot sustain intellectual depth and delve into the complex realities of life and the myriad hues of human predicament, dream and desire. These are best rendered through the frugal use of symbols, a more potent device of oblique expression, which lends a fascinating and efficacious poetic cosmos its power.
This whole process of a poet’s ascent from one creative stage to the next has been very aptly illustrated by Prof. Rahman in his own words:
In stages, images evolve into similes, similes into metaphors, metaphors into symbols, and ultimately symbols into myths.
The language in which these feelings take shape undergoes a process of metamorphosis and artistic churning, so much so that it loses its resemblance to the real and familiar world, only to re-emerge later in the form of similes, metaphors, symbols, myths and kinaesthetic images.
Anisur Rahman, with his enormous wealth of critical insight and a cultivated literary taste, has taken up the task of unravelling and appreciating the deeper layers of meaning and the larger connotations behind these facades of tropes and artefacts, and the entirely new tapestry of human creativity that reaches its climax in Mir’s verses.
Usually, two serious concerns seemed to have constantly occupied Mir’s attention. One being the overall decadence in the social and cultural fabric of his time, resulting in the erosion of human values and emergence of new socio-cultural realities unsuited to his taste and vocation. The second being the major issue relating to the vagaries of his shifting fortune owing to the tormenting separation from his beloved, which in a way contributed to stimulating him to create highly captivating poetic landscapes with a marked philosophical and metaphysical depth in the sonic texture of his poetry.
While going through the corpus of Rahman’s translation, one cannot but be amazed at the translator’s range of insight and his finesse in navigating this most treacherous and nerve-racking exercise.
A Few Points of Departure
Despite the utmost sincerity and precaution in illustrating Mir’s verses, there have been a few minor lapses on the translator’s part that need to be underlined.
The couplet:
Paas baitha ghubaar-e-Mir us se, ishq bin yeh hunar nahin aata.
Here Mir, the nom de plume, signifies lovers in general. Hence, following the hallowed tradition, even if a lover is consigned to dust after his death, his ashes would not violate protocol by flying beyond the threshold of his beloved’s abode. What a novel way of metaphorical expression.
Another couplet:
Aadam-e-khaaki se aalam ko jila hai warna, aaina tha yeh wale, qaabil-e-deedaar na tha.
Here an obvious objection comes to mind. It is man in general, not Adam the first man, who, with his tremendous capacity to undergo trials and tribulations, has transformed the world into its present shape, and who is being recognised and applauded. Prof. Russell is more apt when he translates the couplet:
Man, formed of clay, gave lustre to this mirror; none would have looked into it but for him.
Another couplet:
Shaam se kuchh bujha sa rehta hoon, dil hua hai charaagh-e-muflis ka.
Instead of the first person singular, the reading should be rehta hai. In that case the focus shifts to the heart, which is compared to a poor man’s lamp. As the lamp, with its insufficient oil, has been flickering since evening and cannot survive to brighten the whole gloomy night, so too the heart is subdued and beats slowly in its profound desolation.
This couplet:
Kaha maine gul ka hai kitna sabaat, kali ne yeh sun kar tabassum kiya.
Its translation needs to focus on the commanding, eloquent trope of tabassum (the smile). Here the kali (bud), being so transitory, withers and loses its existence the moment it smiles, that is, the moment it becomes a flower. There is essentially no immediate reference to human existence. It reflects Mir’s intriguing capacity to derive deeper meaning from a familiar object that one seldom notices in life.
The couplet:
Dil woh nagar nahin ke phir aabaad ho sake, pachtaaoge, suno ho, yeh basti ujaad kar.
Russell has translated it thus:
The heart is not a city that can rise again from ruins. Look at it and, do you hear me? You will live to rue the day.
It is a fact that Mir was greatly aggrieved by the torments inflicted on his heart by his beloved, but he was equally distressed by the wanton devastation of Delhi’s centuries-old civilisation at the hands of callous invaders. He loved Delhi no less than his beloved, and shed tears to mourn the treatment meted out to both his dil and his Dilli at once. Even in this couplet, an oblique reference to both these tragedies is present.
Finally, it must be acknowledged that this translation, meant for Anglophone readers, is an eloquent tribute to Mir three hundred years after his birth, offered by a celebrated critic and scholar who wears his scholarship, intellectual credibility and fame so lightly.
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