Yet there is this great need, felt both individually and collectively, to share, to transmit, and to translate from one language to another. Translation is a kind of recoding, a mapping of one language system onto another. In a sense, recoding is itself a re-creation and so can never be the duplicate of the original; the result is bound always to be more or less. But this recoding may also provide recreation, a diversion—a turning aside, an amusement, the pleasure of play. Our deep-seated impulse to retell stories, with subtle shifts of emphasis (whether conscious or unconscious), a readjusted point of view, or in a reimagined form, may be another abetting factor. There are also the more obvious reasons, apparently simpler, but potentially as dangerous in the way they negotiate the original, and equally as important in their effect: to make accessible to foreign audiences the literature of a specific area, to convey the significance and stature of its artistic productions, to have these works become part of the international discourse of literary classics, itself a notoriously vexed subject. Below the surface, it is the old excitement of dismantling and deconstructing and the lure of reassembling and redesigning. A good literary translation perhaps looks for a happy marriage between these two competing impulses: the transference from one language to another and re-creation of the text. Translations, as transactions between languages, are thus important in more ways than one. They help to develop individual languages at the same time that they exchange or transfer patterns of perception, imagery, formal structures of expression, and organization of material.
The present anthology contains translations into English of 148 poems from seven major languages of Pakistan, six of them regional (Balochi, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Pashto, Seraiki, and Sindhi) and one national (Urdu). It represents the work of forty-four poets and fifteen translators. When I was invited, in November 2007, to take up the responsibility of translation editor for this volume, I was both daunted and, somewhat apprehensively, thrilled. Nothing of this kind, to my knowledge, had previously been attempted in the United States. There are volumes of translations of individual poets, as well as collections that present the poetry of one particular language or another, but not an anthology showcasing poems from so many different languages from one particular country.
The reach of the anthology, the effort to represent the poetry of all of modern Pakistan, creates a challenging problem in selection. Over the past half a century, a vast amount of poetry has been produced in the country’s many languages. As anyone familiar with this output would realize, strong disagreements could exist about whom to include in such a volume. No matter what the selection process, questions would remain, for any editor brings his or her biases to the work. Iftikhar Arif, then Chairman of the Pakistan Academy of Letters, made the selections for this anthology, and they reflect the mood of his times, the temper and temperament of officialdom in a military-supervised democracy. Far from vitiating the project, this in fact makes it more noteworthy. These are the poems of a society riven by ethnic, class, sectarian, and political differences, yet there is an attempt to show that the poems in these various languages are all of a piece, that they belong to the same culture and share many similar concerns and perceptions.
The selection of poets and poems having already been made, I felt free to concentrate on arranging for the work of translation. I have thus been engaged these last couple of years in securing, what to my mind appeared, the best possible translations of poems that sometimes seemed impossible to render into English or whose field of allusion and experience defied easy transference across linguistic boundaries. Having looked through existing translations of poetry from some of the languages included here, and having considered the nature of the reservations I had about them, I decided early that I would try to get the translations done by people who were not only familiar with the idiom, historical background, and cultural context of the language of composition but almost, if not equally, as comfortable with these markers in the language of translation. This was an exacting requirement, and it did not always bear fruit. Although I had intended to have a series of translators do anywhere from five to ten poems each, it did not quite work out that way, and, in the end, I found myself taking on around one third of the translations myself. Good translators are not easy to find and once found are not always eager to embark on fresh translations.
I grew up speaking Urdu, Punjabi, and English, but, of the other languages represented in the collection, I know only some Seraiki. In cases where I had no choice but to work in collaboration with native speakers (often themselves scholars and poets), I decided to use multiple translations of the same poem, often by different hands—a literal, line by line rendition, a plain prose version, and a poetic rendering, with or without the rhyme scheme and meter—to get a better idea of the original. I also advised my collaborators to be absolutely faithful to the imagery of the poems. It helped, of course, that I could read the script and recognize some of the images, expressions, and rhythmic patterns even in languages that I did not know. The receipt of various draft versions was followed by e-mail exchanges and, in many instances, telephone conversations, in which the meanings and connotations of words, images, and metaphors were discussed, often at considerable length.
In happy instances where translators of the sort I was looking for were found, I shared with them the following guidelines to ensure that the anthology would reflect a uniformity of approach:
1. Try, as far as possible, to follow the lineation of the original. Ghazal couplets are sometimes represented in quatrains in translation, and this is all right, but a certain consistency of approach, a recognizable strategy, in terms of lineation would be certainly helpful;
2. It would be helpful if the metaphors and images of the original are faithfully reproduced in translation—again, as far as that is possible—for it is these metaphors and images that may be distinctive in terms of language and cultural tradition. Sometimes this would not be possible—both for obvious and not so obvious reasons—awkwardness of transferred metaphor or image as signifier in the language/culture of translation, culture-specific allusive field, etc. But it is a reasonable goal to keep in mind, perhaps for the very reasons which would render it “strange” or “unfamiliar” or “difficult” in translation;
3. Maintain the micro-formal structures—construction of ideas, vehicles of expression, idiomatic expressions, modes of formulation of ideas (rhetorical questions, plain statements, passive voice, gender ambiguity or specificity, etc.)—as far as possible. The macro or the “framing” form may be the more difficult to transfer into the translated version, especially since there may be far fewer possibilities of rhyming in English than in Urdu (and other subcontinental languages)—and ignoring this may not be a catastrophe—but the micro-structures as building blocks of the original poem should be followed closely as a rule unless there is some overriding and compelling reason not to do so;
4. It follows from this that rhyme may be less important than rhythm in this exercise. If the rhythm or “flow” the poem creates in your head is captured, that would be a major achievement, for the more subtle musicality of the language may be traced in this as opposed to the overt rhyme scheme—again, as a general rule;
5. No explaining should be part of the translations—the connotative field and the allusive environment should, as in the original (and with the originally intended readership) emerge through suggestion. If explanations of peculiar images, ideas, or allusions are needed, they should be relegated to footnotes, if at all;
6. Trust your instinct for the original language of the poem.
It is true that some poems translate better than others, but there are issues relating to grammar and the formulation of ideas, as well as conventions of drawing images and metaphors, on the one hand, and rituals of imparting feelings, emotions, and sensations, on the other, that may be difficult to get across from one language to another. Within the literary tradition of the language of composition, such conventions all have their place; they command instinctive r
ecognition and trigger a frisson of response. In translation, however, they may come across as stylized and mechanistic, or unusual and unfamiliar.
In the poetry of most of the languages from which translations are included here, the line is frequently a unit of meaning, as opposed to sentences that extend over several lines, and this is why it often makes sense to preserve the lineation. There are, however, occasionally quite elaborate syntactical structures, and, because the standard word order in these languages differs from that in English, there were times when following the original lineation would unduly dislocate English syntax. In such cases, it was sometimes necessary to rearrange words across lines, with the goal, nevertheless, of conveying the sequence and timing of expressed thought and feeling as closely as possible without doing violence to English idiom. Even at a very basic level, the subject-verb-object structure natural to English is simply not the standard grammatical sequence in Urdu or in the other languages from which the poems included in this volume are drawn. For example, the opening line of Ahmad Faraz’s poem “Mahasara” (“Siege”) is “meray ghanim nain mujh ko yeh paigham bheja hae” (“My enemy has sent me this message”), which translates literally as, “My enemy has me to this message sent have.” So it can be seen how the conveyance of thought, emotion, or idea in exactly the manner, sequence, and pacing of the original is virtually impossible.
Moreover, the languages represented in this volume use the passive voice far more frequently, and naturally, than is considered appropriate in English. As a general rule, the passive voice was retained when it seemed crucial to the emotional and psychological temper of a line or poem, and it was discarded when it created an awkwardness that clouded the experience of the poem. Punctuation and capitalization present yet another source of anxiety for the translator. In all the original languages of composition represented here, there are no markers for capitalization, and punctuation is minimal. In the rare instances where punctuation does exist, it is hardly standardized or used with any regularity. Invariably, lines do not end with any form of punctuation (even where one would expect a period, a comma, or some other form of punctuation in English). Readers of Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi, Balochi, Seraiki, and Kashmiri are of course accustomed to this convention, and their aesthetic experience and enjoyment of their poetry is partly constituted by this open-ended quality of the line. As an aesthetically significant feature of the poems from these languages, this convention has been largely retained in the translations.
It is well recognized that ideas and images that carry an emotional or intellectual charge in one language may not have the same in another and may appear flat or even wholly obscure outside their linguistic code and context. Thus gul-o-bulbul (“the rose and the nightingale”), maqtal or the plural qatal gahain (“field of execution” or “killing fields”), Karbala (the place of Hazrat Imam Husain’s martyrdom), folk characters like Heer, Ranjha, Kaido, Sassi, Punnu, Laila, Majnun, Sohni, Mahiwal, and others, may mean very little to a Western audience, even though these names and terms have a wide circulation in South Asia and parts of the Middle East. The connotations they carry for local readers and audiences cannot be transferred to English, and yet explanations would only have shackled the poetry with academic fetters. I have accordingly kept explanatory notes to a bare minimum. Information about the folk characters, historical allusions, cultural images, and traditional metaphors is readily available on the Internet and from other scholarly sources. For readers to encounter unfamiliar names or terms in a poem and be moved to find out more about them on their own may actually bring the originary experience of the poem closer, make it more personal and intimate.
Yet it is important to keep in mind that for the Muslim poets of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent in particular, no matter what subcontinental language they use to compose their poems, Persian poetry and its conventions are very often the source of inspiration and emulation. It may be, therefore, instructive to review Wheeler M. Thackston’s compact, but thoroughly informative, introduction to his anthology A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry, to get a sense of the energizing aesthetics behind much of the poetry included in this volume. I quote the following passages for their particular relevance in this regard:
Because poets were expected…to have read practically the entire corpus of Persian poetry before they composed their first poem, and because refinement of existing conventions was valued, not innovation, the tradition is cumulative and builds upon itself. The stereotypes of lover and beloved—miserable, suffering, unrequited lover, and inapproachable beloved—and the topoi, the conventional metaphors, that typify these relationships, such as the moth and the candle, the nightingale and the rose, Farhad and Shîrîn, and so forth, all are immutably fixed in the tradition.
The metaphorical language of poetry also developed within the cumulative tradition. What began as a simile, lips red as rubies, for instance, became so commonplace and hackneyed after thousands of repetitions over the decades and centuries that in the end the simile was scrapped, and ruby lips became simply rubies. So also tears that initially rolled down the cheeks like pearls became, in the end, simply pearls, while tears that glistened like stars became stars. A face as round and lovely as the moon similarly became simply the moon. In the twelfth century Nîzamî could write that Lyali’s mother…bound a necklace of stars onto the moon…and know that his audience would immediately understand by this that she covered her daughter’s face with tears. (Thackston x)
Some of these and similarly developed conventions have continued to appear in the poetry of subcontinental Muslim poets. The word “shehr” (literally, city) is one such example of a metaphor that has become a convention for referring to the State or country as a whole. It signified initially the metropolis, the capital city of the Caliphate, itself seen as the source of excessive power, false morality, oppressive legislation, and injustice. In time, the imagery describing the metropolis—its surrounding walls, the censorious Magistrate, the tyrannical King residing in safe luxury behind the walls of his formidable fortress, the mercenary guards armed with bows and arrows to defend the King’s interests or persecute his enemies, the corrupt state functionaries, the hypocritical religious leaders, the suffocating sense of oppression, the harried and harassed common people—has been transplanted to the modern state to represent its milieu of constraint and duress, persecution, deception, and terror.
Another complicating factor is the mystical strain that runs through the imagery of a good number of poems included here. The overt image itself, like the “beloved” (gender unspecified), the “cup-bearer,” “sparrows,” “flame” or “lamp,” can certainly be read literally, but the poet is almost always working within a tradition where these images have mystical connotations. To be able to pick this out requires some experience with reading poetic texts from the Islamic world or the subcontinental Muslim tradition, and this feature too is the gift of Persian poetic convention and practice. Thackston, again, points out that, for a new reader of Persian poetry (and one may just as well read “subcontinental Muslim poetry” here), the pervasiveness of mysticism in it poses a considerable difficulty:
Fairly early in the game the mystics found that they could “express the ineffable” in poetry much better than in prose. Usurping the whole of the poetic vocabulary that had been built up by that time, they imbued every word with mystical signification. What had begun as liquid wine with alcoholic content became the “wine of union with the godhead” on which the mystic is “eternally drunk.” Beautiful young cupbearers with whom one might like to dally became shahids, “bearers of witness” to the dazzling beauty of that-which-truly-exists. After the mystics had wrought their influence on the tradition, every word of the poetic vocabulary had acquired such “clouds” of associated meaning from lyricism and mysticism that the two strains merged into one. (Thackston xi)
Thackston goes on to describe how the “Turk” came to represent the beloved and the mole on the beloved’s cheek to be described as a “
Hindu mole” because of its dark color. Readers of this book will see that many of these images that Thackston discusses are present in the poems of this volume where they have the same or closely similar connotations that are identified here. This is a fascinating subject in itself, but the scope of the introduction does not allow for much further elaboration than has been provided here.
There are certain themes like tribal or ethnic pride, celebration of military glory, fascination with the soldierly life, nationalism, as well as the pleasure (felt by men as well as women) of embracing and reveling in traditional gender roles, that may not travel very well across the linguistic and cultural divide that separates the languages represented here and English. Such feelings are, nonetheless, part of the literary landscape of any language and culture, though their mode of articulation and expression may be different. But there is much else here as well that is likely to strike a chord with American and English-speaking Western readers—challenges to social conventions, critiques of gender inequity, social and political engagement, yearning for a people’s revolution, protest against tyranny in all its forms, the need to claim a place for the individual in a society where individuals have become anonymous or absorbed in the abstract collective, philosophical reflections on the self and its relation to the universe, the depths of personal isolation and grief, the allure and the vagaries of love. This anthology spans an enormous range of subject matter and experience. My hope is that the translated poems will read as poems in the language of translation—that they will come across as poems in English, but not as “English poems,” that these translations retain the cultural flavors of the original and are successful in passing them on to the readers.
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