by Raza Mir
Chapter 2: Anatomy of a Ghazal by Ghalib
1. It is worth noting that the shamsheer, a killing sword, plays a role in many of Ghalib’s poems, often as a sight that the subject welcomes. In another ghazal, he speaks of how the sight of the naked sword is a feast for the eyes.
Chapter 3: Ash’aar
1. I have used the male and female pronouns randomly in different ash’aar to highlight that there is no default gender in many ghazals. Indeed, more often than not, the object of the poet’s affection is male.
2. Jamshed’s bowl is one of the more famous vessels in history, akin to the Holy Grail. It is a cup of divination that is reputed to have contained the nectar of immortality.
Chapter 5: Matley
1. Is Ghalib saying that what we call the sky is but an ant’s egg (to a higher power, or in a bigger context)? Or is he saying that human imagination is so vast that for it, the sky is smaller than an ant’s egg? Both interpretations are plausible.
Chapter 6: Ghazaliyaat
1. This is a good example of the risaai ghazal, an elegy. Ghalib wrote this heartfelt piece on the death of his adoptive son, Zainul Abidin Arif, who died in 1852 at the age of thirty-five. Ghalib and Umrao Begum had lost seven children in infancy, and had showered their affections on Arif, who was Umrao Begum’s nephew. The raw grief of this poem presents a challenge to translation like no other.
2. The full moon occurs on the fourteenth day of the lunar month.
3. This refers to a folk reference that some raindrops, when they fall into the sea, are swallowed by oysters and become pearls. To reach the oyster, they have to negotiate marine perils, embodied here by crocodiles. It is a metaphor for the difficulties that lie in the journey towards fulfilment.
4. The new moon announces the festival, and here, Ghalib connects the curve of the executioner’s scimitar to the curve of the moon, to describe a martyr’s passion.
5. Ghalib is being ironical here.
6. Lovers eventually find their clothes torn or bloodstained.
7. ‘Banatunnash’ (literally, ‘the daughters of the bier’) refers to the constellation Ursa Major, usually associated in Urdu poetry with beautiful women.
8. The poet’s feelings provided the material for the nightingale’s songs, so he thinks of himself as a teacher here.
9. This verse has many sorts of wordplay on the theme of unfurling. Bharam khulna is the ‘unfurling of secrets’, and the word turrah, which means a lock of hair, is also a metaphor for vanity and pride, which may be unfurled into humility.
10. Why would you want to be the scribe to letters written to your lover? Curiosity, jealousy, or a Cyrano de Bergerac–style attempt to communicate your own feelings through other suitors? You be the judge. In this day and age, Ghalib may have written verses about peeking into his lover’s Snapchat account or Instagram feed!
11. Jamshed, the famous king mentioned in Firdausi’s Shahnameh, was associated with the magical bowl discussed in an earlier footnote. Ghalib is imputing an otherworldly purpose (and prowess) to his drinking.
12. Referring to one’s love as infidel is an old practice in the ghazal tradition; it indicates that, at its peak, love begins to resemble worship, and so produces religiously undesirable effects.
13. Over the course of time, Ghalib’s poetry has occasionally been infiltrated, sometimes by people who deleted a few verses, and at others by those who inserted a few ‘rogue verses’ in it. Purists swear that this is one such rogue verse that Ghalib never wrote. I include it to highlight this delightful phenomenon of plagiarism-in-reverse.
14. Ghalib at his best. Without the parenthetic comments, the words sound cryptic. But once illuminated, the sher shows myriad possibilities. For example, what does it mean to say that a desert is hidden by dust? Ghalib uses the metaphor of ‘being left in the dust’ to indicate an upstaging. The desolation of the poet shames the dryness of the desert, just as his tears upstage the oceans in their volume.
15. This is the recrimination of the dumped lover, who accuses the beloved (who is presumably either pale or red-faced).
16. The poet, at death’s door, seeks to remain close to his killer libations. You may choose to read this as a denunciation of addictive habit, or a celebration of faithfulness.
17. This is a very poignant verse. Imagine a lover who finds that the object of their affections, distraught about something else, had sought solace in drink, but with someone else. ‘How much better would it have been,’ says the poet, ‘had this been done in my company!’
18. Ghalib is perhaps extolling the human condition. Our house (station) is high enough that we need not wish for anything higher to view the heavens.
19. Ghalib is equating unrequited love with self-hatred. ‘If you are in love with my rival, I am moving on. I am not hanging around in self-abasement,’ the verse seems to say.
20. This verse reflects a Sufi temperament. One apprehends everything, including the divine, through self-awareness. But at the same time, one needs to be reckless about the ‘self’ to be close to the mystical.
21. ‘Turning the heart to blood’ is the true labour of love.
Appendix 1
1. A prophet known to have had a long life.
Appendix 2
1. I will confine myself here to Ghalib’s translations into English published as books. I offer advance apologies for many great translations of Ghalib I have not listed, in books, magazines and journals.
THE BEGINNING
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This collection published 2019
Copyright © Raza Mir 2019
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This digital edition published in 2019.
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