Ghazal - Faiz Ahmed Faiz
We shall, perhaps, learn to see this world clearly again.
We shall, perhaps, free ourselves from its illusions again.
At the border constant patrols, and in the forest barbed wire. Where will the crazed lover take his desperate pain again?
The road to her kindness is marked with our blood stains. This time, perhaps, we shall not default on her loans again.
Either we abandon this city of fear, Faiz, or forsake life forever. To not die but to live, is a conclusion we have come to again.
Translated from the Urdu. Also see Nayyara Noor sing this ghazal here.
Translations
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A Small Round Ball
Is the world on which we, the small people, tread on, tentatively, for a little while. While out in the first blast of northern cold last evening, to eat dinner at the Pakistani dive around the corner, I scanned a face that looked as if I had met it before, in a much younger version. So I tentatively approached the person, and realized that he too was doing the same.
The first words out of our mouths was a quizzical statement, KGP?! Yes?! Which class? 1995? Same here! It turns out that we had sat in a couple of same classes with titles such as "Structural Engineering -I", "Steel Structures" etc as he was then studying Architecture, and I, Civil Engineering. Having abandoned all vestiges of that life, with him not having designed any buildings following the holy grail of Le Corbusier, and I not having built any suspension bridges in the mode of the Golden Gate, we meet again here, across the Hudson, close to the shadows of the City of Mammon's Temple*, two semi-capitalistic strangers on the make, to eat, and talk, and share the winter solitude by burning old collegiate memories.
*See "mammon" in Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary"
My Daily Notes
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What Script For A New York?
"What can I tell you about New York
that you don't already know?", asks a poet,
the exiled lover of a city not as new.
Everything has been lived here before.
Everything has happened many times before.
I see this now: the meetings and partings, arrivals and departures, laughter, weeping, gnashing of teeth, and throats unfurling chants, invocations, suicide love letters. If New York has to be sung into ghazal, what script is sufficient? What refrain should its couplets employ? What raga?
What tounge leaning against ours will be soft enough to touch the solitude that lives in the gaps between these avenues, and these players playing in the avenues? What maps of grammar will be able to replace the knowing of memory with obliviousness of forgetting, in this new city where everyone appears as if we have met them before?
My Poems
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