Having lost two and more worlds in this love for you, There is he, leaving, leaving behind sadness for you.

Taverns abandon their goblets; sad-drunk is the sea. And the spring days have slipped away hunting you.

For a couple of days, a crime of leisure this was to be, This while I believed to have witnessed Messiah in you!

To the world I am exiled, here, I hold my alienation’s key. Now this pain, day by day, seems as enticing as you.

Was that an accident, the smile she gave you, Sashi? What is this mad enthusiasm and longing within you?

...

Not knowing Urdu, I labour on translating Urdu poetry (while I may have written few sentences somewhere in the word dump on why I attempt translations - mainly because at that point I can't write original poetry) using few online Urdu English dictionaries of indifferent quality and Google. What I produce are not faithful translations either in word or spirit but some kind of versions, which are akin to embryonic structures that I have managed to somehow detach from the body of the original.

....

The original of the above in Urdu is this:

Donon jahaan teri mohabbat mein haar ke Woh jaa raha hai koi shab-e-gham guzaar ke

Bhule se muskra ke diye woh aaj Faiz Mat puchh walwale dil-e-nakarda kaar ke

...

The last two shers were translated elsewhere like this, in a version I read after I finished my version above:

Today she forgot herself her usual ways Her face broke as if by chance into a smile Don’t ask what happened to the defeated heart Oh Faiz how it broke once again into hopeless longing.

...

Now I think, even though my version, as a translation, is way off from what Faiz may have meant in the original, it comes close to conforming to the rules of the ghazal, and perhaps is an approximate ghazal in English, with end rhymes and all. Some of the ghazals that I wrote recently, and which you may want to read, are this, this & this.

...

k.d. lang & Roy Orbison's (on whose work I will do a music post soon) brilliant and stunningly beautiful song 'Crying' provided the background music as I came up with this version of Faiz. I have heard this song some fifty times since I came upon it yesterday.

Also I tried playing songs from Umrao Jaan for a while before this song, but had to stop playing when the poetry of those lyrics proved to be too distracting.

He sits here with a coffe cup in hand, attemtping to break out of groginess, playing Bach's Cantantas on the stereo, messages in German that he doesn't really decipher. But then music is about swimming beyond the tyranny of the Word into some space that is alight with grace.

He sits, drinks coffee, and scans a book title on bullshit, titled "On Bullshit". And after reading

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

&

"On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with mare spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit artist.” "

related questions begin to pop up in his mind, such as the distinctions on whether he recently bullshitted or more simply lied to? And such questions are soon enough dismissed by recalling a line of Homer Simpson, “It takes two to lie, Marge, one to lie and one to listen."

Also for further discussion on bullshit, look at this article from the New Yorker.

All the folks, hailing from Brazil, with whom I have had the grace to be friends with are invariably musical even if they are not. I suppose to be Brazilian is to be able to play the guitar, or at the very minimum to walk around singing, not humming like the rest of us, some song or the other.

Pico Iyer, that inveterate traveler, in one of books invokes paradise, and refers to the essential Brazilian nature to be the closest man can get to subsequent to The Great Fall apres Eating of the Big Red Apple. While such off hand sociological observations necessarily ignore the harsh realities of Brazilian society, they neverthless capture an essential aspect of the Brazilian nature.

So in celebration, this post on a musician I discovered quite recently; if you are a movie watcher, a musican whom you might have encountered in Bill Murray's latest nuthouse movie, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", with an acoustic guitar in hand, singing David Bowie covers in Portuguese. Yes, kind reader, I am talking about Seu Jorge. You can download three of these songs, including Ziggy Stardust over here.

Bro. Seu is a child of Rio de Janeiro's favelas, and his music reflects the same exuberance, and perhaps pain, of those crucibles of hard living and quick death. In this concert Bro. Seu seems to address these issues head on. Check out the terrific drum section. Finally here is the customary YouTube video:

This post is for all my Brazilian friends, especially Sgt. Joao and Daniel