Ghazal - A Distant Version of Faiz Ahmed Faiz
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?
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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.
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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
Viraan hai maikada khum-o-saaghar udaas hain Tum kya gaye ke ruth gaye din bahaar ke
Ek fursat-e-gunah mili woh bhi chaar din Dekhe hain hum ne hausle parwardigaar ke
Duniya ne teri yaad se begaana kar diya Tujh se bhi dilfreb hain gham rozgaar ke
Bhule se muskra ke diye woh aaj Faiz Mat puchh walwale dil-e-nakarda kaar ke
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The last two shers were translated elsewhere like this, in a version I read after I finished my version above:
You made it so brief our time on earth, its exquisite sins This sensation oh Almighty, of forgetting you We know how vulnerable you are, we know you are a coward God.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.
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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.
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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.
Translations
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