Baran Farooqi on Shahid Alam's translation of Ghalib's Ghazal 7

Prof Baran Farooqi writes in the Hindu of a translation of this Ghazal of Ghalib's by an elderly left wing Pakistani economist based in the USA.

...nobody has yet been able to arrive at a foolproof theory for translating poetry as ambiguous, clever and beautifully worded as Ghalib’s. Perhaps the intent of translators all this while was to write good poetry that may be said to portray Ghalib’s verses in English.

I'm not sure this is true. All the English translations I have seen of Ghalib's verses are utterly vile. This is okay if done by an American. Americans are stupid and think Indians are stupider yet. What is puzzling is that Indians too treat Ghalib as an imbecile with an impoverished vocabulary and no connection whatsoever with the grand tradition of Islamic philosophy and Persian literature.

I suppose the most we can say is that Indians translate Ghalib to suit their own taste- but what terrible taste it is!

Unfolding anglesThe focus has thus been on writing good English poems, and to not foreignise the translation by recovering the echoes of the long, complicated strains of imagery (and meaning) hidden in the original Urdu. These meanings have evolved over a period of time and would require a deep understanding of the tradition of ascribing literal meaning to metaphorical statements and then going on to build finer and artistic situations upon which poetic statements are made.

This is Shamsur Rahman Faruqi's theory. But Faruqi, good sickularist that he is, would have no truck with Islam and thus the meta-metaphoricity he attributes to Ghalib is merely baroque and almost entirely meaningless.

Why can't we admit that Ghalib was a sincere Muslim who has written some glorious religious poetry? Why make him out to be a drunken hippie?

Ghalib is a difficult, even obscure poet. His poetry depends a great deal on the historical meanings of the key words of the ghazal — this can be traced to the theory and practice of treating the same theme over and over again from new points of view and new angles.

In this internet age we can all quickly look up those 'historical meanings'. All that remains is to find the angle of ironic 'apoorvata' or 'taza go'i'- i.e. freshness of expression- which Ghalib has settled on so as maximise 'ma'ni afrini'- meaning creation. Englishing this remainder is a more or less mechanical task which I have undertaken below. However, it is this bit of donkey work which most Indian translators refuse to have any truck with. The wish to preserve their reception of a holophrastic unity- or 'sphota'- by babbling like a Beat poet stoned out of his gourd.

For example, the ideal death for the lover is to be killed by the beloved. This meaning has evolved from the idea that one is willing to die for someone (to express the great passion of love). Being killed, therefore, becomes the desired goal.

Farooqi is being silly. Following al-Hallaj's 'tazmin' of Abu Nuwas's line re. drinking wine with the dragon in Summer, a highly specific 'maqaam' or stage in esoteric spirituality was defined upon which learned poets commented because it had become part and parcel of a highly correlated epistemic system which embraced Medicine and even Jurisprudence.

Would an Indian Christian explain Crashaw's epigram on the marriage at Canae- Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit- by saying 'Christians drink wine which is turned into blood of Christ. Also, Christ Ji was turning water into wine for wedding. That is why, Crashaw says, the waters blushed when seeing God. This is showing evolution of metaphors in Christianity'?

I may be wrong, but I doubt this happens. Why? It is disrespectful to a great Religion. It depicts it as a bizarre cult featuring either drunkenness or the quaffing of blood. Moreover, it is ugly and untruthful.

Similarly, Farooqi's description of Urdu poetry as involving a morbid fascination with murder is disrespectful of Islam. It depicts it as a bizarre cult featuring lots of heads being chopped off. Furthermore, any development or innovation that occurs merely compounds the original sin and projects us into a universe yet more grotesque.

A new angle which emerges from this premise is that the beloved is unwilling to kill or kills indiscriminately.

There is a wide difference between not wanting to kill and running amok in a homicidal rage. According to Farooqi, Urdu poets see no distinction here. Foreigners can conclude nothing favorable about Urdu people on the basis of such testimony.

The verses translated under Number 30 open with the she’r

Dhamki mein mar gaya jo bab-e naburd tha 

Ishq-e naburd pesha talab gar-e murd tha

Alam translates this as: 

He blanched, nearly died, at love’s 

first swagger. 

If love takes your head, surrender it, 

be free.

This is sheer nonsense. Ghalib says 'who died just because he was threatened halted at the gateway to Battle. Love's profession is warfare, it seeks out doughty heroes- real men! ' Alam is babbling about some guy who died coz he saw some other dude swaggering. Why? Was Ghalib a homo? If Love wants head, give it up like the little bitch you are. Be free- at least when it comes to giving head to random dudes.

Alam has lived for many years in America. Surely he understands that this translation of his is highly comical to Americans?

The trope of dying at the beloved’s hands as the ultimate desire for the lover doesn’t appear here. But the translation manages to create double or triple meanings and also indicates that the lover is riddled with the pain of love, his raging passion makes him lose his senses and death is a release for him.

If Ghalib was a shite poet, this would be true. But Ghalib wasn't a shite poet. Moreover, he had a scholarly interest in Persian prosody. He knew very well that the original Arab tradition featured doughty warriors boasting of their conquests in love and war. The Sufis reversed the meaning of these tropes so as to dive deeper into Monism. The one who died merely because he was menaced is the Gateway. Why? Duality is an illusion. There is only the threshold. This is the face of the mirror. It is an illusion that there is an image or pre-image. Nevertheless in this virtuality, or barzakh, Passion and the Sacrifice it seeks have an intenser agon because both feed on each other's unreality.

There is a skillful irony here. Ghalib and his Emperor were pensioners of the British. The sword had long rusted in their ancestral scabbards. Yet they showed that Islam in defeat was a yet richer and more wondrous gift of Grace than at the time of its noon-tide splendor.

The lover dies here (in the translation) as a result of love’s ravages — it demands his head, and the idea that one craves to die at the hands of the beloved is marginalised.

Ghalib could have mentioned this habitus of head-hunting if that suited his theme. He didn't because he wasn't a shite poet. Instead he says something which is unexpected and intriguing. The one who died at the threat became the gateway of Battle- which, of course, is also the straight path to Heaven for 'real men'. With his very first line Ghalib is counterposing the inward jihad of the Sufi to the outward jihad of the Ghazi. No doubt, Americans may complain that this doesn't sound like the Islam they have heard about. Cutting off heads is what Muslims do. Kindly get with the program and stop pretending all them sand-niggers aint terrorists.

In his second line, Ghalib shows the true Terror of Love. It is that it is itself univocal with Monism. There is no loss, no bereavement, no humiliation, no despair such as the one the Monist suffers precisely because he is no longer victim to the delusion of Duality and Separation. The Sufi who has withdrawn from the world, is the hero that Love, as the arranger of Battles, returns to time and again.

In the world of the ghazal, love is a public affair, because loving is one of the major aspects of humanity, and shared by all. The lover is reviled not just by the beloved but also by the world — he is an exile, such a one who is celebrated for having given up the world.
Yeh laash-e bekafan asad-e khasta jaan ki hai
Haq maghfirat kare ajab azad mard tha
Alam translates this, again perfectly, as:
In death, Ghalib lay uncoffined, unwashed.
May God bless the man. He dared
to be free.

How is this a perfect translation? Ghalib says 'this corpse without a shroud is that of Asad the heart-broken/ God's mercy on a man so wondrously free.'
Ghalib was a Muslim. He loved his Creator. His religion was far more humane what passed for Christianity in Dickensian England. Why show Islam in such a false light? When has it said 'you must be the slave to this Priest or that Prince?' Why add to an atmosphere of Islamophobia in Trump's America by pretending that Muslims in India were constantly cutting off each others' heads, or- if they escaped that fate by first dying of fright- being commended for 'daring to be free' by giving up the ghost before leave to do so had been obtained from some Mughal or Mullah?

Prof. Farooqi, for some reason unfathomable to me, thinks Alam- an elderly leftist economist whose English is nothing to write home about- has done Urdu literature a great service. I suggest that he could more economically achieve his aim simply by saying 'India is a shit-hole. Always has been, always will be coz its people are utterly beastly. Read Ghalib if you don't believe me. The fellow was a cretin.'

How is it that Orhan Pamuk does not shit on Shiekh Galip while sub-continentals feel obliged to do so on our Mirza?

This is one of the best translations in this volume. Alam has almost been able to convey the grandeur in lying unwashed and uncoffined. The sheer fakiri of the man, the swagger in the surrender, the courage to defy the world. 

Alam & Farooqi are Muslims. They know that one martyred in battle is buried without a shroud. But most non Muslims don't know this. Why can't they explain this? Why say Ghalib is showing 'fakiri' when he is claiming to be a 'shahid'?

Of course there is grandeur in being martyred on the battlefield. But what one is defying is not the world but that which seeks to subvert God's plan for it. 'For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.'

Farooqi's sees Ghalib very differently. His is a world without God and whose Spirituality might at best amount to rejecting 'dogma'.

It is up to the reader to deduce whether he defied the world because he was the ideal lover from the world of the Urdu ghazal, where to lose is to win, or the fakir who questioned and rejected dogma and ritual.

 What Farooqi's reader has deduced is that Ghalib was a shite poet. Urdu ghazals are sheer stupidity. Islam is an evil religion which should be rejected. The best sort of Indian is a dead one coz otherwise the fellow would either be cutting off heads or giving head to random dudes who happen to swagger by.

Tradition of dissent
One can only hope that the target-language reader will not limit herself to knowing how Ghalib sounds in English but will make efforts to understand the historicity of the tropes and themes employed by Ghalib.

Why should one hope this? Alam has not shown how Ghalib sounds in English. Ghalib used rhyme. Alam has not. Furthermore, the historicity of the tropes and themes employed by Ghalib are, on Prof. Farooqi's account, utterly cretinous.

Literal translations of Ghalib have failed even more miserably than poetic translations, which at least read like good English poems.

Alam is an elderly Econ Professor. He can't write good English poems because he is not a poet and his English is only as good as his profession requires.

The literal ones make for unreadable reading more often than not.
Alam shows great awareness of the tradition of the ghazal, the adumbration of meanings from the series of what he calls dramatis personae, which have been generated in the discourse of the ghazal, apart from themes and suppositions. He tells us that the ghazal embodies the tradition of dissent in Islamic discourse and takes positions which are critical of religious orthodoxy both in theology and practice.

Yes, yes. And the Ayatollah Khomeini wrote verses praising al-Hallaj and signed himself 'the Indian'. So what? There is no dissent here whatsoever. This is just an availability cascade of an elitist sort.

Presenting two or more versions of the same she’r demonstrates, in practical terms, the multivalence of Ghalib’s poetry. This multivalence is highlighted by Alam time and again: the word, ‘intimations’, in the title is an acknowledgement of the compromises every translator, and more specifically, a translator of Ghalib has to make when he renders Ghalib’s verses into English.

Why is Farooqi gushing over this elderly fool? I suppose there's some political angle to this.

Alam expresses the hope that the compromises are “good compromises”. However, what we need to ask ourselves, as lovers of Ghalib, is this — to what extent does the translation revive the cultural and poetic assumptions, even discourse, of Ghalib’s poetry in the Urdu original? Will it ever be possible to make English readers aware of his exact cultural idiom so that they become more than mere admirers alone of the glamour of Mirza Ghalib?

Yes! It will be possible once great translators like Alam start cutting off the heads, or giving head, to random dudes who swagger by. This afterall, is the 'cultural idiom' Farooqi is praising up to the skies. Or perhaps this is all a very subtle joke perpetrated by genuine Urdu speakers on benighted Madrasis like yours truly.

Afterall, I spent more than 5 minutes cobbling together the translation given below. More fool me!

Passion's profession is warfare; Heaven's gate for heroes
Who give up the ghost at its glare, rate as but zeroes
All my life was spent trembling at the spectre of Death
All color fled my face while yet I had breath

 Zealously I compiled a Pharmacopeia for fidelity

But that al Shifa proved but anomie's debility

My heart was the shore of my liver's black blood

On that road, the lambent rose returned to but mud

Do Love's struggles with Sorrow ever conclude?

We can pluck out our heart, not its ache e'er elude

Comforters find no cure for an allergy to consolation

No Jail can keep Thought from roaming desolation

Asad, the heart-broken, is this martyr without a shroud

May God forgive a man so utterly free and uncowed! 

dhamkī meñ mar gayā jo nah bāb-e nabard thā

ʿishq-e nabard-peshah t̤alabgār-e mard thā

thā zindagī meñ marg kā khaṭkā lagā huʾā

uṛne se peshtar bhī mirā rang zard thā

tālīf-e nusḳhah'hā-e vafā kar rahā thā maiñ

majmūʿah-e ḳhayāl abhī fard fard thā

dil tā jigar kih sāḥil-e daryā-e ḳhūñ hai ab

us rahguzar meñ jalvah-e gul āge gard thā

jātī hai koʾī kashmakash andoh-e ʿishq kī

dil bhī agar gayā to vuhī dil kā dard thā

aḥbāb chārah-sāzī-e vaḥshat nah kar sake

zindāñ meñ bhī ḳhayāl bayābāñ-navard thā

yih lāsh-e be-kafan asad-e ḳhastah-jāñ kī hai

ḥaq maġhfarat kare ʿajab āzād mard thā