Stirring up a vespiary by Waqas Khwaja

I wrote this introduction for "Modern Poetry of Pakistan": an anthology of 44 poets from Pakistan's 7 language traditions. I served as translation editor and contributing translator. I translated independently over 60 of the 144 poems included here and another 40 in collaboration with local translators. In the introduction I lay out my approach and practice in discharging this project, and in so doing I take issue with the translation perspectives of some highly regarded translators of poetry in Britain and the USA.

The book was published by Dalkey Archive Press, U of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in 2011.

Introduction: Stirring Up a Vespiary

We inhabit a world of translations. All around us, at all times, everything is changing, renewing itself. Things are constantly transforming, transmuting into something else, conveying life to one already evolving form by giving up their body and essence in another. We use language of all kinds—written, oral, visual, tactile, aural, mathematical—to translate our thoughts, impressions, calculations, and feelings, to find expression for what seeks articulation and communication. The striving to render our thoughts, feelings, and emotions into recognizable shape, into legible characters, into comprehensible, communicable speech or discourse lies at the heart of our experience of a lived life. The translations continue in our sleeping and waking hours, whether we will it or not, at times when our consciousness is alert and in moments of vacancy and reflection. Translation is a state natural to us, natural to our existence. Is it any wonder, then, that, in such a world of continual transformations, some of us engage in the process of conducting the form, sensibility, and sense of one language into another, the texts of one language into the matrices of another?

Yet it is widely recognized that literary translation is impossible, that, as Tony Barnstone puts it, “all translation is mistranslation,” that we can render the original only in a version that is something other than the original (T. Barnstone 11). We do not necessarily need reinforcement of this idea from linguists and deconstructionists to acknowledge its truth. What we also know is that we engage in translations, literary and other, nonetheless. The arc of our ambition may be somewhat abbreviated, as with W. S. Merwin who suggests that “without deliberately altering the overt meaning of the original poem, I wanted the translation to represent, with as much life as possible, some aspect, some quality of the poem that made the translator think it was worth translating in the first place,” or in the case of Ok-Koo Kang Grosjean, for whom translation tries to capture “the rasa, or flavor, of the poetry,” rather than attempt fidelity to the original in a literal sense (Merwin 155, Grosjean 65, Stewart 75). But translations are not abandoned just because they are “impossible” to do. In fact, this may precisely be the reason why the exercise fascinates so many poets and translators. “Is translation of poetry possible?” asks Willis Barnstone, the first translator of Mao’s poems into English. “Of course not,” he responds to his own question, and goes on to add, “It is impossible. And it should be understood that only the difficult, the elusive, the impossible lines are worth translating” (W. Barnstone 34).

In charting his evolution as a translator and the contours of his translation process, Willis Barnstone offers a useful preliminary plan for would-be translators (and translation editors, for that matter):

When I began to translate, I believed, as I do now, that fidelity to the poem meant creating a poem in English, a good poem, one that a poet (or, at the very least, one who is a poet in the act of re-creation) translates. To do this requires freedom, perhaps a lot of freedom. But as I have gotten older, my view has changed. I think now that one should try to be as close as possible to the literal meaning, but not in a clumsy way. Within that closeness, and aided by an immense amount of information provided by the fullest knowledge of that literal meaning (with all its connotative elements and music), one can operate with great artistic privilege. Like reproducing formal prosody, to be close is hard but saves one from being seduced by the obvious. Therefore, one is obliged to come up with ten or twenty solutions for each linguistic enigma, one must take greater imaginative leaps, and in the end, I believe, this allows the original poet to talk. (W. Barnstone 32–33)

There is, however, in the strategy suggested by Barnstone’s evolving view of translation, a lurking danger spawned by the phenomenon of poet-translators who do not know the language from which they translate and rely instead on accidental native informants, narrow, often under-prepared, academics, handy dictionaries and grammars, and even on other translations to help them make sense of the originals. The original may then come to be viewed primarily as an excuse for the work offered as a translation—a translation influenced (as it inevitably is) by the qualifications and quality of the native informants, the isolation of words from their colloquial use and context, the unfamiliarity with literary tradition and conventions, and the lack of experiential understanding of the original’s field of nuance and connotation. No wonder, translators operating under these conditions would want to claim greater creative freedom in translation and be prone to indulging themselves in the name of art.

A significant number of translators have succumbed to the seduction of this indulgence. Willis Barnstone’s son, Tony Barnstone—himself also a translator of Chinese poetry—observes: “From the early metrical and end-rhymed translations of Herbert Giles to the so-called free-verse translations of Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, and Kenneth Rexroth, Chinese poems have been reinvented as American poems” (T. Barnstone 2). Later, in the same essay, he notes: “I have argued elsewhere that Chinese poetry in English has deviated deeply from the form, aesthetics, and concerns of the Chinese originals and that this is the result of willful mistranslation by modernist and postmodern poet-translators” (10). Pertinently, W. S. Merwin reminds us that throughout the nineteenth century the “notion of what translation really was or could be [was] undergoing a change . . . partly as a result of efforts to bring over into English a growing range and variety of originals” (Merwin 152).

The trend Merwin identifies brings up yet another area of concern—the imperial absorption of texts from other parts of the world into the colonial language, whether in the name of scholarship or as a source of entertainment for the reading public, consciously or unconsciously complicit with the project of empire building, and the underlying belief that, the essence engrossed in the translation, there was no more need or value for the original any more. Whether it is Sir William Jones rendering texts from Sanskrit, Persian, or Arabic into English, Edward Fitzgerald rewriting the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, or Pound working his “translucences” of Chinese poems from the notes left by Ernest Fenollosa (who knew almost no Chinese himself), there is something offensive to a native speaker of those languages in the attitude that informs these exercises. However much the translations may have contributed to the development of poetry in the language of translation, such reworking remains an act of intervention, subversion, and appropriation, especially when firsthand knowledge of and fidelity to the original become matters of remote interest, if any at all. When presumptions that the translation has improved upon the original, and, afforded the opportunity, poets of the language of translation can exceed in design, theme, and accomplishment the achievements of the poets translated, are added to this lack of cultural, contextual, and linguistic immediacy or understanding, the matter becomes laughable indeed.

Ironically, translations based on library-confined self-learning or on the misreading of texts paraphrased by accidental native informers have been known to inspire entirely new fashions and trends in the poetry of the language of translation. “All translation is mistranslation,” Tony Barnstone declares, “but a translator’s work and joy are to rig, out of the materials at hand, something that opens cans, or carries hay, or sends voices through the lines. We will never create a truly Chinese poem in English, but in this way we can extend the possibilities of the translation, which may in turn reveal to the imaginations of American poets unforeseen continents” (T. Barnstone 11). W. S. Merwin writes about the Chinese translations of Waley and Pound in the same vein: “Their relations to the forms and the life of the originals I will never be able to assess. But from the originals, by means and aspirations that were, in certain respects, quite new, they made something new in English and they revealed a whole new range of possibility for poetry in English. Poetry in our language has never been the same since, and all of us are indebted to Waley and Pound whether we recognize and acknowledge it or not” (Merwin 152). Such remarks are a study in the kind of appropriating impulse I have noted. Merwin seems reluctant to acknowledge any debt to the original Chinese poets. It is Waley and Pound’s “means and aspirations” (which, to his mind, are “in certain respects, quite new”) that have opened up a “whole new range of possibility in English poetry,” and our gratitude should accordingly be addressed to them. In the end, it matters little what the original Chinese poems were, how they function, or what their forms and strategies of composition are. They have been impressionistically absorbed by Waley and Pound and turned into English poems, and this has given English poetry a momentous charge to diversify in directions hitherto unknown to it.

Two hundred and thirty years earlier, Sir William Jones had translated poems from Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, partly with a similar hope of opening up new possibilities for European poetry. His work inspired a raging trend of “orientalist” poetry and prose in England (it had its effect in continental Europe as well), contributing significantly towards kindling the Romantic movement and keeping it stoked. A skilled philologist, Jones had learnt the languages from which he translated. He spent the last eleven years of his relatively brief life (he died at forty-seven) in Calcutta engaged in scholarly work, in addition to his official duties as puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Bengal. He had a deep respect for the ancient and classical texts of these oriental languages, and his eagerness to see in them a source of replenishment for European literary tradition is quite understandable. But, in the final analysis, despite his very genuine admiration for the literary achievements of the East, even he could not shed the propensity to look at that literature as a means for what it might offer in terms of poetic possibilities to the literature of the West. He concludes his famous essay “On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations” (1772) with the following caveats and proposals:

"I must once more request, that, bestowing these praises on the writings of Asia, I may not be thought to derogate from the merit of the Greek and Latin poems, which have justly been admired in every age; yet I cannot but think that our European poetry has subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and incessant allusions to the same fables: and it has been my endeavour for several years to inculcate this truth, That, if the principal writings of the Asiaticks, which are reposited in our publick libraries, were printed with the usual advantage of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in our places of education, where every other branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field would be open for speculation; we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind, we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes, and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate." (Jones 228–29)

There is nothing wrong with this agenda on the face of it; in fact, it would even be laudable were it to operate as part of a voluntary and disinterested exchange on all sides, so that all parties could appreciate each other’s literary productions and learn of new creative and aesthetic strategies from each other. But the agenda could be, and was, all too easily appropriated by the empire builders of the day for their imperial project, not forgetting the proud claim that in their institutions of learning “every other branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection.” Perhaps this complicity is built into the assumptions that undergird Jones’s proposal, for he is so caught in his fascination for the past literary “excellences” of England’s newly acquired territories that he disregards, or dismisses, contemporary literary production and activity in them. This neglect might have been less troublesome had it not coincided with the conclusion that these cultures were no longer vibrant and that the populations of these territories were therefore in need of suitable oversight. But there is the sense that the past literature, beliefs, and customs of the colonized peoples offer a means of control over them in that the person who gains this knowledge comes so thoroughly to understand these subjectivized peoples that he acquires also the right to legislate for them and determine categorically what may be good or bad for them. In his nine hymns to various Hindu gods and goddesses (Camdeo, Durga, Bhavani, Indra, Surya, Lacshimi, Narayena, Sereswaty, and Ganga), for instance, Jones often adopts the persona of a venerable Hindu poet who, after rehearsing the ancient wisdom of Hindu tradition, invariably endorses British rule in India as the condition, and hope, for its future success and prosperity. Michael J. Franklin correctly points out the “intended metropolitan destination [London] and propagandist purposes of these odes.” Noting Jones’s opposition to civil liberty and free government in India and his support of absolute rule and preservation of local laws and customs, Franklin also recognizes in this stance “a nexus of responsibilities not wholly dissimilar from what a century later became known as ‘the white man’s burden’” (Franklin 63–64). Thus, even a translator as dedicated and indefatigable as Sir William Jones was not above disregarding the contemporary context and apt, at the same time, to assume an understanding of the native, its historical motivations, and its inclinations that was superior to the native’s own self-apprehension or self-knowledge.

What, then, does literary translation involve? How, despite what are seen as virtually insurmountable odds, can translation happen so that it does not undervalue, misrepresent, or (not an unknown phenomenon) utterly dispense with the original? The arrogation of both the privilege and power to translate into English often works in one direction, to the detriment of the text translated. Given the dominance of English and Euro-American institutions of production, dissemination, and interpretation as a natural historical fallout of western imperialism, the determination of methodology and meaning lies essentially with the new centers of power in the West—academic institutions, university and commercial presses, print, visual, and digital media. The reverse is also true: literary and translation theory in, and translation of English texts into, regional and local languages of former colonies have neither the exposure nor the authority of their privileged western counterparts. As a consequence, there is no real conversation or dialogue, by which I mean conversation and dialogue on the basis of parity, between the two sides that are inevitably crucial to the translation process. How can a translator ensure that the text being translated is accorded respect for its own sake, and on its own terms? Should the drive to find exotic avenues of development for the poetry of one’s own language and culture (and/or for one’s own work) override the responsibility one owes, when undertaking what one claims to be a translation, to transmit with fidelity a text from another language? Can literary translation be approached only in extremes, either creatively or literally? Is there no way of combining the two, no way to pursue what Ok-Koo Kang Grosjean calls the “middle way?”

A good translator is an exquisite ambassador. Just as the creative artist suggests new ways of looking at the commonplace, the translator opens up to readers a whole new world, a whole new mode of perception and experience, they may hardly have suspected of existing. Although language is primarily a means of communication, with usage and exchange it acquires over a period the sensibility peculiar to the people that transact it, one that is, in many ways, itself dictated by the physical environment and material conditions of the language’s provenance and prevalence. This sensibility seems seldom, if ever, to be interchangeable between languages. The function of a translator, to my mind, is to find approximations that do the least violence to the original work while preserving to the greatest possible extent its significations and design. Since it is not always possible to find such solutions, the translator must also be creative and be able to produce a recognizable flavor (rasa) where the full taste of the original is not transferable.

As form and cadence, too, are exclusive to each language, they further complicate the task of a translator. All too little account may be taken of the social and material conditions that, in some way or another, impinge upon a work of literature and upon language itself. Neither conceptual paradigms nor languages remain static or immutable, for practice and performance are constantly modifying them. Assorted vernaculars, dialects, and hybrids exist in distinct, yet interwoven, strains. An excessively close and sensitive reading may overdistinguish the subtle currents in the stream that conveys thoughts from one point to another, while an overly rigorous objective distancing may produce the illusion of homogeneity. We may tend to weight words and images with meanings they presently carry and so, we believe, must always have carried. We may also interpret behavioral patterns in the context of our current sociocultural background, understanding, and expectations, just as, in reverse, we may impose specific motives and intentions, picked up from our own reading, on situations and formulations that deserve to be appreciated with an open mind. Where, in translation, a clash of sensibilities occurs, or inadequate attention is paid to historical and cultural displacement, the result is liable to become banal, odd, or even ludicrous. It is a perilous process then, this translation, and one that succeeds less often than is generally assumed.

Yet there is this great need, felt both individually and collectively, to share, to transmit, and to translate from one language to another. Translation is a kind of recoding, a mapping of one language system onto another. In a sense, recoding is itself a re-creation and so can never be the duplicate of the original; the result is bound always to be more or less. But this recoding may also provide recreation, a diversion—a turning aside, an amusement, the pleasure of play. Our deep-seated impulse to retell stories, with subtle shifts of emphasis (whether conscious or unconscious), a readjusted point of view, or in a reimagined form, may be another abetting factor. There are also the more obvious reasons, apparently simpler, but potentially as dangerous in the way they negotiate the original, and equally as important in their effect: to make accessible to foreign audiences the literature of a specific area, to convey the significance and stature of its artistic productions, to have these works become part of the international discourse of literary classics, itself a notoriously vexed subject. Below the surface, it is the old excitement of dismantling and deconstructing and the lure of reassembling and redesigning. A good literary translation perhaps looks for a happy marriage between these two competing impulses, the transference from one language to another and re-creation of the text. Translations, as transactions between languages, are thus important in more ways than one. They help to develop individual languages at the same time that they exchange or transfer patterns of perception, imagery, formal structures of expression, and organization of material.

The present anthology contains translations into English of 148 poems from seven major languages of Pakistan, six of them regional (Baluchi, Kashmiri, Panjabi, Pashto, Seraiki, and Sindhi) and one national (Urdu). It represents the work of forty-four poets and fifteen translators. When I was invited, in November 2007, to take up the responsibility of translation editor for this volume, I was both daunted and, somewhat apprehensively, thrilled. Nothing of this kind, to my knowledge, had previously been attempted in the United States. There are volumes of translations of individual poets, as well as collections that present the poetry of one particular language or another, but not an anthology showcasing poems from so many different languages from one particular country.

The reach of the anthology, the effort to represent the poetry of all of modern Pakistan, creates a challenging problem in selection. Over the past half a century, a vast amount of poetry has been produced in the country’s many languages. As anyone familiar with this output would realize, strong disagreements could exist about whom to include in such a volume. No matter what the selection process, questions would remain, for any editor brings his or her biases to the work. Iftikhar Arif, then chairman of the Pakistan Academy of Letters, made the selections for this anthology, and they reflect the mood of his times, the temper and temperament of officialdom in a military-supervised democracy. Far from vitiating the project, this in fact makes it more noteworthy. These are the poems of a society riven by ethnic, class, sectarian, and political differences, yet there is an attempt to show that the poems in these various languages are all of a piece, that they belong to the same culture and share many similar concerns and perceptions.

The selection of poets and poems having already been made, I felt free to concentrate on arranging for the work of translation. I have thus been engaged these last couple of years in securing, what to my mind appeared, the best possible translations of poems that sometimes seemed impossible to render into English or whose field of allusion and experience defied easy transference across linguistic boundaries. Having looked through existing translations of poetry from some of the languages included here, and having considered the nature of the reservations I had about them, I decided early that I would try to get the translations done by people who were not only familiar with the idiom, historical background, and cultural context of the language of composition but almost, if not equally, as comfortable with these markers in the language of translation. This was an exacting requirement, and it did not always bear fruit. Although I had intended to have a series of translators do anywhere from five to ten poems each, it did not quite work out that way, and, in the end, I found myself taking on around one-third of the translations myself. Good translators are not easy to find and once found are not always eager to embark on fresh translations.

I grew up speaking Urdu, Panjabi, and English, but, of the other languages represented in the collection, I know only some Seraiki. In cases where I had no choice but to work in collaboration with native speakers (often themselves scholars and poets), I decided to use multiple translations of the same poem, often by different hands—a literal, line by line rendition, a plain prose version, and a poetic rendering, with or without the rhyme scheme and meter—to get a better idea of the original. I also advised my collaborators to be absolutely faithful to the imagery of the poems. It helped, of course, that I could read the script and recognize some of the images, expressions, and rhythmic patterns even in languages that I did not know. The receipt of various draft versions was followed by email exchanges and, in many instances, telephone conversations, in which the meanings and connotations of words, images, and metaphors were discussed, often at considerable length.

In happy instances where translators of the sort I was looking for were found, I shared with them the following guidelines to ensure that the anthology would reflect a uniformity of approach:

1. Try, as far as possible, to follow the lineation of the original. Ghazal couplets are sometimes represented in quatrains in translation, and this is all right, but a certain consistency of approach, a recognizable strategy, in terms of lineation would be certainly helpful;

2. It would be helpful if the metaphors and images of the original are faithfully reproduced in translation—again, as far as that is possible—for it is these metaphors and images that may be distinctive in terms of language and cultural tradition. Sometimes this would not be possible—both for obvious and not so obvious reasons—awkwardness of transferred metaphor or image as signifier in the language/culture of translation, culture-specific allusive field, etc. But it is a reasonable goal to keep in mind, perhaps for the very reasons which would render it "strange" or "unfamiliar" or "difficult" in translation;

3. Maintain the micro-formal structures—construction of ideas, vehicles of expression, idiomatic expressions, modes of formulation of ideas (rhetorical questions, plain statements, passive voice, gender ambiguity or specificity, etc.), as far as possible. The macro- or the "framing-" form may be the more difficult to transfer into the translated version, especially since there may be far fewer possibilities of rhyming in English than in Urdu (and other sub-continental languages)—and ignoring this may not be a catastrophe—but the micro-structures as building blocks of the original poem should be followed closely as a rule unless there is some overriding and compelling reason not to do so;

4. It follows from this that rhyme may be less important than rhythm in this exercise. If the rhythm or "flow" the poem creates in your head is captured, that would be a major achievement, for the more subtle musicality of the language may be traced in this as opposed to the overt rhyme scheme—again, as a general rule;

5. No explaining should be part of the translations—the connotative field and the allusive environment should, as in the original (and with the originally intended readership) emerge through suggestion. If explanations of peculiar images, ideas, or allusions are needed, they should be relegated to footnotes, if at all;

6. Trust your instinct for the original language of the poem.

It is true that some poems translate better than others, but there are issues relating to grammar and the formulation of ideas, as well as conventions of drawing images and metaphors, on the one hand, and rituals of imparting feelings, emotions, and sensations, on the other, that may be difficult to get across from one language to another. Within the literary tradition of the language of composition, such conventions all have their place; they command instinctive recognition and trigger a frisson of response. In translation, however, they may come across as stylized and mechanistic, or unusual and unfamiliar.

In the poetry of most of the languages from which translations are included here, the line is frequently a unit of meaning, as opposed to sentences that extend over several lines, and this is why it often makes sense to preserve the lineation. There are, however, occasionally quite elaborate syntactical structures, and, because the standard word order in these languages differs from that in English, there were times when following the original lineation would unduly dislocate English syntax. In such cases, it was sometimes necessary to rearrange words across lines, with the goal, nevertheless, of conveying the sequence and timing of expressed thought and feeling as closely as possible without doing violence to English idiom. Even at a very basic level, the subject-verb-object structure natural to English is simply not the standard grammatical sequence in Urdu or in the other languages from which the poems included in this volume are drawn. For example, the opening line of Ahmad Faraz’s poem “Mahasara” (“Siege”) is “meray ghanim nain mujh ko yeh paigham bheja hae” (“My enemy has sent me this message”), which translates literally as, “My enemy has me to this message sent have.” So it can be seen how the conveyance of thought, emotion, or idea in exactly the manner, sequence, and pacing of the original is virtually impossible.

Moreover, the languages represented in this volume use the passive voice far more frequently, and naturally, than is considered appropriate in English. As a general rule, the passive voice was retained when it seemed crucial to the emotional and psychological temper of a line or poem, and it was discarded when it created an awkwardness that clouded the experience of the poem. Punctuation and capitalization present yet another source of anxiety for the translator. In all the original languages of composition represented here, there are no markers for capitalization, and punctuation is minimal. In the rare instances where punctuation does exist, it is hardly standardized or used with any regularity. Invariably, lines do not end with any form of punctuation (even where one would expect a period, a comma, or some other form of punctuation in English). Readers of Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, Panjabi, Balochi, Seraiki, and Kashmiri are of course accustomed to this convention, and their aesthetic experience and enjoyment of their poetry is partly constituted by this open-ended quality of the line. As an aesthetically significant feature of the poems from these languages, this convention has been largely retained in the translations.

It is well recognized that ideas and images that carry an emotional or intellectual charge in one language may not have the same in another and may appear flat or even wholly obscure outside their linguist code and context. Thus gul-o-bulbul (“the rose and the nightingale”), maqtal, or the plural qatal gahain (“field of execution” or “killing fields”), Karbala (the place of Hazrat Imam Husain’s martyrdom), folk characters like Heer, Ranjha, Kaido, Sassi, Punnu, Laila, Majnun, Sohni, Mahiwal, and others, may mean very little to a Western audience, even though these names and terms have a wide circulation in South Asia and parts of the Middle East. The connotations they carry for local readers and audiences cannot be transferred to English, and yet explanations would only have shackled the poetry with academic fetters. I have accordingly kept explanatory notes to a bare minimum. Information about the folk characters, historical allusions, cultural images, and traditional metaphors is readily available on the Internet and from other scholarly sources. For readers to encounter unfamiliar names or terms in a poem and be moved to find out more about them on their own may actually bring the originary experience of the poem closer, make it more personal and intimate.

Yet it is important to keep in mind, that for the Muslim poets of the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent in particular, no matter what sub-continental language they use to compose their poems, Persian poetry and its conventions are very often the source of inspiration and emulation. It may be, therefore, instructive to review Wheeler M. Thackston’s compact, but thoroughly informative, introduction to his anthology A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry to get a sense of the energizing aesthetics behind much of the poetry included in this volume. I quote the following passages for their particular relevance in this regard:

"Because poets were expected . . . to have read practically the entire corpus of Persian poetry before they composed their first poem, and because refinement of existing conventions was valued, not innovation, the tradition is cumulative and builds upon itself. The stereotypes of lover and beloved—miserable, suffering, unrequited lover, and inapproachable beloved—and the topoi, the conventional metaphors, that typify these relationships, such as the moth and the candle, the nightingale and the rose, Farhad and Shîrîn, and so forth, all are immutably fixed in the tradition.

The metaphorical language of poetry also developed within the cumulative tradition. What began as a simile, lips red as rubies, for instance, became so commonplace and hackneyed after thousands of repetitions over the decades and centuries that in the end the simile was scrapped, and ruby lips became simply rubies. So also tears that initially rolled down the cheeks like pearls became, in the end, simply pearls, while tears that glistened like stars became stars. A face as round and lovely as the moon similarly became simply the moon. In the twelfth century Nîzamî could write that Lyali’s mother . . . bound a necklace of stars onto the moon . . . and know that his audience would immediately understand by this that she covered her daughter’s face wit tears." (Thackston x)

Some of these and similarly developed conventions have continued to appear in the poetry of sub-continental Muslim poets. The word “shehr” (literally, city) is one such example of a metaphor, drawn initially from the historical setting of an ancient metropolis where one may have resided, that has come to acquire the sense of the state or country as whole. All the imagery attendant to this metaphor, the surrounding walls, the city’s censorious magistrate, the tyrannical king and his warriors armed with bows and arrows, the atmosphere of oppression, has likewise been transplanted to the modern state without change to represent the milieu of constraint, persecution, and terror in its radically changed physical setting and appearance.

Another complicating factor is the mystical strain that runs through the imagery of a good number of poems included here. The overt image itself, like the “beloved” (gender unspecified), the “cup-bearer,” “sparrows,” “flame” or “lamp,” can certainly be read literally, but the poet is almost always working within a tradition where these images have mystical connotations. To be able to pick this requires some experience with reading poetic texts from the Islamic world or the sub-continental Muslim tradition, and this feature too is the gift of Persian poetic convention and practice. Thackston, again, points out that, for a new reader of Persian poetry (and one may just as well read “sub-continental Muslim poetry” here), the pervasiveness of mysticism in it poses a considerable difficulty:

"Fairly early in the game the mystics found that they could “express the ineffable” in poetry much better than in prose. Usurping the whole of the poetic vocabulary that had been built up by that time, they imbued every word with mystical signification. What had begun as liquid wine with alcoholic content became the “wine of union with the godhead” on which the mystic is “eternally drunk.” Beautiful young cupbearers with whom one might like to dally became shahids, “bearers of witness” to the dazzling beauty of that-which-truly-exists. After the mystics had wrought their influence on the tradition, every word of the poetic vocabulary had acquired such “clouds” of associated meaning from lyricism and mysticism that the two strains merged into one." (Thackston xi)

Thackston goes on to describe how the “Turk” came to represent the beloved and the mole on the beloved’s cheek to be described as a “Hindu mole” because of its dark color. Readers of this book will see that many of these images that Thackston discusses are present in the poems of the present volume where they have the same or closely similar connotations that are identified here. This is a fascinating subject in itself, but the scope of the introduction does not allow for much further elaboration than has been provided here.

There are certain themes like tribal or ethnic pride, celebration of military glory, fascination with the soldierly life, nationalism, as well as the pleasure (felt by men as well as women) of embracing and reveling in traditional gender roles, that may not travel very well across the linguistic and cultural divide that separates the languages represented here and English. Such feelings are, nonetheless, part of the literary landscape of any language and culture, though their mode of articulation and expression may be different. But there is much else here as well that is likely to strike a chord with American and English-speaking western readers—challenges to social conventions, critiques of gender inequity, social and political engagement, yearning for a people’s revolution, protest against tyranny in all its forms, the need to claim a place for the individual in a society where individuals have become anonymous or absorbed in the abstract collective, philosophical reflections on the self and its relation to the universe, the depths of personal isolation and grief, the allure and the vagaries of love. This anthology spans an enormous range of subject matter and experience. My hope is that the translated poems will read as poems in the language of translation—that they will come across as poems in English, but not as “English poems,” that these translations retain the cultural flavors of the original and are successful in passing them on to the readers.

Finally, a brief note on the dominant poetic forms in sub-continental Muslim linguistic and literary cultures may be helpful in understanding the aesthetic dynamics of the works represented in this anthology. To begin with, ghazal and nazm are the two broad divisions of classical Urdu poetry, ghazal being, traditionally, the more popular of the two. This distinction is preserved in other Pakistani language traditions as well. A ghazal is composed of a series of couplets, generally between five and twelve, with a rhyme scheme of AA, BA, CA, DA, and so on. The rhyme scheme has two parts, qafia and radif, which may be translated as rhyme and end rhyme (or rhyme phrase). Both are maintained strictly throughout the ghazal. It is important to note that every couplet is autonomous in a ghazal and constitutes a theme in itself that sometimes may, but generally is not, continued in the following couplets. This allows the poet considerable freedom, and there are instances where the person being addressed may not be the same throughout the poem. Even the mood may change dramatically from couplet to couplet. The ghazal, then, is distinguished by the disunity of its content, a feature that Western readers find disorienting unless they are aware of it as a convention integral to the form. What provides unity to the ghazal is its form, i.e., the meter and the rhyming pattern, its qafia and radif.

A nazm is a rhymed poem of any length and follows a strict meter. It has a definite rhyme scheme, though usually more varied than the repetitive double rhyming structure of the ghazal. A nazm may be lyrical, narrative, or dramatic, but unlike the ghazal, it does have unity of theme and content. A nazm that does not follow a strict meter nor rely on rhyme—or contain a regular rhyme scheme—is known as azad nazm, akin to free verse in English.

Other forms of poetry prevalent in the Arabic and Indo-Iranian traditions that are reflected in Pakistani linguistic and literary cultures include kafi (a short devotional poem), qita (a short poem within or independent of a ghazal), rubai (an independent poem of four lines, a quatrain), qawwali (based on “qaul”, a famous saying, generally from Hadith, having its origin in 9^th c. Baghdad—“qawwals” are those who recite the qauls), qasida (a eulogy or panegyric in rhymed couplets), sufi (also known as sufiana kalam—literally mystical speech), marsiya (elegy, generally in commemoration of Imam Husain’s martyrdom at Karbala), and the masnavi (a narrative poem in rhymed couplets). Those peculiar to the Indo-Iranian culture include bol (sayings, proverbs), doha (rhymed couplets), geet (song of love, devotion, or pain of separation), thumri (a semi-classical song genre in the woman’s voice), and dadra. Ghazal, nazm, qawwali, and sufiana kalam, however, are extremely popular in Pakistan. It is also significant, that the gender of the poetic persona and the addressee in many of these forms may often be indeterminate or may show any one of the following pairings, male to male, female to male, male to female, and female to female.

In conclusion, I would like to acknowledge here the debt I owe to the many wonderful translators, literary critics, and commentators whose work has given me such enjoyment over the years and from whom I have learned much to help me shape my own views about translating poetry. I am also grateful for the support of my department faculty at Agnes Scott College. Their generosity of spirit has redefined for me the inestimable worth of cherished colleagues. Nor could this work have been accomplished without the patience, flexibility, and understanding with which Ivar Nelson, former director of Eastern Washington University Press, helped me negotiate my way. His encouragement kept me going even when my spirit flagged sometimes. Christopher Howell, senior editor at the Press and himself a poet, provided a gifted second sight. His suggestions were always helpful, often more widely than the context in which they were made. That said, it was Pamela Holway, managing editor of Eastern Washington Press, whose rigorous scrutiny of the translations and meticulous editorial comments, questions, and suggestions helped guide this work to its present form. My deepest thanks to her for the professional excellence she brought to her work. She has been an inspiration in many ways. I would be seriously remiss if I did not mention the patience and self-denial of my family during the time I worked on this anthology. As always, it was the love and care of my wife, Maryam, that sustained me throughout. I only hope that what I have to offer here is not entirely unworthy of all the goodwill, affection, and accommodation extended to me by friends, colleagues, and family alike.

Waqas Khwaja

Bibliography

Ali, Agha Shahid, trans. The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

Barnstone, Tony. “The Poem Behind the Poem: Literary Translation as American Poetry.” In The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry, edited by Frank Stewart, pp. 1–16. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2004.

Barnstone, Willis. “How I Strayed into Asian Poetry” In The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry, edited by Frank Stewart, pp. 28–38. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2004.

Elias, Jamal, trans. Death Before Dying: The Sufi Poems of Sultan Bahu. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Frank, Bernhard, trans. Modern Hebrew Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980.

Franklin, Michael J. “Accessing India: Orientalism, Anti-‘Indianism,’ and the Rhetoric of Jones and Burke.” In Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, edited by Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, pp. 48–66. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Fulford, Tim, and Peter J. Kitson, eds. Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Grosjean, Ok-Koo Kang. “The Way of Translation.” In The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry, edited by Frank Stewart, pp. 62–75. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2004.

Habib, M.A.R., ed. and trans. An Anthology of Modern Urdu Poetry, in English Translation with Urdu Text. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003.

Jamal, Mahmood. The Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Jones, Sir William. Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages, to Which Are Added Two Essays: I. On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations; II. On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative. Second edition. London: Printed by W. Bowyer and J. Nichols for N. Conant, 1777 [1772].

Kiernan, Victor. Poems from Iqbal: Renderings in English Verse with Comparative Urdu Text. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Lazard, Naomi. Translator. The True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1988.

Merwin, W. S. “Preface to East Window: The Asian Translations.” In The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry, edited by Frank Stewart, pp. 152–62. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2004.

Pritchett, Frances W. Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1994.

-- Her website on the Columbia University domain (http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/) and, in particular, her translation of Iqbal’s “Masjid-e Qur:tubah” (http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/iqbal/masjid_index.html).

Russell, Ralph. The Seeing Eye: Selections from the Urdu and Persian Ghazals of Ghalib. Islamabad, Pakistan: Alhamra Publishers, 2003.

Stewart, Frank. Ed. The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2004.

Syed, Najm Hosain. Recurrent Patterns in Punjabi Poetry. Lahore: Majlis Shah Husain, 1968.

Sorley, H. T. Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit: His Poetry, Life and Times, A Study of Literary, Social and Economic Conditions in Eighteenth Century Sind. New Delhi: Ashish Publishing House, 1984.

Thackston, Wheeler M. A Millenium of Classical Persian Poetry: A Guide to the Reading and Understanding of Persian Poetry from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Bethesda, Maryland: Ibex Publishers, 2000.

Added explanation by Waqas Khwaja
On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Khwaja, Waqas <wkhwaj(at)agnesscott.edu> wrote:

Dear Gabriel and Hatto,

Attached is the introduction I wrote for "Modern Poetry of Pakistan," an anthology of 44 poets from Pakistan's 7 language traditions for which I served as Translation editor and contributing translator. I translated over 60 of the 144 poems included there independently and another 40 in collaboration with local translators. The introduction lays out my approach and practice in discharging this project and takes issue with the translation perspectives of some highly regarded translators of poetry in Britain and the USA. It might interest you as well as others on this list.

Comments:

On 7/27/13 2:14 PM, "Gabriel Rosenstock" <grosenstock0(at)gmail.com> wrote:

Great essay, Waqas. I shall pass it around!

Over ten years ago I wrote a haiku (or senryu) in Irish which goes like this in English:

Mumbai
rags on a pavement
a body stirs in them

Recently it was translated into Japanese:

ボンベイの               Bombei no                              ( Bombei : Bombay)
歩道の襤褸切れ       hodo no borokire                     ( hodo : pavement, borokire : rags)
人なりや                   hito nariya                              ( hito : human, hito nariya : it’s a man)

A full circle, so to speak, in the sense of my tuning into a Japanese form to write a haiku in Irish, set in India, and eventually it finds its way back into Japanese. I suppose if all of the elements in my haiku were translated into Japanese, it would have gone over 17 syllables and would no longer contain 'haiku spirit', the 'rasa' or flavour of haiku (a word from your essay).

Somebody said it's not enough to be bilingual, one must be bicultural as well. One finds certain words in Japanese haiku, such as 'ya' and 'kana' for which there are no English equivalents. And what do you do with a language which has no plural form (Japanese) and which the context alone suggests singular or plural?

Did I say bicultural/bilingual a few seconds ago? Multicultural!
I'm told that P R Sarkar knew 200 languages, and yet he wasn't allowed into America. (Or maybe it's because of that!)

Porter (in the video I circulated) is clear about it: he NEEDS to translate from the Chinese to get to know himself, because he was Chinese in a previous existence. Contemporary Chinese has no resonance for him.
He is T'ang Dynasty! He sounded convincing to me, I must say.

I'd love to see a survey among poets and poet-translators asking them why a) they are drawn to translation or b) why they are not. How many would drift into Porter territory? Those who are comfortable in their skins and sure of their identity, I would suggest, will not be drawn to literary translation as a vital act of self-discovery,

Much poetry arises from higher states of consciousness and is imbued with vibrations which are not of the humdrum world and it may be that the poet-translator uses this as a vehicle for a type of time-space travel in order to occupy, temporarily, another plane of existence which the inspiration of all poets, past, present and future, pervades. I have translated tens of thousands of haiku and very often can do so automatically (in the way they may have been written) without going through what Barnhill calls 'the interpretative faculties' and when this happens, its a type of kensho, or instant enlightenment.
Enough already!

G

Subject:	Re: Translating Beyond Europe
Date:	Sun, 28 Jul 2013 16:17:14 -0400
From:	"Khwaja, Waqas" <wkhwaj(at)agnesscott.edu>

Response by Waqas

Thanks, Gabriel, for your appreciation, and for demonstrating the finer points of translation through the evolution of your haiku in its Japanese translation. The crosscultural intersections of language, sensibility, and ideas are exhilarating at many levels.

Waqas

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