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BOOK REVIEW: Should one translate Ghalib?
Sept 24: Kejariwal says each reader discovers something new in Ghalib. It is equally
true that the same reader may discover different meanings in Ghalib at various
stages of his own mental growth
Ghalib in Translation
by OP
Kejariwal
Publisher: UPSPD Publishers New Delhi 2006
Pp200; Price Rs
395
Available at bookshops in Pakistan
Generally speaking, one
should leave Ghalib alone. Yes, you should attempt it if you know the idiom in
which he wrote and grasp andesha not as fear alone but as thought too. Don't
touch him if you want to subject him to the tyranny of rhyme, unless you are a
poet of English of equivalent, if not equal, status. If you still insist, you
are bound to pare Ghalib down and make him as ordinary as yourself.
Mr
Kejariwal is an enthusiast and has been trying to convey the genius of Ghalib
for the ordinary reader who can't understand Ghalib's diction. He did a hundred
couplets in his first attempt and got the Indian External Affairs Ministry to
publish the book as a kind of memento. This time, he has done 200 and the result
is predictably below par. He began by rhyming and made a terrible mess of it,
then abandoned it, but was hounded by two additional handicaps: one innate, born
of his incompetence as a reader of Urdu and as a poet in English; the other, his
self-imposed obligation to make Ghalib easy on the presumption that the reader
will not be able to grasp complex conceits.
Kejariwal says each reader
discovers something new in Ghalib. It is equally true that the same reader may
discover different meanings in Ghalib at various stages of his own mental
growth. He selects Ghalib and as always betrays his own sensibility through
selection. Was the selection made by first presuming that the reader will be
'average' in his sensibility or has it materialised out of Kejariwal's own
limitations as a reader of Urdu poetry? Some of the lines he has chosen he
simply doesn't understand.
Ghalib wrote the couplet: Naam ka meray hai jo
dukh keh kisi ko na mila tha/ kaam mein meray hai jo fitna keh barpa na hua tha.
Kejraiwal translates: Who could have borne/the sadness and the grief/ which are
my destiny/ Why is it/ that it's only me/ whose no effort/ is accompanied
without a crisis/ and disaster. The fact is that Ghalib claims the
upheaval/revolution in his lines never happened because of lack of grasp of his
readership. It is not that Ghalib never wanted the fitna to happen. He is
lamenting the fact that the suffering that he has endured is something which
normally happens to the genius who transforms the society, but the
transformation that his poetry promised never happened. The translation has the
meaning back-to-front.
Confronting the famous phrase Ghalib ka hai
andaz-e-bayan aur, the translator says: But they say there was that Ghalib who
could say/ as nobody could/ and nobody can. There is another couplet where the
translator has given a meaning never intended by Ghalib. In fact, Ghalib would
spin like a lathe in his grave upon reading this rendering. His couplet was:
Partav-e-khur say hai shabnam ko fana ki taleem/ main bhi hun aik inayat ki
nazar honay tak. Translation: The dew does die/ at a glance from the sun/ I too
survive only as long/ that I receive/ a glance from her. Ghalib actually wanted
to say that he would die upon receiving attention, not that he would live as
long as he received it.
Ralph Russel did the right thing by translating
Ghalib close to the original text. The couplet Nahin kucch subha-o-zunnaar kay
phanday mein giraai has been ruined by not creating the metaphor of the trap
(phanda) as being without purchase (giraai). The translator has it like this: Is
the noose any different/ whether cast by the thread/ that is sacred/ or the
rosary of the moulavi? It is in fact/ the faith of the Sheikh and of the
Brahmin/ which are/ on test. Linking faith to plural 'are' is grammatically
wrong. The wafadari of the priests pointed to adherence to their own faiths, not
loyalty.
Kejariwal accepts the received wisdom that early Ghalib was too
difficult because of his excessively Persianised diction. He thinks that
Ghalib's self-correction was an admission of his prolixity. Now that all his
lost verse has been recovered by Kali Das Gupta Raza and printed in his
Diwan-e-Kamil, published in 1990 by Anjuman-e-Taraqqi-e-Urdu, Karachi, it is
also clear that he was reacting to two factors: the assault engineered against
him in Calcutta and offence he thought he had given to the increasingly
influential Ahle Hadith in Delhi.
Strangely, lovers of Ghalib have
ignored Diwan-e-Kamil perhaps on the yardstick of "difficult Ghalib". They may
not have read the highly Persianised couplets written by him in 1816-17; but any
careful reading of them will disclose the extraordinary new sensibility buried
in them. For once, Ghalib was wrong to have dropped these lines in his
authorised Diwan, which is now only half of the total versification of the poet.
On the other hand, Mir Taqi Mir did us a great favour by not censoring his work,
bequeathing some of the profoundest lines in Urdu to us.
Kejariwal should
have ventured out of the authorised Diwan to get at some of the greatest lines
written by Ghalib. One can even say that the lines ignored by Urdu scholars even
after they were made available by Kali Das Gupta Raza are superior to any that
he considered worth keeping. It is by adding to the Ghalib's 'rejected' MS of
Bhopal that Raza put in circulation the new gems from the poet, showing how
erroneous his deletions were. Look at this line for universality of thought:
Kucch nahin haasil ta'alluq mein beghair az kashmakash/ Ai khushaa rinday keh
murghe-e-gulshan-e-tajreed hai (Nothing is gained in relationships except
struggle/ happy is the drunk who is the bird of the orchard of
bachelorhood).
Look at another line: Nahin raftaar-e-umr-e-tezrau
paband-e-matlab-ha (The pace of a fast-slipping life is not tied down to any
designated meaning). How about this couplet: Rashk hai aasaesh-e-arbab-e-gaflat
par Asad/ Pech-o-tab-e-dil nasib-e-khatar-e-agah hai (I envy the contentment of
the shallow/ the anxiety of the heart is the fate only of the one who has a
knowing consciousness).
In his introduction, the translator quotes from a
letter of Ghalib explaining his racial origin, and gets the sub-tribal
designation wrong: Pashang instead of Pecheneg. As explained by Russian scholar
Prigarina, Ghalib was an Oghuz from Central Asia, from a ferocious sub-tribe
called Pecheneg that had spread from its home around the Caspian Sea to the
Balkans and Eastern Europe, threatening the Byzantine Empire in the 10th century
AD. Pakistan's test cricketer Majid Khan, from the Ghuzz tribe, could be the
fellow-tribesman of Ghalib.
On page 190, the couplet Dil aap ka keh dil
mein hai jo kucch so aap ka/ dil lijiay magar meray armaan nikaal kar could be
challenged by many 'Ghalib-watchers' as not being Ghalib's. The Urdu version
says kay but the English transcription says kar. * Daily Times
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| Education News | | Updated: 25 May, 2012 |
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