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TRANSLATING FAIZ
White Star Archives
The difficulties of translating Faiz — and Urdu poetry in general — have been noted by scholars and translators. In particular, Faiz’s poetry’s deep imbrication within a web of established images and metaphors, drawn from the Urdu and Indo-Persian poetic traditions, presents challenges. According to Victor Kiernan, Faiz’s major translator, “Of all elements in foreign poetry, imagery is the easiest to appreciate, except when, as often in the Persian-Urdu tradition, it has symbolic and shifting meanings” (cited in Ali, “Introduction—The Rebel’s Silhouette: Translating Faiz Ahmed Faiz,” Daybreak: Writings on Faiz, 2013: 177-178). As Naomi Lazard, an American poet who worked with Faiz on her transcreations of his poems, noted about her process: “I asked him questions regarding the text. Why did he choose just that phrase, that word, that image, that metaphor? What did it mean to him? … What was crystal clear to an Urdu-speaking reader meant nothing at all to an American” (Ibid., 178). As I have argued elsewhere, Faiz’s poetry draws on the resources of tradition to invert them to new, and sometimes political, purposes. Part of what makes his poetry so fresh and quotable — and well-suited to political protest — is its multi-valence; its deep debt to, and reimagining of, the Urdu poetic topos.
To bring the impact of ‘Hum Dekhenge’ to an English-speaking audience, I had to consider these various factors. How is one to transmit the dense networks of meaning underlying Faiz’s poem, and to render them in a form that communicates the poem’s rousing effect, its quotability, its rhetorical impact on the listener? I have made my best attempt below. I chose to substitute ‘Hum Dekhenge,’ which means “We shall see,” with “On that day” or similar phrases, because the finality of the future tense in the Urdu is what makes that line so powerful. This grammatical distinction is not clear in English. But what the Urdu phrase points to is the certainty that the day that has been promised will, indeed, arrive. I do not believe that sense is rendered in “We shall see”, but other translators are welcome to make their own decisions.
On That DayThat day will comeYes, that day will comeThat day we have been promisedWhen mountains of tyranny and oppressionwill float away like cottonAnd the earth will tremble and shakeunder the feet of the oppressedThe sky will thunder and roaron the heads of the arbitratorsFalse idols will be uprootedfrom the Ka’ba of God’s earthAnd we, the pure-hearted, those banished from the sanctuary, will be seated in places of honourThrones will be smashedAnd crowns overthrownOn that dayOnly the name of God shall remainWho is both present and unseenWho is both the observer and the perceivedOn that dayThe cry of “I am God!” will resoundThe God that is in you and meAnd the earth shall be ruled by those whom God createdThe people, who are you and me
— America, January 1979
***
On February 23, 2020, mob violence broke out in parts of northeast Delhi, sparked by a speech in which a BJP leader, Kapil Mishra, issued an ultimatum to Delhi police to clear the road of Chand Bagh, in northeast Delhi, of anti-CAA protesters within three days, or risk violence. Violence ensued, as armed mobs barged into neighbourhoods, attacking Muslim men and shops, setting cars and e-rickshaws ablaze, throwing stones and, according to a recent estimate by the Delhi Police, vandalising eight mosques, two temples, one madrassah and one shrine (dargah). Police reportedly stood by, or joined in.
On my Twitter feed, someone cited another Faiz poem, this time his 1974 ‘Dhaka Se Vaapsi Par,’ composed as he returned from Dhaka with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as part of his work with the Pakistan National Council for the Arts. The poem becomes a kind of shorthand: a way of extending sympathy and solidarity not only to the residents of northeast Delhi, where Hindu and Muslim neighbourhoods are being torn apart, but also to the estranged neighbours from the formerly East and West Pakistan.
“We have become strangers,” the poem begins, “after so many meetings/When will we become confidants again?” And so, threads of intimacy and estrangement, trauma and longing, across local neighbourhoods and national borders, are woven together into a web of suffering and loss. It is not surprising that this poem by Faiz who, along with his progressive contemporaries, imagined alternative futures for the peoples of both India and Pakistan, can serve as metonym for the pain and suffering of the present day.
Faiz and his fellow members of the Progressive Writers’ Movement stressed the universality of the human condition, as against the divisions of caste, class, language, region, religion and nation. Faiz’s third-world internationalist stance, evident in the poems in Mere Dil Mere Musafir, envisions a global community organised around shared solidarities. In ‘Hum Dekhenge,’ Faiz draws on the resources of Urdu poetry, including its Sufi and Quranic imageries, to invoke and create this common sense of suffering and hope.
A version of this piece was originally published in Positions: Asia critique
The writer is Associate Professor of Urdu at the University of Washington, and the author of Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia
Published in Dawn, EOS, July 5th, 2020
White Star Archives
The difficulties of translating Faiz — and Urdu poetry in general — have been noted by scholars and translators. In particular, Faiz’s poetry’s deep imbrication within a web of established images and metaphors, drawn from the Urdu and Indo-Persian poetic traditions, presents challenges. According to Victor Kiernan, Faiz’s major translator, “Of all elements in foreign poetry, imagery is the easiest to appreciate, except when, as often in the Persian-Urdu tradition, it has symbolic and shifting meanings” (cited in Ali, “Introduction—The Rebel’s Silhouette: Translating Faiz Ahmed Faiz,” Daybreak: Writings on Faiz, 2013: 177-178). As Naomi Lazard, an American poet who worked with Faiz on her transcreations of his poems, noted about her process: “I asked him questions regarding the text. Why did he choose just that phrase, that word, that image, that metaphor? What did it mean to him? … What was crystal clear to an Urdu-speaking reader meant nothing at all to an American” (Ibid., 178). As I have argued elsewhere, Faiz’s poetry draws on the resources of tradition to invert them to new, and sometimes political, purposes. Part of what makes his poetry so fresh and quotable — and well-suited to political protest — is its multi-valence; its deep debt to, and reimagining of, the Urdu poetic topos.
To bring the impact of ‘Hum Dekhenge’ to an English-speaking audience, I had to consider these various factors. How is one to transmit the dense networks of meaning underlying Faiz’s poem, and to render them in a form that communicates the poem’s rousing effect, its quotability, its rhetorical impact on the listener? I have made my best attempt below. I chose to substitute ‘Hum Dekhenge,’ which means “We shall see,” with “On that day” or similar phrases, because the finality of the future tense in the Urdu is what makes that line so powerful. This grammatical distinction is not clear in English. But what the Urdu phrase points to is the certainty that the day that has been promised will, indeed, arrive. I do not believe that sense is rendered in “We shall see”, but other translators are welcome to make their own decisions.
On That DayThat day will comeYes, that day will comeThat day we have been promisedWhen mountains of tyranny and oppressionwill float away like cottonAnd the earth will tremble and shakeunder the feet of the oppressedThe sky will thunder and roaron the heads of the arbitratorsFalse idols will be uprootedfrom the Ka’ba of God’s earthAnd we, the pure-hearted, those banished from the sanctuary, will be seated in places of honourThrones will be smashedAnd crowns overthrownOn that dayOnly the name of God shall remainWho is both present and unseenWho is both the observer and the perceivedOn that dayThe cry of “I am God!” will resoundThe God that is in you and meAnd the earth shall be ruled by those whom God createdThe people, who are you and me
— America, January 1979
***
On February 23, 2020, mob violence broke out in parts of northeast Delhi, sparked by a speech in which a BJP leader, Kapil Mishra, issued an ultimatum to Delhi police to clear the road of Chand Bagh, in northeast Delhi, of anti-CAA protesters within three days, or risk violence. Violence ensued, as armed mobs barged into neighbourhoods, attacking Muslim men and shops, setting cars and e-rickshaws ablaze, throwing stones and, according to a recent estimate by the Delhi Police, vandalising eight mosques, two temples, one madrassah and one shrine (dargah). Police reportedly stood by, or joined in.
On my Twitter feed, someone cited another Faiz poem, this time his 1974 ‘Dhaka Se Vaapsi Par,’ composed as he returned from Dhaka with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as part of his work with the Pakistan National Council for the Arts. The poem becomes a kind of shorthand: a way of extending sympathy and solidarity not only to the residents of northeast Delhi, where Hindu and Muslim neighbourhoods are being torn apart, but also to the estranged neighbours from the formerly East and West Pakistan.
“We have become strangers,” the poem begins, “after so many meetings/When will we become confidants again?” And so, threads of intimacy and estrangement, trauma and longing, across local neighbourhoods and national borders, are woven together into a web of suffering and loss. It is not surprising that this poem by Faiz who, along with his progressive contemporaries, imagined alternative futures for the peoples of both India and Pakistan, can serve as metonym for the pain and suffering of the present day.
Faiz and his fellow members of the Progressive Writers’ Movement stressed the universality of the human condition, as against the divisions of caste, class, language, region, religion and nation. Faiz’s third-world internationalist stance, evident in the poems in Mere Dil Mere Musafir, envisions a global community organised around shared solidarities. In ‘Hum Dekhenge,’ Faiz draws on the resources of Urdu poetry, including its Sufi and Quranic imageries, to invoke and create this common sense of suffering and hope.
A version of this piece was originally published in Positions: Asia critique
The writer is Associate Professor of Urdu at the University of Washington, and the author of Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia
Published in Dawn, EOS, July 5th, 2020
