Week 7 exercise
I was particularly struck this week by the notes from Fenollosa included in Ezra Pound’s Cathay – reading the word-by-word glosses conjured up the visual potency of the ideographs (as noted in “The Chinese Written Character…”) as distinct images in a way that a traditional “translation” incorporating grammar, syntax, etc. did not. The experience was more along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s montage-effect – images dreamily arising and fading, with the connections between each image/word/character left to the reader’s imagination (at least in translation; obviously in the original Chinese they are linked to form grammatical sense, but I have no access to the language). For example,
faint waves dragon scales water-grass green
ripples floating
versus “The small ripples resembled the scales of dragons, and the water grass was green” or Pound’s “With ripples like dragon-scales, going grass green/on the water” – there’s an economy of language in the gloss that doesn’t spell out the relationship, say, between “ripples” and “scales” – perhaps there’s a marker for the language of simile (“like”) in the original, but I rather liked the way the necessity of literal glossing just juxtaposes the two things without saying that the water is scales or is like scales, but lets the reader hold the two images together in the mind’s eye.
So, for this week’s exercise I chose to return to an Urdu ghazal that I’ve attempted to translate before and found my efforts to be clunky, thinking that perhaps what seems like the clunkiness that would result from literality might in fact produce new effects and connect the reader more viscerally to the montage of images present in the poem. The following is a very famous ghazal by Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib,” which has in fact been translated multiple times into English (notably in the 1971 volume Ghazals of Ghalib with versions by Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, W. S. Merwin, David Ray, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Strand, and William Hunt, who used a similar process to Pound for their translations since none had access to the original Urdu). I’ll include the original for the first couplet to make clear how the gloss progresses, and then just leave it in English for the rest. A few working notes – the ending verb, hota, of this ghazal is not just “been” but more along the lines of “would have been” or “had it been” – it’s irrealis, suggesting that the action of the poem has never and will never occur (but is nonetheless instantiated by the poem itself). Also, the izafa contruction in Urdu and Persian, consisting of the sound “e” between words (like in “wisal-e yar”) is something that is written as a diagonal slash underneath the word and delineates a relationship of possession (it’s typically translated “of”); but I thought it might be fun to play with the closest visual analog in English, the dash. Also, it was interesting to literally translate idiomatic compounds literally (i.e. “grief-swallower,” rather than “someone who sympathizes” – I think the former packs a bigger poetic punch), but in some places I included both meanings (for example, towards the end, in Urdu “do-char” is literally “two-four,” but idiomatically means to meet or encounter someone, but in this poem Ghalib is clearly numerically punning and juxtaposing it with the “one” of unity).
yeh na thī humārī qismat keh wisāl-e yār hotā
this was not our fate that beloved-union been
agar aur jītē rehtē yehi intiẓār hotā
if more living stayed this very waiting been
your promise on live we then this life lie know
dear one
that from happiness not dying if trust been
from your fragility know that bound was the vow weak
never you could have broken if strong been
knotted tight
someone my heart ask to your arrow-half-drawn
this frisson from where that gone past the liver been
rankling shot through
what is this somewhere friendship that became friend advisor
someone remedy-maker, someone grief-swallower been
from rock-vein dripping that blood which again not stopped
never
this which grief you understand this if sparks been
grief although life-breaking is on where we escape for the heart is
if not love-grief been world-grief been
time-grief
should I say to whom what is grief-night a calamity
to me what harm was to die if once been
having died we who disgraced became why not sea-drowned
not ever funeral rising not anywhere tomb been
who could have seen that one since singular is that oneness
able to see
that twoness-scent also been where two-four been
encounter
these Sufi-problems this your discourse Ghalib
to you we a saint would understand if not wine-drinker been
#foundintranslation #ghazal #submission #ghalib #grief #love