the best of FAIZ
the best of FAIZ
translated by SHIV K. KUMAR
Published by Random House India in 2013
Copyright © Shiv K. Kumar 2013
Translation copyright © Shiv K. Kumar 2013
Faiz’s original poetry courtesy of Faiz Foundation Trust, Pakistan
(www.faizghar.net)
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EPUB ISBN 9788184004151
For
Sharad Dutt—
One of the best things
that ever happened to me
CONTENTS
Foreword
POEMS
Naqsh-é-Faryadi
The Melody of Night
Three Scenes
Losing Both Worlds …
Reflections
Quatrains
To My Love
Given Away to Sorrow and Despair
Tonight
A Scene
My Friend
Ask Me Not for That Old Fervour
To My Rival
Loneliness
I’ve Tried Camouflaging My Love’s Secret
Again, I Am a Rival of Spring
A Few Days More, My Love
Dogs
Speak Up!
Poesy’s Domain
We People
Highway
Dast-é-Saba
Quatrains
Hold On, Restless Heart
My Friend, My Mate
The Morning of Freedom
Pen and Paper
Neither Have You Come
When the Scars of Memory Begin to Heal
The Evening Star Has Burnt Out
Two Loves
Dedicated to Your Alleyways
In My Heart Now Well Up
It’s the Same Word of Passion
Let There Be Some Clouds
Remembrance
Zinda Nama
Ask Me Not About the Evening of Parting
Rendezvous
Quatrains
Lending Colour to the Flowers
Quatrains
Casement
Pain Will Creep in Soft-footed
Quatrains
Some Lover to His Beloved
Ever Since I Have Been Waiting for You
Dast-é-Tah-é-Sang
Quatrain
Evening
Quatrain
When Will Pain Cease?
This Patient Breathless
End of the Rain of Stones
Where Will You Go?
In Your Ocean Eyes
The Colour of the Moment
Stay With Me
Quatrains
Sar-é-Vadi’ś Sina
Look at the City from Here!
Blackout
Let Me Think
Heart Attack
Quatrain
Somewhere Near the Pillow
When the Heart’s Bad Blood
A Wish
Anniversary
Shām-é-Shaihr-é-Yara
Day and Night
All That You Ever Said to Me
If Pain Could Speak
Quatrain
Wash the Blood off Your Feet
Evening, Be Gracious
Some Love, Some Work
Méré Dil Méré Musafir
My Heart, My Fellow Traveller
Today Again is Imagination Seeking a Word
All the Flowers Have Withered Away
Some Lover to His Beloved
We Poets
This is the Moment to Mourn Time
We are Committed to Loyalty
Paris
What Shall We Do?
Quatrains
Ghubār-é-Ayyām
Love’s Prisoners
What’s To Be Done, You Tell
Nobody around Tonight
It Seems at This Moment …
Thoughts of Turkish Poet Nazim Hikmat
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
A Note on the Translator
FOREWORD
Poet, journalist, translator, film-maker, broadcaster, Marxist and recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, Faiz Ahmed Faiz grew into a legend in his lifetime. When he died on 20 November 1984, his admirers all over the world felt that a literary era had come to an end.
I first met him in 1979 when he came to Hyderabad. I was asked to preside over one of his poetry readings, while introducing him to the audience, in what turned out to be my first ever public speech in Urdu, I said, ‘Ye rahe Faiz Sahib— hum watan, hum zabaan aur hum pasha …’ This was because we were both natives of Lahore (a city he loved, although he was born in Sialkot); we shared the same mother tongue (Punjabi); and we had both started our careers as lecturers in English. But what I now cherish is the memory of an evening with him in Hyderabad. When I told him how his poetry had influenced mine, although I wrote in English, he responded modestly that he had been unjustifiably overrated, and that he was only too conscious of his limitations. There lay the secret of his charisma—his humility, which is so rare in most contemporary writers. I then told him that while, as Professor of English, I lectured on British and American poetry, it was in his poetry, Iqbal’s or Ghalib’s, that I sought sustenance for my soul. To this he responded, with a dimpled smile: ‘It’s the mystique of Urdu words, I guess, that does it. Hasn’t Urdu its unique aura of sound and meaning?… Also, it carries an emotional charge of such high voltage as is not found in most Western poetry.’
A Rebel
An irrepressible rebel, Faiz never submitted himself to any form of tyranny—political, social or religious. As a poet-thinker, he believed that art should not be divorced from social reality. This commitment to social and political justice was accentuated by the long spells of incarceration he had to undergo. Prison, therefore, emerges in his poetry as a predominant metaphor that embodies his poetic vision.
All his life, he waged a relentless struggle as poet, journalist and activist, for the emancipation of the common man from injustice and oppression.
A truly enlightened government, he believed, must be dedicated to the welfare of the daily wage-earner. No wonder, when Pakistan achieved independence, he felt anguished to see the so-called political liberators as only neo-colonials, drunk on power. This disillusionment is the theme of his poem titled ‘The Morning of Freedom, August 1947’:
… this is not the morning we’d fought for,
in whose eager quest, all comrades
had set out, hoping that somewhere
in the wilderness of the sky
would emerge the ultimate destination of stars …
But while he lamented that his country’s independence brought no relief to the daily wage-earner, he knew that the new political overlords could not muzzle the common man’s urge for social and political justice. In one of his moving poems, ‘Dogs’, symbolizing the labour classes, he warns that if denied their rights, they could shake up the pill
ars of power. Like ‘The Man with the Hoe’, in Edward Markham’s poem, the labourer would some day ‘rise like a dumb terror to judge the world’. So let not these street dogs be kept under perpetual tyranny, for
If these destitutes ever stirred up …
… they could chew up even the bones of their
masters.
All this—
if only someone would awaken them to their ignominy,
shake their sagging tails
to action.
But in spite of a Marxist undercurrent in his poetry, Faiz remained, essentially, a romantic poet—impelled by his passion for his beloved—the theme that dominates most Urdu poetry. This dilemma between Marxist thought and romantic love is incisively resolved in his poem ‘Poesy’s Domain’. While recognizing the validity of such themes as hunger and social justice, Faiz turns to the muse’s perennial preoccupation—love.
These luscious corn-fields bursting with youth
why do they yield hunger alone?
All these themes are there indeed—and many more
but the gently parting lips of that beauty,
and, oh, the alluring contours of her body
now tell me yourself, could there be such witchery
elsewhere?
Well, for me, this is it—
a poet’s mental province can be none other than this.
It would, therefore, be appropriate to say that Faiz’s all-embracing poetic vision is like a mighty river that carries in its sweep countless tributaries. Faiz denies no experience, excludes nothing, to project reality in all its baffling complexity. He is a poet of many moods, and his work is a mosaic of diverse concerns—of classicism and modernity, of political commitment and romantic love, of affirmation and denial.
A Poet in Exile
Faiz travelled extensively abroad, in the USA, England and the Middle East. But wherever he went, he yearned for Pakistan, ‘my other Laila, my land’. To quote from his poem ‘Two Loves’ (‘Do Ishq’):
Just so have I craved for
My other Laila, my land.
So has my heart fluttered
With the same longing.
Celebrated literary orientalist, Edward Said, describes his meeting with Faiz, in Beirut. ‘To see a poet in exile, as opposed to reading his poetry of exile—is to see exile’s antinomies embodied and endured … Several years ago, I spent some time with Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the greatest of contemporary Urdu poets …’
Besides being a widely travelled man, Faiz had also read extensively in Western literature, particularly Latin American. So he could look at the Western man from an oriental point of view, and the oriental man from the Western standpoint. It is this bifocal vision that lends a new dimension to his well-known poem ‘Paris’. To him, the West is a wasteland of emotional sterility, of loneliness and an innate incapacity for genuine emotion. To the Western man, like Eliot’s carbuncular lover, sex is a mere biological function.
Music of Words
The poetry of Faiz embodies the music of words. In a note on his boyhood and youth, he recalls how he was introduced to classical music by his friend Khwaja Khurshid Anwar, who was a member of the revolutionary group led by Bhagat Singh. This may explain Faiz’s unique sense of rhythm, cadence, assonance and resonance. Of all the senses he evokes, the auditory is the most conspicuous. Even when his lines don’t rhyme, as in his poem ‘Yaad’ (‘Remembrance’), any reader endowed with auditory imagination may ‘hear’ the reverberations of music that flows through it:
In the wilderness of my heart, O love,
waver
the shadows of your voice
the mirages of your lips …
No wonder, his poetry lends itself so readily to such ghazal singers as Iqbal Bano, Begum Akhtar, Mehdi Hasan and Noor Jehan. His language is multiversant; he can move effortlessly from formal prose syntax to freewheeling structures. After all, ‘a poet’, he once remarked to a fellow Pakistani writer, ‘is not a grammarian or a lexicographer. Language is his tool, the material he uses to create. It is thus subservient to him, not he to it.’
Synthesis of Tradition and Modernity
This brings me to another aspect of his poetry—is it classical or modern? While some critics consider him a traditionalist, others applaud him as an innovator. In fact, his poetry is a creative synthesis of both tradition and experiment. If he uses such traditional images as the caravan, the night of union or separation, the dawn of hope, etc., he never fails to alchemize each such image so as to invest it with a new meaning and coherence. In fact, his unique achievement, according to Edward Said, ‘was to have created a contrapuntal rhetoric and rhythm whereby he could use classical forms (qasida, ghazal, masnavi) and transform them before his reader rather than break away from the old forms … The critical thing to understand about Faiz is that like Garcia Marquez, he was read and listened to both by the literary elite and by the masses.’
As a Humanist
Faiz may be called a citizen of the world because he felt at home everywhere, be it Paris, Chicago, London or Beirut.
Since he was a liberal humanist, he considered all human beings members of a global family. Islam, to him, was synonymous with peace and love. True religion, according to him, is a unifying force; it does not generate differences between one community and another. So Faiz was adored and admired both in Pakistan and India. If he were alive today, he would have certainly advocated open borders between all countries of the Indian subcontinent—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
One wonders how Faiz would have reacted to religious extremism, which has become the scourge of our time. His humanism would have abhorred places of worship being used as centres of terror. He would have said with Iqbal, his favourite poet, that mazhab nahin sikhata apas mein beir rakhna. (Religion does not teach us to nourish hatred for one another.)
Creation and Criticism
If Faiz often refrained from responding to professional critics, it was because he believed that poetic process was autotelic. In his introductory note to Naqsh-e-Faryadi, he says, ‘So whenever these literary sleuths ask me why I write poetry, I often say anything that comes to my mind, just to put them off.’
Critics, he thought, exulted in long-winded commentaries, without savouring life itself. They are like someone who stands on the bank of a river, taking it as his ultimate destination, while the poet plunges into deep waters, for isn’t that the only way to taste the flavour of the water in midstream?
Tum dur khade dekha hi kiye
Aur doobne wala doob gaya
Tum sahil ko manzil samjhe
Tum lazzaté darya kya jano
In any case, Faiz believed that creation and criticism are co-extensive, for doesn’t a poet function as his own critic while revising his work—expunging, modifying, adding, etc. So why should one create an arbitrary hiatus between a poet’s creative and critical faculties?
Only once did Faiz open up to say that there was no fixed pattern in his mode of writing. Often while listening to music, a specific note or a certain rhythmic form, would send him off to writing. Or it could be a line, a phrase, or an image from a book he was reading … or, an exciting event, a sudden encounter with a stranger—in fact, anything anywhere could stir his imagination. While a ghazal, according to Faiz, emerges from a rhyming scheme in the poet’s mind, a nazm demands deliberation.
It is difficult to sum up a poet like Faiz, whose multi-splendoured genius encompasses human experience in its entirety—mind, body and soul. I earnestly believe that, after Mir, Ghalib and Iqbal, he should be recognized as the greatest Urdu poet.
Shiv K. Kumar
Poems
The Melody of Night
Midnight, moon, self-forgetfulness—
desolate is the theatre of being.
Silence is desire incarnate
and sad the conclave of stars.
This ceaseless cataract of tranquillity—
oblivion reigns all around
as th
ough existence is a mere fragment of a dream
and the entire world a mirage.
On the clustered treetops,
the jaded cry of moonlight sleeps.
With half-shut eyes, the constellations
seem to articulate my humble payer to you.
Through the mute heart-strings
filters the intoxication
that swells to ectasy.
Desire, dream and your visage, so bewitching!
Three Scenes
Imagination
That playfulness, restless in her drunken eyes,
pleasures lurking in the talc’s tints on her cheeks.
And on those crimson lips was her smile’s glow
like jasmine dipped in the wine of flowers.
Encounter
A world of longing filtering through the eyes—
sleeplessness, tales, moon, yearnings.
Some tangled conversations, some stray strains—
and some tears in the eyes, for no reason.
Parting
Face woe-begone, on the lips silence tinged with humility,
the smile jaded and her marble hands aquiver.
What helplessness was there in your proud eyes
and what sorrow in your sighs, so mute and scared.
Losing Both Worlds …
Losing both worlds in his love for you,
there goes someone, after a night of pain.
Desolate is the tavern, and despondent are
the cups and jars—
your parting has alienated me from the days of spring.
Four days was all the time I had for sinning;
indeed, I’ve known the limits of God’s bounty.
The world’s grind has estranged me
from your remembrance—
the woes of life are more alluring than your love.
Unwittingly, as she broke into a smile today, O Faiz—
then ask me not how yearnings upsurged in this hapless
heart.
Reflections
Why is my heart so disconsolate?
Why am I always sunk in silence?
Leave me to my tale of woe
I’m happy as I am.