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April 28, 2002
REVIEW: Poetic reflections
THERE is little or no planning involved in poetry. It is basically a vision, which is projected into written words through the thought process. Unlike philosophy, which depends on a series of arguments and lectures to drive home a theory, poetry reaches minds with symbols, which translate messages on multiple levels. You could say it is a multiverse in a microcosm. That is exactly why it is so inspirational. And that is why when an individual gets down to translating poetry, it is literally next to impossible to carry all those symbols and visions to the hearth of a different language.
It is fascinating to enjoy the translation of a wide variety of verse selected from the treasures of world poetry, in a recently published book by Zamir Ahmad, titled Doosron ki shairi. He already has an earlier edition of translation, titled Aalmi shaeri se khubsurat nazmon ke tarjumay, which was lauded for the effort which went into it.
Zamir Ahmad is presently based in Canada, and thus, is at a vantage point to have a constant link with the current moods and trends of world literature. In his foreword to the book, he hints that he is a translator. His understanding of the Persian and Arabic poetry, as well as an adequate grasp of the classical and modern European poetry, gives him an edge over others of his ilk. Another plus point is that he is also linked with the Urdu writers and poets in the Writers Forum in Toronto, which gives him access to the latest that is being churned out in the subcontinent.
The collection under review has the works of poets from almost all over. But, one feels Doosron ki shairi is not exactly an apt title for a book full of such wonderful verse. More so, symbolically it holds the wrong meaning. World literature, especially poetry, is the mutual inheritance of humankind. There are no ‘others’ in this world of communication, which is why one feels the title has wrong implications.
Those included in this rainbow of verse, range from names like Sappho, a Greek poetess (61 BC), to Shakespeare that incredible litterateur from Stratford-upon-Avon, who is supposed to have “created most after God”, to T.S. Eliot and Robert Browning and then onto the Latin American giants of the twentieth century, like Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Gabriela Mistral, apart from the celebrated Russian defectors like Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz.
Some thing very gratifying is the way Zamir has latched onto the correct pronunciations, in Urdu, of the names from the European and Latin American continents.
What should, in fact, be pointed out forthwith, is that Zamir Ahmad surely has the gift for translating world poetry into Urdu, with mostly powerful words and expressions. He seems to have that much needed command over the language, and it is obvious that he conveys those poems much better, which are steeped in symbolism, and hold deeper meanings. In such translations, he uses some exceptional Urdu lines, like he demonstrates in a touching poem from the Polish Nobel laureate (1996) Wislawa Szymborska, with a title “Yahan bar-i-digar kuch bhee naheen hota”.
Similarly, Joseph Brodsky, another Nobel winner, is very well tackled in poems like “Chaey baras ba’ad” and “Bosnia kee dhun”. The wholly symbolic complexity of the Chilean master, Neruda, has been superbly clothed in Urdu expressions, retaining his wordy vigour too, which mostly confuses translators.
As for Rabindarnath Tagore, his poetry is as a rose petal, and equally fragrant. Bengali and Hindi languages translate with a natural affinity, into Urdu, with a sort of an umbilical cord connecting the lingual joints. Eliot, on the other hand, makes a very different proposition, with largely one-dimensional lines, inferring meanings from the atmosphere he creates, as he goes along, for instance in the “Wasteland”, or “The love song” of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Eliot was, in fact, one of the first poets to have included inanimate objects in pure form in his poems. This made his poetry a bit prosaic, which infuriated the people at that time. In this context, Zamir tries valiantly, to link lines, which proves insufficient, as Eliot writes short stories in verse form. In Urdu, one concludes, such lengthy free verses, no matter how highly endorsed all over the world, make a wrong choice. Similar is the case with Samuel Beckett, whose Cascando makes awkward reading in Urdu. One appreciates that Urdu, despite its recent liberalization, cannot dress down its lyricism, and thus falls short of the business language.
One also notes that there is an inherent lyricism in the Latin American and Spanish poetry, which is very well conveyed by Zamir Ahmad. That can be amply witnessed in the poems of Neruda, Octavio Paz and Gabriela Mistral, and even more so in the Spanish serenade of Juan Ramon Jimenez, another Nobel medalist. Mistral’s “Ballad”, translated as “Ghair ke sath”, is fabulous, almost like a poem from Majaz or Saifuddin Saif.
Jimenez’s poem, “Kabhi hoti hai mehv-i-khwab jub tu”, translates like a purely Urdu free verse, with a sense of the same sensibilities. A masterpiece is “The wild swans at Coole”, titled as “Raj hans”, by William Butler Yeats, the Irish theosophist. One can call it the best example of Zamir’s calibre, and surely one of the best poem in the collection.
The Greek poetess Sappho’s poem makes fine reading, transcending the long chronological distances with its lyrical innocence. A rare poem of Shakespeare has that feeling of deja vu in it. The poems of USSR’s Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Palestinian Mehmood Darwish and Chinese Shu Ting are very well translated and show that Zamir has a good grasp of the poetic essence of all modern poetry.
Zamir Ahmad should also be lauded for the fact that he has made accessible to us prized world poetry, which most of us would not have been able to read owing to the high price of foreign books. Most of our young Urdu poets should buy this book to get a close look at how world poetry has progressed over the centuries and what are the latest trends in literature.
Doosron ki shairi: aalmi shairi say nazmon kay tarjumay
By Zamir Ahmad
Scheherzade, B-155, Block 5, Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Karachi.
E-mail: scheherzade@altavista.com
ISBN 969-8636-00-5
214pp. Rs200
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