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June 5, 2005
ARTICLE: A dialogue with my spirit
Javed Shaheen belongs to the group of poets who sought a new expression in the ghazal, especially in terms of its content and diction, in the late 1950s. Six volumes of his poetry have been published so far, five of them collectively as Ishq Tamam, in 1993. His latest book is Der se Nikalne Wala Din, published in 2004. He has also published a collection of short stories, a novel, his autobiography titled Mere Mah-o-Saal, and a translation of Trotsky’s autobiography.
Javed Shaheen is a versatile writer who manages to write in various genres with equal facility and ease. His poetry teems with images of the time and age to which he belongs. His language, which is simple and unpretentious, lends a true-to-life quality to his verse. His ghazals, nazms and prose poems are all fashioned in the same mould and seem to be one with each other.
The poems selected for translation are from his collection, Ishq Tamam published in 1993 by Sang-e-Meel, Lahore.
The body on the peg
As evening sets in,
I hang
the body soaked in sweat
on the peg,
hunt my pockets
for the day’s earnings
and find empty hands
sticking out of them.
I contemplate:
I am over fifty now;
what does the future hold for me?
How would I face the next generation?
I am afraid to wash the body
soaked in sweat,
the only token of my toil
for those to follow.All night, the body hanging
on the peg
stares at me;
empty hands
waste under the bed.
In the morning, from the peg
I lift the body
and the hands
from under the bed.
I open the door.
An all-out merciless day
confronts me yet again.
To live
When my feet
sank into the mire of apathy,
I abandoned them right there,
shoved under the bed,
my journeys and ramblings, scattered in the room
and sat in the window,
keeping count of colours
of seasons going past.
Then my eyes were blinded
with rods of barren, fruitless times
and I knew
that nothing worth seeing
was left in the world.
I shut the window;
to keep myself alive
sought the comfort of dreams,
but dreams refused
to replace hunger.
So, taking them for
pieces of bread
I knotted them tight
around my stomach and lay down on the bed.
Now I watch the rats,
who wait to snatch away these pieces,
wait for me to fall asleep.
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