Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. Asif Raza.
Preface
In 2017 over a period of six months or so, poet, literary critic novelist and doyen of Urdu letters Shamsur Rahman Faruqi engaged with his friend and fellow poet Asif Raza no less a polymath, in a conversation over emails. What do poets talk of when they talk poetry? Just about everything from the human predicament, the idea that beneath the “thin veneer of civilization lurks the beast” as Asif Raza begins,to personal fame that Faruqi dismisses (in upper case), to their comprehensions of translations not just as forms of inter-lingual transfers or renditions but as cultural projects breathing lives of their own. They do not pontificate; their tone remains conversational, polished yet profound. The medium of communication creates its own terms of discourse and the digital age more than any other before it has altered our modes of social exchange immensely; this is well known. So all the more are these exchanges striking and remarkable for they betoken and harken to not a time irrevocably lost but to latent possibilities in the here and now of a different spirit of social communication; a contemporaneity of human exchanges to be found even in this digital age, a spirit of a dialogic warmth and musicality that can overcome the limits of the medium through which they are expressed. Too, their samvaad should be read not for its learnedness, as exhibitionism of poets talking across the parched plains of the quotidian to each other in their ivory towers but as invitations to the art and joy of reading itself. For if there is one takeaway, (to use an Americanese here) it lies in the magic of words, in the spell they weave. And so the gift of this conversation without maps is an invitation to the enchantment of those poetic visions we inherit and create.The Beacon
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Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and Asif Raza
“Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams” Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (citing Robert Bridges)
“Poetry may not be a substitute for religion but in this world, drowning in materialism, it may be the only spiritual pursuit left to man” Asif Raza
January 13,2017 at 11:10 PM
Dear Faruqi Sahib:
It was a delight to receive your letter.
Preeminence has a fatality. It is ineluctably followed by adoration and idolization by others.There is nothing you can do about it. You are a literary icon. Thus it is expected that people would be seeking you out for patronage.
I pray the sun melts enough to provide you with a rejuvenating warmth.
Memon sahib has published quite a few of my translations in his Annuals. Please let me know if you have read any of those. That will help me decide which ones to send you and which not.
As someone said, the future of humanity is always beset with the dark ages. Beneath the thin veneer of civilization, lurks the beast, tugging at its chains. However, having broken loose, it now prowls and growls around the globe.
Yours as ever,
Asif
Jan 17, 2017 at 5:50 AM
Dear Asif,
Many thanks. I am glad my emails provide you with some moments of delectation.
No, I am NOT a literary icon. It is just that everybody wants to be ratified, certified, and praised. Anyway, my view of Urdu literature today is so bleak that nothing gives me pleasure.
The cold weather here is not so intense. It is just the aches and pain sand the pills one takes to keep off the inevitable. Only I hope that the inevitable doesn’t preface itself with incapacity. So help me God. Yaar, where is this Being whom we all invoke all the time? The more I get close to extinction and my ultimate meeting with Him, I get more and more remote from Him spiritually. Ha! Tennyson, the good old Victorian beset with doubts but still able to hope:
Crossing the Bar
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
(And this is the last stanza)
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have cross the bar.
What a beautiful poem and how moving but it fails to inspire hope in me.I say to myself numerous times and have done so even in the past. Poetry may not redeem, but it certainly makes you feel better.
Yes, I remember seeing your poems in the AUS, but that was along time ago.Better send whatever you want to send, and specify the originals. I would have asked for the Urdu poems themselves, but it would be somewhat cumbersome for you. My library is all a jumble because I don’t take good care of it, but I will try to locate your books, so as to save you the trouble.
Yours affectionately, SRF; Jan. 17, 2017
Jan 23, 2017 at 10:51 AM
Dear Faruqi Sahib:
What a poignant poem! Despite Tennyson (“and may there be no sadness of farewell”) I see it suffused with “sadness of farewell”. Yet he is fortunate, despite his uncertainty, to entertain the possibility of coming face to face with his Pilot. As for me, like you, I am also in the evening of my life. Yet I see no evening star, only the darkening sky. For me the proper image for human existence is not “Crossing over”. (There is nothing to cross over to). Rather it is man adrift in a sea towards the abyss of nothingness.
As for God, “Is man merely a mistake of God, or God merely a mistake of man?”asked Nietzsche.
I believe God will never be dead (except for the condemned ones). Man will always need Him to face the primordial terrors of existence, and non-existence. Marx put it better “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature”. But he was rather shallow, since by oppression he meant oppression under the capitalist system. I take it in the metaphysical sense, as the sigh of the homeless man, that is, homeless in a godless universe.
As for keeping off the inevitable,in a state of what I feel like a slow disintegration, I too fear not death but incapacity. However, if it ever comes to that, I intend to make my exit, if not with a “bare” bodkin” then with something as effective.
Poetry may not be a substitute for religion but in this world, drowning in materialism, it may be the only spiritual pursuit left to man.
I hope you are well,
Yours,
Asif
Feb 11,2007 at 2:44 AM
Dear Asif
Yaar our mood seems to be one of unrelieved gloom these days. Let’s snap out of it. Man is God’s mistake, or God is man’s mistake, it avails us nothing. We have to live our days one way or the other.I know that loss of faith is something that is perennial pain in the soul, but I am given to understand that it can be regained too. Epiphanies do happen, they say.
For the present, just to entertain you, I send you a beautiful poem by Browning. It is delightful, not least because of the fact that all the lines rhyme together. In spite of a faint whiff of chauvinism(imperialism too?), I like the poem because of its sheer mastery.
Home-Thoughts, From the Sea
Nobly, nobly, Cape Saint Vincent to the Northwest died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish ‘mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest Northeast distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;
“Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?”–say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God and pray,
While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.
Tremendous, isn’t it? And the meter too is unusual and delightfully controlled.
Yours affectionately, SRF; Jan 30, 2017
March 7, 2017 at 10:14 PM
Dear Faruqi Sahib:
Ah, my “unrelieved gloom”! I wish it were possible for one to forge a new disposition! To tell you the truth, my immersion in the angst of existence is lifelong. However, that does not mean that I wear my pathos on my sleeves. I, ahomo duplex,am well-versed in the artifice of living the quotidian life.
Browning’s “Home Thoughts” that you sent me is delightful indeed for its strong meter, flowing rhythm and for its vivid and colorful imagery. As for your detection of “a faint whiff of chauvinism” and imperialism in it, I would say it is rather more like a strong smell. In a tone of spiritualized patriotism, he mythologizes Britain with reference to its nobly won battles.
I have re-engaged myself in the review of my English translations. One of these days I may send you a few by way of a sample.
I hope you are doing well.
Yours,
Asif
May 3, 2017, 8:02 AM
Dear Asif,
I was horrified to realize that your email is still unanswered. I thought of calling you on the phone once or twice. But I was unsure about the time, as usual. I am truly sorry.
I agree with you about the Browning poem: Home Thoughts from Abroad. But try as I might, I can’t rid myself of its meter and its strong rhythm. It is utterly compelling.
I hope you continue to enjoy good health and are busy translating your poems. I’ll look forward to seeing them.
I will give you today a poem by Robert Bridges which is my perennial favorite. I love it for its rhythm, its meter and its bleak mood. And it is so different from the celebratory, melancholic rich poem by Keats.
Nightingales
Beautiful must be the mountains, whence ye come,
And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, where from
Ye learn your song:
Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,
Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air
Bloom the year long!
Nay, barren are those mountains and spent those streams:
Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,
A throe of the heart,
Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,
No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound,
For all our art.
Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men
We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,
As night is withdrawn
From these sweet springing meads and bursting boughs of May
Dream, while the innumerable choir of day
Welcome the dawn.
To me the poem seems to be the perfect metaphor of a lonely poet, and all poets are lonely, more or less, it seems to me.
Yours affectionately, SRF, May 3, 2017.
June 4, 2017 08:32 PM
Dear Faruqi Sahib:
It is a joyous moment each time I receive your email, because for me, it is a reaffirmation of the bond that you have let me forge with you.
Reading Robert Bridge’s poem brings something deep within me to the surface. It seems so attuned to my own vision of existence. I recall other poems written on the “bird of melancholy”. For example Coleridge’s Wordsworthian poem (of which I confess I cannot speak with great animation) but especially Keats’ dialectically complex, sublime and tragic “Ode to a Nightingale”. (When once I visited Rome for two weeks, the first site I went to was Keats’s grave. I spent quite some time in his house, along the famous Spanish Steps, where he had died. Literally thousands of tourists milled around down below but I was the sole visitor in his house. Perhaps that too a metaphor for the status of the poet in the modern ethos). Comparing the two poems, one notices that, unable to wrest himself away from the world of ‘fever, fret and fury’, Keats bids the bird adieu. But for him, the bird remains idealized as a symbol of perfect happiness. However, Bridges de-idealizes the bird, as subject to the same misery and suffering as Yes, a poignant metaphor for the poet.
I have a draft of thirty poems thus far translated into English. Rather than making another file of a selected few for you, I am sending you, despite being ill at ease in doing so, the entire file. In accordance with your wish to read them alongside their originals, I have referenced the book, the original title, and its page number at the end of each poem
Among the translations, several have been published in Dr. Memon’s Annual, (one titled “Seven Sisters” appeared in an anthology published by the Penguin.) Of course my fondest desire is to have them published in a book form. Dr. Memon has been strongly urging upon me to set it as my goal. He has asked me to send him all my translations, which I may do in time. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself.
Please take good care of yourself,
Yours,
Asif
June 13, 2017 at 2:36 AM
Dear Asif,
Your long silence had begun to worry me. I should have phoned, but I am always confused about the time difference, and your time zones. Ahamad Mushtaq is easier because he goes to bed very very late.
As for slow ‘disintegration’ yaar, are we not all disintegrating, slowly or fast?
ہیں زوال آمادہ اجزا آفرینش کے تمام.
مہرگردوں ھےچراغ رہگذار بادیاں
Wahwah! Subhanallah!
Life must go on, it is not something we can comprehend, far less control. To me, life and the universe seem more and more pointless with every hour of the day that passes. Love, love for poetry, for people (hard to find) is what makes life less miserable. So let us go on, and to hell with everything.
I read your English poems. I must reserve my judgement until I have seen the Urdu originals.
As for the English poems themselves without worrying about the Urdu originals, they read well, if somewhat heavy. But your Urdu is rather heavy itself. Still, give me time to find the originals (at least some of them) before Ican say more.
How lucky of you to have been to Rome and visited Keats’ home! Man I have loved that guy since I was small, and he continues to be one of my most loved ones.
I am glad you liked Bridges’ poem. It is so utterly different from the rest of his work. He must have suffered keenly inwardly to write something like that poem.
The hot weather somehow saps my energy, and the pressure of work is so great that I can’t write more just now. By way of ample (and much better compensation), I send you Thomas Hardy’s Weathers, another of my favorite poems. I hope it lifts your spirits somewhat.
Weathers
This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at ‘The Traveler’s Rest,’
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.
This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.
Your, affectionately, SRF, June 13, 2017
July 3, 2017, at 6:35 AM
Dear Asif,
Your email address appears on the address strip by default. Any way no mat At least you got to read what I said. I have a poem by Walter de la Mare for you this time.I will send it to you once you have had a chance to read and respond to my last one. Things are well here, as well as can be expected. I did a lot of hard work until this morning going over and commenting upon the copious edits on my Mir translation to be published by Harvard under the Murthy Classics of India.
I hope all is well wish you, as well as can be expected.
Yours affectionately, SRF, July, 2017
July 6, 2017 at 11.20 AM
Dear Faruqi Sahib:
I am sorry for being this late in responding. Thanks for your two messages.
And thanks also for countering my bleak pessimism with your sobering thoughts on life and existence. And for Gahlib’ sublime couplet.
Hardy’s Weathers is a fairly straightforward poem but one that captivates the reader with its musical rhythm and masterfully drawn images. (“And drops on a gate-bar hang in a row”). A beautiful lyric.A tragi-comic tale of two seasons in life.(Metaphorically, it makes one aware of the weather that one shuns.) I look forward to Walter de la Mare’s poem. (One of his poems has had a lasting impression on me.)
You are both a theoretician and a practitioner of translation. (I regard your Mirror of Beauty as a prodigious achievement in prose.) In my own practice of translating my poetry, I have avoided “foreignizing” and leaned more towards,domesticating” the translation. In other words, I am partial to “transparency”, that is, parataxis rather than metaphrase. However, acknowledging that the two are not necessarily antithetical to each other, I have also tried to steer the currents and cross currents of these approaches to translation.
I do think translated poems may be judged in two ways, as English translations of Urdu originals but then as English poems in their own right too.
Yours,
Asif
July 18, 2017 at 2:59 AM
Dear Asif,
I have devoted all the available time to Mir which is now near completion. I have tried to be as close to the text, and also to ‘literary’ English as possible. But my editor is fixated upon ‘modern’ English, and that too modern American English, where ten years is sufficient time for a word to become archaic. It has been a battle, of sorts. On the whole I am content because though much of language does not sound like Mir but the voice and the poetry’ are so distinctive that much of the original can be experienced by the discerning reader. Do you have a kulliyat of Mir? If so, I can send you some samples of my translations along with the indication of the ghazal number. The book may be some time in coming, may be Dec.
I am glad you liked Hardy’s ‘The Weathers”.I give below a Walter de la Mare poem which is little known but is a gem of his style. I am glad to know that you too like de la Mare.
SILVER
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
Hypnotizing, isn’t it? It has been read by [John] Gielgud and a number of others, including a Muslim whose name slips my mind. You will find him, and also Gielgud, on Youtube.
Hope this finds you as OK as can be expected.
Yours affectionately, SRF, July 18, 2017.
July 26, 2017 at 9:58 Am
Dear Faruqi Sahib:
I am glad to know that your translations are near completion (mine too). What challenges you must have faced during the process of translating Mir! As we all know, compared to other literary genres, translating poetry is the hardest.
I, as a reader, would not expect the language of the translator to “sound like” the poet’s.It would be enough for me to see the translator carry over the poet’s voice and the aesthetic values of his poetry into English. I eagerly wait to read your translations.
Mir’s kulliyat used to be my prized possession but, alas, I lost it. Now all I have is a selection from his Divan. However, I do have all the four volumes of your Sher-e Shor Angez sent by you.
Would they not suffice ?
One can read Walter de la Mare’s “Silver” as being the poet’s perspective on the moon’s effect on the earth down below. Or, phenomenologically, as the personalized silver moon’s own perception of her effect on nature, an account of “What she peers and sees” with fresh eyes of a child as she glides silently above the earth. .She has “a mirror disposition”, to use Lacan’s phrase.
Or she is Narcissistic, in a benign sense. The silver-she, sees all nature reflecting silver back to her.
In any case, the poem leaves the reader in a trance or, as you put it, “hypnotized”.
Yours,
Asif
August 1, 2017 at 4:24 AM
Dear Asif,
I like your rather unusual interpretation of de la Mare’s poem ‘Silver’. I always read it and cherished it as a celebration of the moonlight night, of a moonlit landscape,etc. But it didn’t occur to me when he says ‘she peers and sees/silver fruits upon silver trees’, it may be the moon’s own perception, and the moon is not personified here, but is presented as a sentient observer.
Mir caused me no end of anguish, and mihnat, and time. I should be able to send you some samples when the mss is finalized. But you may not be able to recognize all the ghazals far less Individual she’rs, by the translation. You need to have the original before you. I will try to do something about it.
Sorry you lost your Kulliyat of Mir. I can send a copy of the new edition that was prepared under my supervision, though it is not free from defects.
Affectionately, SRF; Aug.1, 2017
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Notes AUS refers to the Annual of Urdu Studies now defunct based out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founded and edited by the late Urdu scholar and translator Muhammad Umar Memon that provided scholars working on Urdu humanities in the broadest sense a forum in which to publish scholarly articles, translations, and views. Each issue also included a section in the Urdu script featuring old and new writing. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi Urdu poet literary critic, novelist, in short a polymath whose contribution to Urdu literature and to Indian letters has been immeasurable. His historical novel Mirror of Beauty, self-translated from Urdu original sheds light on a historical period much abused by conventional (colonial) historiography. Asif Raza No less polymath writes poetry in Urdu and translates many of them into English. His poems have been published in several literary journals in India and Pakistan. Several of his original poems as well as his English translations of them were published in the now defunct bilingual journal, Annual of Urdu Studies, University of Wisconsin. He has authored three collections of poems: Bujhe Rangon ki Raunaq (Splendor of Faded colors), Tanhai ke Tehwar(Festivals of Solitude) and Aaeene Ke Zindani (Captives of the Mirror) published in two editions, the first one in Delhi, India (under the supervision of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who also wrote its foreword) and the other in Karachi, Pakistan.After a doctorate in Sociology, he taught at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb and a senior college in Texas. He lives in Tyler, Texas
The correspondence above was curated by Mr. Raza and made available to The Beacon with the consent of Mr. Faruqi
To Mr. Raza and Mr. Faruqi, weavers of magic, many thanks!
More by Asif Raza in The Beacon
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