Naima Rashid

Latent Realms and Rhythms

This summer, I had the honour of teaching an Urdu-English workshop at Bristol Translates. The participants included academics and translators with works in progress. This was one of the highest-caliber groups I have taught, well-versed in Urdu and English, and familiar with literary and translation traditions in both languages. I was able to do fairly advanced exercises with the participants, working across different modes – in groups, in pairs, and solo – for them to get a feel for each and find what format suited them best. Invariably, all exercises turned into a translation slam, where we saw multiple takes on a single text, and discussed the intentions, challenges, and decisions behind each version’s choices.

On the last day, after we had workshopped several texts and discussed our processes, I invited them to translate this ghazal by Nasir Kazmi. It was simple enough for them to work optimally in pairs. The challenge here was not the diction or getting to the meaning, but in deciding how to house the impact cohesively in a new form in English. The language is fairly straightforward, and the mood is richly melancholic (Nasir’s signature style), demanding a slowing down, a reflection. The bulk of their time would be spent not at the sentence level but on adjusting the message to the form. Since the ghazal has no direct equivalent in English, there were several routes available to them: they could invent a form with some formal constraints echoing those of the ghazal, they could adopt an existing form in English such as the sonnet, or they could take the mood or atmospheric impact of the ghazal as a point of departure for shaping their English version.

As part of the warm-up for our week-long workshop, we had discussed the concept of trade-off, how important it is for translators to embrace this idea instead of working from FOMO. There are infinite variations of translation for a single text and each one maneuvers the set of elements differently. As translators and readers, how do we feel these different versions in our bones? In one, we might find that the translator is rigidly loyal to form, resulting in a translation that feels faithful but flat. In another, we might sense free-spiritedness, the translation capturing the essence beautifully while being less concerned about the form. One version might preserve the register and mood of the original while another could deliberately make the text more contemporary, creating the effect of a small tear in time.

There is no right or wrong here, simply different interpretations, of how they land, what chords they strike in us as readers, what they miss, and an awareness of this as we engage with our own translations.

In 2019, when I taught my first translation workshops in universities across Pakistan, I found students excessively attached to the notion of loyalty at the level of form, down to line and word count. No good translation can come from a place where you are starting with a concern for replicating the form in the original. I designed and integrated some priming and warm-up exercises to break this attachment, and we worked toward reorienting the concept of loyalty to the whole gamut of a poem’s experience. What is its diction? Is the language contemporary or does it evoke a certain period? How important would it be to preserve the temporal frame implied by the diction of the original? Are the words light or heavy? Will this texture shift in translation? What is the full composition of the poem’s mood? What are the primary and residual feelings it evokes in us? We talked about whether a poem carries rhythm, speed and sweep or if there is a silence and stillness in it – and if silence, then what kind: a reflective silence that forces one to stop and dwell or a pregnant one, ominous with threat? The words are merely windows; what are the latent realms and rhythms of the text?

I have always maintained that translation is an act of the body and the bones, not a rearranging of fragments in the mind. More often than not, participants lean towards not trusting their instinct, tending to overwrite with learned behaviours of correctness and verification. While conducting the Bristol Translates workshop, I floated among the groups to observe how they worked and to listen in on the discussions. This front row view of their thinking process was priceless. I saw that while translating, they would spontaneously come up with a brilliant word or phrase, then suddenly be reminded to look in the dictionary, even for simple words that did not require it. Having consulted it, they would pick a safer word (because the dictionary said so). No disrespect to dictionaries; I love mine, but if you trust the dictionary more than yourself, you haven’t translated enough to understand their inadequacy. Use the dictionary towards finding out what you don’t know, but don’t use it to overwrite your own instinct. We discussed how a dictionary will never have what a translator has – context. It will never have the range of associations that a word can evoke in a reader, the layers of meaning that are woven into one’s cultural DNA, an insight a person gets from a childhood tale, the circuitry of connections and contrasts latent in the text and revealed only to the reader.

This ghazal by Nasir Kazmi is a personal favourite. It always reminds me of the graveyard scene in Hamlet when Hamlet and Horatio meet two gravediggers digging a grave. Hamlet finds the skull of a court jester, Yorick, that he used to play with as a child. As he holds Yorick’s skull in his hand, he utters a poignant meditation on transience and mortality: ‘Where be your jibes now?’ It has a quiet resignation and wonder, a mellow awe and surrender to the inevitability of the passage of time, an acceptance of the scheme of things and our place therein as silent witnesses. This is narrated in a rhythm that mirrors the ebb and flow of the subject itself. This is a choti beher ki ghazal and a ghazal-e-musalsal. Each sher is a repetition of the same thought, differently expressed through new images each time.

In French, when you meet a person after some time, you say, ‘Qu’est-ce que tu deviens?’ Literally, ‘What are you becoming?’ It is meant to ask, ‘What have you been up to?’ or ‘What’s new with you?’ but there is an existential ring to the grammar that used to throw me off. I had to teach myself to respond to it casually and not to go down an existential blackhole. While going down such rabbit holes is hardly practical in daily life, translation is just the right place to indulge this instinct.

The radeef in the ghazal – ‘waale kya huay’, ‘what became of those…’ – has the same effect of interrupting the album of everyday images in the couplets and framing the question for larger truths beyond. The translations below tease open the questions latent in the poem, using the full interpretive range beyond the literal grammar of images. What is the full import of ‘akela ghar’ and ‘tera diya jalane waale’ in the meanings of light, life, and warmth which are left cold over time? The versions below explore the spectrum through which this contrast can be understood.

Similarly, ‘imaaratain tau jal ke raakh ho gaeen/imaaratain bananay waale kya huay’, a good translator will stretch the concept of ‘imaarat’ beyond mere buildings. There are two clear tangents of meaning here (nuances of grandeur) to contrast with raakh – height and opulence. ‘Imaaratain’ could be high rises, towers, or bright glittering palaces. As the ghazal harps upon its theme of urooj and zawaal, these are monuments to the pride of man, later cautionary tales of his fall. ‘Raakh’ itself is ashes but could also be – less literally – decrepitude, abandon or neglect (‘cracks’, ‘crevices’, ‘ruptures’). What is a more powerful image to keep; ashes or fire? Do we imagine a curtain-drop scene with the finality of residue or do we see it as a never-ending cyclical curse, best captured with the image of lapping flames? Do we want a feel of endgame or an inferno on repeat?

In the last sher, ‘Ye aap hum tau bojh hain zameen ka/zameen ka bojh uthanay waale kya huay’, one version imagines God as the subject of the last line – ‘where is the one who gave us this earth?’ – pushing the existentialist strain in the poem to mean Creator instead of orders of creation.

Two out of the five pairs disrupted the formal structure of the ghazal and used thematic tangents to order the poem in English, while others worked creatively within the structure of a couplet, experimenting with different placements for rhyming elements. All captured the tone and mood thoughtfully.

I appreciated the alertness they brought to how the poem lands – softly, with a hush and a pause that forces you to disrupt your everyday scenes and look beyond the moment to the arc of eternity. That contemplative pause, so crucial to this ghazal, has been beautifully rendered through play with punctuation – an em dash, ellipses, an e.e.cummings-style lowercase. The translators that reimagine the structure did it consciously to step outside their comfort zone. They did so with a considered coherence that takes the principle of the original and restacks it to similar effect by leading with a different unifying strain. The ones staying within the couplet structure retain something of the original’s poise.

As you read these translations and the accompanying notes, I hope you resist the urge to pick a single favourite. Instead, I hope you linger in the plurality of possibilities that these variations reveal.