topics: |  poetry | urdu | translation

Among the poetic voices of South Asia, Faiz stands unchallenged due to his eclectical vision and his modern imagery couched in a modern sensibility.

When this book came out, critic Abdul Jabbar wrote:

In Lazard's translation, the heartbeat one feels is that of Faiz himself. Such an achievement is, indeed, rare in translations.

- Abdul Jabbar, Journal of South Asian Literature, Vol. 26, (Summer, Fall 1991), pp. 156-170 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40873227

At that time, only the translations by Kiernan were available, and Mahmood Jamal's Modern Urdu Poetry had just come out. Daud Kamal's_The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl_ would also appear the same year.

Noted historian and polymath Victor Kiernan befrieneded Faiz while living in Lahore 1938-46. His Poems by Faiz, originally published 1958, updated 1971, remains the work of a master. His versions are transparent and let you inhale Faiz, but the aroma is not as intense as it is with Lazard. Lazard is definitely more economical, and her choice of phrase for many poems remains unmatched till today.

Like that work, this is a bilingual text, with the original nashtaliq on the facing page. However, unlike Kiernan, Lazard does not provide a romanization for those of us who do not read urdu...

In the nearly three decades since this work, we have had Agha Shahid
Ali's brilliant Rebel's silhouette (1995), along with notable work by
Shiv K Kumar and others.  Nonetheless, the simplicity and directness of
Lazard serve the poetry very well.   And yet they ring true as in the
originals.  Partly, that may be because of her direct involvement with
Faiz in executing these translations, and her heartfelt dedication to her
work, attested very clearly in an earlier version of the Introduction. 

Naomi Lazard's poetry

Naomi Lazard is perhaps one of the more under-rated poets in English today.
She is primarily a poet's poet, and her poems have been anthologized in Joy
Katz and Kevin Prufer's Dark Horses: Poets on overlooked poems (2007),
in Czeslaw Milosz's anthology, Book of luminous things (1996),
and have been read by Garison Keillor on National Public Radio in the
program Writer's Almanac.

Reading some of Lazard's own work, you can get a clear sense of why
Lazard should be attracted to the poetry of Faiz :

	Welcome to you
	who have managed to get here.
	It's been a terrible trip;
	you should be happy you have survived it.
	Statistics prove that not many do.
	You would like a bath, a hot meal,
	a good night's sleep. Some of you
	need medical attention.
	None of this is available.

Both are clearly anti-establishment, protest poets. 

You can read the rest of Ordinance on Arrival on Book Excerptise; 

Poetry as popular culture

In the West, poetry is written primarily for the afficionado, often other
poets.  In recent years, I can think of very few poets whose work is on
everyone's lips.  Perhaps Maya Angelou comes close, maybe Dr. Seuss. 

But in Indian culture the situation is different.  Tagore's poems - not
only his songs, but the words themselves - are known to even the
illiterate.  Poetry is mass culture.  

So it was with Faiz, and before him, Iqbal.  Lazard writes:

	When he read at a musha'ira, in which poets contended in
	recitations, fifty thousand people and more gathered to listen, and
	to participate.  People who barely have an education know Faiz's
	poetry not only because of the songs using his lyrics but also the
	poems themselves, without musical accompaniment.

But poetry, in these cultures, as in Palestine, has a wide reach, and
becomes an instrument of power.  Faiz, Iqbal, and Darwish knew it.  Like
Tagore, they were not merely poets - they sought to transform society.

In an earlier version of the present introduction, written immediately
after Faiz's death, Lazard was more personal, more elegiac:

   Once when we were saying good-bye after our time in Honolulu I asked
   for his address. He told me I really didn't need it. A letter would
   reach him if I simply sent it to Faiz, Pakistan.

   The reason - he had helped found the postal workers union. They were his
   people. They knew where to find him anytime.

   So this is where Faiz came from when we met in Honolulu in the 
   winter of 1979. 

		(Annual of Urdu Studies, v. 5, 1985 p. 103-110)

Faiz was not merely a poet, he was also an activist. He felt for the
poor, and he worked for them.  He felt that his poetry needed to do more
than sound pleasant.  It needed to change society, transform lives.

And perhaps even as you read these lines, it is doing that.

Excerpts

Translating Faiz, p.xi

   Death is the eggshell that clarifies the poet's work. Though Faiz's
   poetry is almost unknown in this country, the opposite is true on the
   other side of the world. For many years the finest musicians have
   composed music to his poems.

   When he read at a musha'ira, the present-day version of the ancient
   contest or agon in which poets contended in recitations, fifty
   thousand people and more gathered to listen, and to participate.  In
   our culture poetry is occasionally set to music but is usually a form
   of high art, not for popular consumption.  In the Hindu and Moslem
   world it is different.  People who barely have an education know Faiz's
   poetry not only because of the songs using his lyrics but also the
   poems themselves, without musical accompaniment.

   He was, by the British act of partition, a Pakistani, but his people
   were the people of all India, Pakistan, the entire
   subcontinent. Everyone who knows any poetry at all in that vast region
   knows of Faiz.

   Faiz became the spokesman for his people by many and continuous acts of
   courage and conviction. When he became editor of the Pakistan Times
   he used that position to speak in prose as well poetry for peace and
   social justice.  He made himself known as an opponent of oppression. He
   incurred enmity. In 1951 he was arrested faced a sentence of death, and
   was sentenced to four years in prison. This was only one of three
   sojourns in a cell. Part of his time in prison was spent in solitary
   confinement. Some of the poems I have translated were written under
   those conditions

   Faiz became the spokesman for his people in another way too. Instead of
   struggling for a literary career instead of taking high posts as
   lecturer or professor he dedicated himself to teaching illiterate
   people. He was blase' in his disregard for the blandishments of
   life. He identified himself with the masses of the poor. 

Fellow-Marxist Victor Kiernan has written of him: 

	Faiz has remained all this time faithful to what might be called an
	enlightened, humanistic socialism; the kind of activity open to him
	has fluctuated with circumstances.

	After independence came in 1947, accompanied by partition, he
	continued to hope, as he has always done, for good relations
	between the two countries.

	When Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu fanatic, for trying to protect
	the Muslim minority in India, Faiz was, as a London newspaper said,
	"a brave enough man to fly from Lahore for Gandhi's funeral at the
	height of Indo-Pakistan hatred."

	He believed in building his new nation on principles of social
	justice and progress. One of his best-known poems - 
	(|Freedom's Dawn) - expressed the tragic disillusionment of
	finding the promised land a Canaan -- or so it seemed to him --
	only flowing with milk and honey for feudal landowners and
	self-seeking politicians.

The translations

   This century has given us a few great poets whose stance and influence
   have altered the consciousness of the world: Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo
   and Ernesto Cardenal in the Western hemisphere; Nazim Hikmet and Yannis
   Ritsos in the Middle East; and Faiz Ahmed Faiz in South Asia.

   This project of translation started at an international literary conference
   in Honolulu in 1979 and continued until Faiz's death. 

   We established a procedure immediately. Faiz gave me the literal
   translation of a poem. I wrote it down just as he dictated it. Then the
   real work began. I asked him questions regarding the text. Why did he
   choose just that phrase, that word, that image, that metaphor? What did
   it mean to him? There were cultural differences. What was crystal clear
   to an Urdu-speaking reader meant nothing at all to an American. I had to
   know the meaning of every nuance in order to re-create the poem. (p. xii)

   From the beginning this work of translation has been a process of discovery
   for me. I have learned what my own language can and cannot do.  I have also
   learned that I have infinite patience for translation, the same patience I
   have for writing my own poems.  I have learned that it doesn't matter how
   long it takes, how many transformations a poem must be brought through,
   until the English version works in the same way that a poem I have written
   myself works. It must be faithful to the meaning Faiz has given it. It must
   move in his own spirit, with the same feeling and tone. It must have the
   same music, the same direction, and, above all, it must mean the same thing
   in English that it means in Urdu... (p xii)

[One of the first poems Faiz gave her was Spring comes.  The
introduction gives an earlier draft version. p.xiii]

A natural problem that comes up over and over again in translating from a
literal text is the one of making it more specific, since the literal text
is usually a summation, more or less general, of the original meaning,
(p. xv)

"True Subject": A thought that went full circle

Lazard's introduction ends on an amazing anecdote of a story that went
around the world.  

One day in the Honolulu conference where they met, Lazard remarked to
Faiz that 
	"The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved."

She had read this in Robert Graves' The White Goddess many years back,
where it had been attributed to Alun Lewis:
	"The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved."

As it turned out, the statement originated with Faiz, and here is how the
ring closes:

Faiz Ahmed Faiz to Alun Lewis, Burma, circa 1943:
	"The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved."

Alun Lewis, in a letter to Robert Graves before he was killed, Burma, 1944:
      "The single poetic theme of Life and Death - the question of what
      survives of the beloved."

Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, quoting Alun Lewis, 1947:
	"The single poetic theme of Life and Death - the question of what
	survives of the beloved."

And in 1979, Lazard mentions it to Faiz himself.

Poems

Any lover to Any beloved (two)

		[yAd ki rAhguzar, jis par usi surat se (Az Zindan Nama, 1956)]

The road of memory you have walked so long
will end a few steps further on
where it turns on the way to oblivion.
Neither you nor I exist there

My eyes can't bear it:
They don't know if you might return,
step into thin air and disappear
or look back over your shoulder.

But these eyes are experienced
in illusion. If they embrace you again
elsewhere, another road like this one
will spring into being, where, in the same way,
the shadow of your hair, your arms swinging,
			will journey forth

The other possibility is equally false:
there is no turning, nothing
to hide you from me.

		So, let the same road
go on as it does, with you on it,
and if you never look back
			it doesn't matter

Any lover to Any beloved (two)

Today, if the breath of breeze
wants to scatter petals in the garden of memory,
why shouldn't it?

		If a forgotten pain
in some corner of the past
wants to burst into flame again, let it happen.
Though you act like a stranger now —
come — be close to me for a few minutes.
Though after this meeting
		we will know even better what we have lost.
and the gauze of words left unspoken
hangs bettween one line and another
neither of us will mention our promises.
Nothing will be said of loyalty or faithfulness.

If my eyelashes want to tell you something
about wiping out the lines
left by the dust of time on your face,
you can listen or not, just as you like.
And what your eyes fail to hide from me —
	if you care to, of course you may say it,
	or not, as the case may be.

		tr. Naomi Lazard

Blackout p.11

     India-Pakistan War: 1965

Since our lights were extinguished
I have been searching for a way to see;
my eyes are lost, God knows where.

You who know me, tell me who I am,
who is a friend, and who an enemy.
A murderous river has been unleashed
into my veins; hatred beats in it.

Be patient; a flash of lightning will come
from another horizon like the white hand
of Moses with my eyes, my lost diamonds.

online at: http://rickshawdiaries.wordpress.com/2007/01/22/poetry-monday-faiz-ahmed-faiz/

When autumn came p.21

This is the way that autumn came to the trees:
it stripped them down to the skin,
left their ebony bodies naked.
It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves,
scattered them over the ground.
Anyone could trample them out of shape
undisturbed by a single moan of protest.

The birds that herald dreams
were exiled from their song,
each voice torn out of its throat.
They dropped into the dust
even before the hunter strung his bow.

Oh, God of May have mercy.
Bless these withered bodies
with the passion of your resurrection;
make their dead veins flow with blood again.

Give some tree the gift of green again.
Let one bird sing.

	(online at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19348)

Be near me p.25

Be near me now,
My tormentor, my love, be near me --
At this hour when night comes down,
When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes.
With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets,
When it comes with cries of lamentation,
				with laughter with songs;
Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step.
At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places,
Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil
For hands still enfolded in sleeves;
When wine being poured makes the sound
			of inconsolable children
	     who, though you try with all your heart,
			cannot be soothed.
When whatever you want to do cannot be done,
When nothing is of any use;
-- At this hour when night comes down,
When night comes, dragging its long face,
				dressed in mourning,
Be with me,
My tormentor, my love, be near me.

Evening p.27

Every tree is an ancient, dark, deserted temple
whose walls are split open, the roof caving in.
The temple is looking for an excuse to let go entirely,
tumble into ruins. The sky is a Brahmin priest,
body smeared with ashes, forehead stained vermilion.
The sky is bowed in timeless, silent reverie.
There is also an invisible sorcerer
who has trapped the world in his spell,
attached the skirt of evening to the skirt of time
without a seam-which means twilight
will never be snuffed out,
darkness will never descend.
Night will not deepen, daybreak will never come.
The sky longs for the spell to break,
for the chain of silence to snap,
for the skirt of time to tear itself away.
The sky listens for a conch to shrill,
an ankle bell to ring;
it waits for a goddess to awaken, her dark veil cast off.

Before you came 33

Before you came things were just what they were:
the road precisely a road, the horizon fixed,
the limit of what could be seen,
a glass of wine no more than a glass of wine.

With you the world took on the spectrum
radiating from my heart: your eyes gold
as they open to me, slate the colour
that falls each time I lose all hope.

With your advent roses burst into flame:
you were the artist of dried-up leaves, sorceress
who flicked her wrist to change dust into soot.
You lacquered the night black.

As for the sky, the road, the cup of wine:
one was my tear-drenched shirt,
the other an aching nerve,
the third a mirror that never reflected the same thing.

Now you are here again - stay with me.
This time things will fall into place;
the road can be the road,
the sky nothing but the sky;
the glass of wine, as it should be, the glass of wine.


---
see this alternate translation by Agha Shahid Ali in
	   bookexcerptise: The rebel's silhouette

Once again the mind p.43

Today, as usual, the mind goes hunting for a word,
one filled with venom, a word
sultry with honey, heavy with love,
     smashing with fury.
The word of love must be brilliant as a glance
which greets the eye like a kiss on the lips,
bright as a summer river, its surface streaming gold,
joyous as the moment when the beloved enters
     for the appointed meeting.

The word of rage must be a ferocious blade
that brings down for all time the oppressor's citadel.
The word must be dark as the night of a crematorium;
if I bring it to my lips
     it will blacken them forever.

Today every instrument is forsaken by its melody,
and the singer's voice goes searching for its singer.
Today the chords of every harp are shredded
like a madman's shirt. Today
the people beg each gust of wind
to bring any sound at all, even a lamentation,
even a scream of anguish,
or the last trump crying the hour of doom.

Spring comes p.37

	Spring comes; suddenly all those days return,
	all the youthful days that died on your lips,
	that have been lost in the void, are born again
	each time the roses display themselves.
	Their scent belongs to you;
	it is your perfume.
	The roses are also the blood of your lovers.
	The torments  return, melancholy
			with the suffering  of friends,
	intoxicated with embraces of moon-bodied beauties.
	All the chapters of the heart's oppression return,
	all the questions and all the answers
			between you and me.
	Spring comes, ready with all the old accounts reopened, (p. 37)

Don't ask me now, Beloved 39

Don't ask me now, Beloved, to love you as I did
when I believed life owed its luster to your existence.
The torments of the world meant nothing;
you alone could make me suffer.
Your beauty guaranteed the spring,
ordained its enduring green.
Your eyes were all there was of value anywhere.
If I could have you, fate would bow before me.
None of this was real; it was all invented by desire.
The world knows how to deal out pain, apart from passion,
and manna for the heart, beyond the realm of love.
Warp and woof, the trappings of the rich are woven
by the brutish spell cast over all the ages;
human bodies numbed by filth, deformed by injuries,
cheap merchandise on sale in every street.
I must attend to this too: what can be done?
Your beauty still delights me, but what can I do?
The world knows how to deal out pain, apart from passion,
and manna for the heart, beyond the realm of love.
Don't ask from me, Beloved, love like that one long ago.

original: mujh-se pahli-si mahabbAt meri mehbUb na mAng

		first two stanzas

mujh-se pahli-si mahabbAt meri mehbUb na mAng

main-ne samajhA thA ke tu hai, to darakhshAn hai hayAt
terA gham hai to gham-e-dahar kA jhagRA kyA hai
teri surat se hai Alam mein bahAron ko sabAt
teri Ankhon ke sivA duniya mein rakkhA kyA hai

tu jo mil jAye to taqdir nigUn ho jAye

yun na thA mein ne faqat chahA thA yun ho-jAye
aur bhI dukh hain zamAne me.n mohabbat ke siwA
rAhaten aur bhi hain vasl ki rAhat ke sivA
an-ginat sadiyon ki tArik bahemAna tilism
resham-o-atalas-o-kamkhwAb mein bunavAye huye
jA-ba-jA bikte huye kUchA-o-bAzAr mein jism
khAk me.n lithaRe huye khUn me.n nahlAye huye

jism nikale huye amarAz ke tannUron se
pIp bahatI huI galate huye nAsUron se_
laut jAti hai udhar ko bhi nazar kyA kIje
ab bhi dilkash hai tera husn magar kya kIje

aur bhI dukh hain zamAne me.n mohabbat ke siwA
rAhaten aur bhi hain vasl ki rAhat ke sivA
mujh se pehli-si mahabbat meri mehbub na mAng

---
version by Agha Shahid Ali (from The rebel's silhouette):


	That which then was ours, my love,
	don't ask me for that love again.
	The world then was gold, burnished with light --
	and only because of you. That's what I had believed.
	How could one weep for sorrows other than yours?
	How could one have any sorrow but the one you gave?
	So what were these protests, these rumors of injustice?
	A glimpse of your face was evidence of springtime.
	The sky, wherever I looked, was nothing but your eyes.
	If You'd fall into my arms, Fate would be helpless.

	All this I'd thought, all this I'd believed.
	But there were other sorrows, comforts other than love.
	The rich had cast their spell on history:
	dark centuries had been embroidered on brocades and silks.
	Bitter threads began to unravel before me
	as I went into alleys and in open markets
	saw bodies plastered with ash, bathed in blood.
	I saw them sold and bought, again and again.
	This too deserves attention. I can't help but look back
	when I return from those alleys --what should one do?
	And you still are so ravishing --what should I do?
	There are other sorrows in this world,
	comforts other than love.
	Don't ask me, my love, for that love again.

---
version from V.G. Kiernan's Poems by Faiz (1971)

Love, do not ask me for that love again
Once I thought life, because you lived, a prize --
The time's pain nothing, you alone were pain;
Your beauty kept earth's springtimes from decay,
My universe held only your bright eyes --
If I won you, fate would be at my feet.

It was not true, all this, but only wishing;
Our world knows other torments of love,
And other happiness than a fond embrace.
Dark curse of countless ages, savagery
Inwoven with silk and satin and gold lace,
Men's bodies sold in street and marketplace,
Bodies that caked grime fould sand thick blood smears.
Flesh issuing from the cauldrons of disease
With festered sores dripping corruption -- these
Sights haunt me too, and will not beshut out;
Not be shut out, though your looks ravish still.

This world knows other torments than of love,
And other happiness than a fond embrace;
Love, do not ask for my old love again.


---
and this version by Mahmood Jamal:

	Do not ask of me, my love,
	that love I once had for you.
	There was a time when
	life was bright and young and blooming,
	and your sorrow was much more than
	any other pain.
	Your beauty gave the spring everlasting youth:
	your eyes, yes your eyes were everything,
	all else was vain.
	While you were mine, I thought, the world was mine.
	Though now I know that it was not reality,
	that's the way I imagined it to be;
	for there are other sorrows in the world than love,
	and other pleasures, tool
	Woven in silk and satin and brocade,
	those dark and brutal curses of countless centuries:
	bodies bathed in blood, smeared with dust,
	sold from market-place to market-place,
	bodies risen from the cauldron of disease,
	pus dripping from their festering sores—
	my eyes must also turn to these.
	You’re beautiful still, my love,
	but I am helpless too;
	for there are other sorrows in the world than love,
	and other pleasures too.
	Do not ask of me, my love,
	that love I once had for you!
			from Modern Urdu Poetry (1986) p.33
---
contrast also this version by Shiv K. Kumar:
	Ask me not for that old fervour, my love
	I had then imagined
	that your love would spark off my being,
	counterpoise the giant agony of the world --
	that your beauty would bring every spring to eternal bloom.
	And what else was there to cherish but your eyes?
	Once you were mine
	would not fate itself bow to me?
	      - Shiv K. Kumar [selected poems p. 17]

does "ask me not" work better than "don't ask" as some critics
feel?  I wonder if it has too much of longfellow in it; i am happy with "don't ask".

No sign of blood p.49

Nowhere, nowhere is there any trace of blood
Neither on the hands of the assassin,
		nor under his fingernails,
not a spot on his sleeve, no stain on the walls.
No red on the tip of his dagger,
no dye on the point of his bayonet.
There is no sign of blood anywhere.
This invisible blood was not given in the service of kings
for a reward of bounty, nor as a religious sacrifice
		to obtain absolution.
It was not spilled on any battlefield for the sake of honor,
celebrated later in script on some banner.
The orphaned blood of murdered parents screamed out
		for justice;
no one had time or patience to listen to its cries.
There was no plaintiff, no witness;
		therefore no indictment.
It was the blood of those whose homes are made of dust,
blood that in the end became the nourishment for dust.

original: yatIm lahU

kahin nahi hain kahin bhI nahi lahU kA suhrAg
na dast-o-nakhoon-e-katil na Asti~n pe nishA~n
na surkhiye labh-e-khanjar na range nokh-e-sanA
na khAk par koi dhAbbA na bAm par koi dAg
kahin nahi hai, kahin bhI nahi lahU kA suhrAg

na sarfe khidmat-e-shahAn ke khoon baha dete~n
na deen ke nazron beAnAye jazA dete
na razmagAh me barsAh ki mautabar hotA
kisi alam pe raqam hoke mushtahar hotA
pukArtA rahA beasarAh yatIm lahU

kisi ke pAs samAhat ka waqt thA na dimag
na muddayi na shahAdat, hisAb pAk huyA
ye khoon-e-khAk nashinA thA rizk-e-khAk huyA
kahin nahi hain kahin bhI nahi lahU kA suhrAg

You tell us what to do p.63

When we lowered the boat of our existence
into the river run with pain,
how powerful our arms were,
how crimson the blood in our veins!
We were sure that after just a few strokes of the oars
our boat would enter its haven.
That's not how it happened.
Every current was treacherous with unseen maelstrom;
we foundered because the boatmen were unskilled;
nor had the oars been properly tested.
Whatever investigation you conduct,
whatever charges you bring,
that river is still there; the same boat too.
Now you tell us what can be done.
You tell us how to manage a safe landing.

When our hearts were stricken for the first time
by the wounds of our people
we trusted the healers,
remembered the time-honored prescriptions.
It seemed that within a matter of days
the affliction could be cured,
all the injuries healed.
This is not what happened.
The malady was chronic:
the healers were incapable of diagnosing properly
All their quackeries were futile.
Whatever investigation you conduct,
whatever charges you bring,
the heart remains the same, the wounds
are the same wounds.
Now you tell us what can be done.
You tell us how to heal our wounds.

If you look at the city from here p.67

		Yahaan sey sheher ko dekho (from prison)

If you look at the city from here
you see it laid out in concentric circles
each circle surrounded by a wall
		exactly like a prison
Each street is a dog-run for prisoners
No milestones, no destinations, no way out.

If anyone moves too quickly you wonder
why he hasn't been stopped by a shout.
If someone raises his arm
you expect to hear the jangling of chains.

If you look at the city from here
there is no one with dignity,
no one fully in control of his senses
Every young man bears the brand of a criminal,
every young woman the emblem of a slave.

You cannot tell whether yoou see
		a group of revelers or mourners
in the shadows dancing around the distant lamps,
and from here you cannot tell
whether the color streaming down the walls
is that of blood or roses.

---
contrast Agha Shahid Ali:

	There are flames dancing in the farthest corners,
	throwing their shadows on a group of mourners.
	Or are they lighting up a feast of poetry and wine?
	From here you cannot tell, as you cannot tell
	whether the colour clinging to those distant doors and walls
	is that of roses or of blood.

I feel that in this instance, the directness and simplicity of Lazard wins
over Agha.

The hour of faithlessness p.71

In a little while the moon will be torn to shreds
				on every rooftop.
the mirror stricken with longing for that lost reflection.
The stars will rain down from the moist eye of heaven,
				star by star,
on streets littered with the usual rubbish.

In bedrooms exhausted by desire
someone will roll and unroll his loneliness.

This is the hour of betrayal when all who have met us must part,
when the key to the prison of self has disappeared.
It is the hour of renunciation when the festivities are over.
I ask my vagrant heart:
			"Where is there to go now?"
No one belongs to anyone at this hour.  Forget it.
No one will receive you at this hour.  Let it go.
Where can you possibly go now?
Even if you find someone you will only regret it.
Wait a while, wait until every eye is ope, a wound
slashed by a razor streak of dawn.

A Scene 115

	The weight of silence crushes doors, walls, windows:
	pain streams down from the sky;
	moonlight tells its malancholy legend
	that mingles with the roadside dust.
	Bedrooms lie in semi-darkness,
	and life's harp strums its worn-out tune
			in soft, lamenting notes.

Tyrant p.119

This is the festival; we will inter hope
with appropriate mourning. Come, my people.
We will celebrate the massacre of the multitudes.
Come, my people.
I have caused the ghost city known as Limbo to be inhabited.
I have liberated you
from night and from day.

You desire something from dawn's first brushstrokes?
Yuo make a wish on your bed of dreams?
I have decreed death to vision;
all eyes have been excised.
I have sent all dreams to the gibbet.

No bough will displayits wealth of blossoms.
The spring that is near will not bring
the embers of Nimrod's fire.
This season of beads of rain will not shimmer
like pearl drops; its clouds
will cover you with dust and ashes.

Mine is the new religion, the new morality.
Mine are the new laws, and a new dogma.
From now on the priests in God's temple
will touch their lips to the hands of idols.
Proud men, tall as Cypress trees, will bend
to lick the dwarves' feet, and taste the clay.

On this day all over earth the door
		of beneficient deeds is bolted.
Every gate of prayer throughout heaven
		is slammed shut today.

Why talk about that day? p.127

Why talk about the day
when the heart will splinter into a thousand pieces,
and all sorrows will be ended,
when everything we achieved will be lost,
when everything we were denied will be granted?
That day will be like the first day of love
which we always longed for and feared at the same time,
the day that has come to us over and over again,
and each time we were exalted and then cast down,
So why talk about the day
when the heart will shatter into a thousand pieces
and all sorrows will be over?
Why not forget the fear, the danger?
After all, what is inevitable cannot be avoided.
If it is laughter that comes-splendid;
if there are tears, they are equally acceptable.
Do what you must, do what you will,
and see what happens.

The day death comes p.131

How will it be, the day death comes?
Perhaps like the gift at the beginning of night,
the first kiss on the lips given unasked,
the kiss that opens the way to brilliant worlds
while, in the distance, an April of nameless flowers
          agitates the moon's heart.

Perhaps in this way: when the morning,
green with unopened buds, begins to shimmer
in the bedroom of the beloved,
and the tinkle of stars as they rush to depart
can be heard on the silent windows.

What will it be like, the day death comes?
Perhaps like a vein screaming
with the premonition of pain
under the edge of a knife, while a shadow,
the assassin holding the knife,
spreads out with a wingspan
            from one end of the world to the other.

No matter when death comes, or how,
even though in the guise of the disdainful beloved
          who is always cold,
there will be the same words of farewell to the heart:
"Thank God it is finished, the night of the broken-hearted.
Praise be to the meeting of lips,
the honeyed lips I have known."

Contents

Translating Faiz xi
Introduction 					  1
Any lover to Any beloved (one) 			  5
Any lover to Any beloved (two) 			  9
Blackout 					 11
Lament for the death of Time 			 15
The flowers have gone to seed 			 19
When autumn came 				 21
Be near me 					 25
Evening 					 27
Prison daybreak 				 29
Before you came 				 33
Spring comes 					 37
Don't ask me now, beloved 			 39
Once again the mind 				 43
The flowers of love -- the ashes of parting 	 47
No sign of blood 				 49
Prison meeting 					 51
Love's captives 				 55
Elegy 						 59
You tell us what to do      			   63
If you look at the city from here 		 67
The hour of faithlessness 			 71
Tonight there is no one 			 75
Solitary confinement 				 77
It is as though nothing exists anymore 		 79
If my suffering found a voice 			 83
Evening be kind 				 85
Paris 						 89
I made some love; I did some work 		 91
My visitors 					 93
The war cemetery in Leningrad 			 95
Landscape 					 97
Solitude 					 99
Our relationship 				101
Don't look at them 				103
In your eyes and mine 				107
Three quatrains 				111
We were commanded by this heart 		113
A scene 					115
The slave 					117
The tyrant 					119
Travelogue 					123
Battleground 					125
Why talk about the day? 			127
The day death comes 				131

Faiz works

	Naqsh-e faryadi, 1943
	Dast-e saba, 1952
	Zindan namad, 1956
	Mizan, 1964
	Dast-e tah-e sang, 1965
	Harf harf, 1965
	Sar-e vadi-ye sina, 1971
	Rat di rat, 1975
	Sham-e shahri-yaran, 1978
	Mere dil, mere musafir, 1980
	Nuskha-Hai-Wafa, 1984

translations:
	Poems by Faiz, 1971 (trans. by V.G. Kiernan)
	The True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 1987 (trans. Naomi Lazard)
	Selected poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, tr. Shiv K. Kumar, Viking 1994
	The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems, 1995 (rev. ed. trans. by Agha Shahid Ali)
	Poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz: A Poet of the Third World, 1998 (trans. by Mohammed Zakir, and M.N. Menai)
	100 poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 1911-1984, 2002 ed. by Sarvat Rahman
	Culture And Identity: Selected English Writings of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, 2006

literary biography: Naomi Lazard

Naomi Lazard is a American poet and a playright.  Born 1936 in Philadelphia,
she attended the City College of New York.  She has been Poet-in-Residence at
Hamilton/Kirkland College and at the University of Montana.

Naomi Lazard has published three books of poetry:
   - Cry of the Peacocks (Harcourt, Brace & World; 1967)
   - The Moonlit Upper Deckerina  (Sheepmeadow Press, 1977)
   - Ordinances (Ardis 1984)

She is also a past-President of the Poetry Society of America.

 

Ordinances

The poems in Ordinances are notable for their dark
orwellian tone of life lived under a monstrous, faceless
bureaucracy.  all the poems are "ordinances" or official
notifications sent to citizens.  News comes in from
the distant reaches of empire:

	All the reports that have reached you
	are true. In that area known as the front
	no one sleeps anymore.
	According to a recent bulletin
	we know that infants are born there
	with their eyes open; chickens
	stagger in the dusty roads
	for lack of sleep. There is
	no escape...
		- Ordinance on the News from the Front

The poet Edward Field has said of these poems:
    She has found a language where poetry can... skillfully adopt the
    official cliches that work to our disadvantage, the very language of our
    manipulation, with its corporate blandness and heartlessness, all in a
    lordly tone that makes the injustices all the more blatant, as if all is
    as it should be, and the door is shut in your face if you want to
    object. It is an Alice-in-Wonderland world Lazard portrays, a perfect
    indictment of the grotesque predicament we live in, how we are treated by
    institutions–governmental, corporate, and commercial–how our lives are
    manipulated.

Reading the poems from Ordinances, one can sense how the spirit of Faiz would
have appealed to her:
		If anyone moves too quickly you wonder
		why he hasn't been stopped by a shout.
		If someone raises his arm
		you expect to hear the jangling of chains.

In addition to Faiz, she has also translated the Romanian poet
Nina Cassian.

Career

Lazard won two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (one for
her own poetry, and one for True Subject).  Her poems have appeared in
the American Poetry Review, the Nation, The New Yorker, Harper's, American
Scholar, Harper's Bazaar, Hudson Review, The Nation, Saturday Review, Chicago
Review, and other magazines.

She is also the author of the children's book What Amanda Saw.  She also
wrote the screenplay The White Raven, and the play The Elephant and the Dove.

In 1992, Lazard co-founded The Hamptons International Film Festival.

Despite her prominence as a poet, Lazard is mainly a poet's poet, not very
well known in broader circles.  Her poems have been anthologized in
Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer's Dark Horses: Poets on overlooked poems
(2007), and in Czeslaw Milosz's anthology, Book of luminous things (1996).

Links:
* http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2003/07/22
	the poem "To answer your query" from Ordinances.  Also the audio
	of it being read by Garrison Keilor on NPR.
* http://www.101bananas.com/poems/lazard.html
	five poems from Ordinances
* http://sevenkitchenspress.wordpress.com/our-authors/naomi-lazard-ordinances/
	the publisher of ordinances (currently out of print)
* http://minsytest3.blogspot.com/2003/07/ordinance-on-arrival-naomi-lazard.html
* http://cottertherealdeal.blogspot.com/2008/12/in-answer-to-your-query-poem-by-naomi.html
* http://www.pw.org/content/naomi_lazard_2
* http://easthampton.patch.com/events/author-readingnaomi-lazard-ordinances-sat-12211-1-230-pm

Agha Shahid Ali on how Faiz is unknown in America, and on Lazard

from The poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali
Grand Street, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter, 1990), pp. 129-138
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25007348.pdf

Hardly any American poet has had the desire, it seems, to read between the
often subversively ethnocentric lines of [US news reports] on the Middle
East.  Why can't they see through the mystification of politics that governs
those reports?

This ethnocentrism is not just visible in attitudes towards the Middle East;
it is visible, quite clearly, in attitudes towards the entire Muslim world -
a fact that may help explain why The True Subject (Princeton University
Press, 1988), Naomi Lazard's excellent translations of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's
poetry, has been virtually ignored... Why?

Curiosity about Faiz, actually, should have grown even before the appearance
of these translations. In the September 1984 issue of Harper's (two months
before Faiz died in Lahore), Edward Said, in his essay "The Mind of Winter:
Reflections on Life in Exile," wrote:

	To see a poet in exile-as opposed to reading the 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.  He had been exiled from his native Pakistan by Zia ul
	Haq's military regime and had found a welcome of sorts in the ruins
	of Beirut. His closest friends were Palestinian, but I sensed that
	although there was an affinity of spirit between them, nothing quite
	matched - language, poetic convention, life history. Only once, when
	Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani friend and fellow exile, came to Beirut, did
	Faiz seem to overcome the estrangemenwt ritten all over his face.

The three of them, late one night,

	sat in a dingy restaurant . . . and Faiz recited poems to us. After a
	time he and Eqbal stopped translating his verses for my benefit, but
	it did not matter. For what I watched required no translation: an
	enactment of homecoming steeped in defiance and loss, as if to say
	exultantly to Zia, "We are here."

When I came to the United States over ten years ago, I found myself
frustrated at discovering that no one, absolutely no one, had heard of Faiz
(at that time, very few had heard even of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet - a
friend of Faiz's and like him a winner of the Lenin Prize for Literature;
some of Hikmet's poems were translated into Urdu by Faiz). To have to
introduce Faiz's name, a name that is mentioned in Pakistan-to quote Naomi
Shihab Nye-as often as the sun is, seemed a terrible insult. In the
subcontinent we consider him a giant. As Naomi Lazard says in her
introduction to The True Subject, "This century has given us a few great
poets whose stance and influence have altered the consciousness of the world:
Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Ernesto Cardenal in the Western hemisphere;
Nazim Hikmet and Yannis Ritsos in the Middle East; and Faiz Ahmed Faiz in
South Asia." Nevertheless, one fellowship-awarding committee told Naomi
Lazard that it was not convinced of the literary importance of her
translation project - this about a poet who drew as many as fifty thousand
people to his readings, a poet whose work is quoted by heart by the literate
and the illiterate, a poet whose lines were recited even by those who opposed
him.

When UNESCO was approaching various govemments to nominate the representative
writers of their countries-for the purpose of translating them into English -
the then President of Pakistan, Ayub Khan, first mentioned Faiz (and Ayub
Khan, I believe, had briefly jailed him). As Edward Said says elsewhere,

     The crucial 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. His major - indeed it is unique in any language -
     achievement was to have created a contrapuntal rhetoric and rhythm
     whereby he would use classical forms (qasida, ghazal, masnavi, qita) and
     transform them before his readers rather than break from the old
     forms. You could hear old and new together. His purity and precision
     were astonishing, and you must imagine therefore a poet whose poetry
     combined the sensuousness of Yeats with the power of Neruda. He was, I
     think, one of the greatest poets of this century, and was honored as
     such throughout the major part of Asia and Africa.

And then, quite by chance, I came across five of Naomi Lazard's translations
in Kayak. I was immediately struck by how good they were, and I was eager to
find more of her translations. I also wanted to find out more about her.
Because the world - at least of poetry - can be delight fully small, a series of
coincidences led me several months later to a phone conversation with her
and, shortly after that, a meeting in New York. I learned that she and
Carolyn Kizer were collaborating on a joint volume of Faiz translations, that
Kizer had known Faiz since the 1960s, when she met him in Pakistan, and that
Lazard had met him at an international literary conference in Honolulu in
1979...

Abdul Jabbar review

from review by Abdul Jabbar, Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 26,
(Summer, Fall 1991), pp. 156-170; http://www.jstor.org/stable/40873227.

Jabbar is almost ecstatic that Faiz is being recognized and is rather happy
with the translation, but makes a few remarks on textual differences,
inevitable in any attempt at translation.

One unfortunate aspect of this review is how Jabbar tends to draw in
analogies with Coleridge and Yeats.  These are quite uncalled for, but go
with a colonial tendency to present south asian art in terms of the canons
of the west. the references are quite sad, especially since the analogies
themselves don't work.

mujhse pahli si muhabbat

[praises the translation in general.] However, the translation of four
lines of the poem falls short of Lazard' s  achievement in translating
other lines:

1.  "Tera gham hai to ghami dehr ka jhagra kiya hai."

Lazard's  translation: The torments of the world meant nothing;
		       You alone could make me suffer,  (p. 39)

This translation is correct but by stretching out Faiz's  one succinct line
into two lines, it dilutes the line's power. Faiz's  one line sounds like this:
	The grief you caused left no room in me for world sorrow.

2.  "Teri ankhon ke siva dunya main rakha kia hai."
Lazard's  translation: Your eyes were all there was of value anywhere.

This translation misses the metaphoric and idiomatic force of the original,
which is something like this: To me your eyes were the whole world.

3.  "Aur bhi dukh hain zamanë main mohabbat kë siva."

Lazard' s translation: The world knows how to deal out pain apart from
passion, (p. 41)  The structure  of Lazard's line is inexact in that it could
be mistaken to mean that the world deals out pain and passion.  The
beloved, not the world, is the source of passion that the speaker equates
with torment. Passion is pain, perhaps from being unrequited. Literally
translated,  Faiz is saying that there are other torments  in the world besides
love.

4.  "Rahatain aur bhi hain wasl ki rahat ke siva."

Lazard's translation: and manna for the heart, beyond the realm of love
(p. 41).  "Realm of love" is not the same as "wasl ki rahat" (fulfillment
through  consummation  of sexual passion). Moreover, Lazard's choice of
the Biblical allusion of "manna" is questionable because it gives a
religious slant to Faiz' s secular verse.  Faiz leaves other sources of
fulfillment  unspecified. The speaker knows for certain that consummation
of sexual passion would bring fulfillment,  but since his passion remains
unconsummated, he tries to reduce the pain of his deprivation by
comforting  himself with the idea of other possible means of finding that
deep satisfaction. He doesn't say what those other means are.  Literal
translation  of Faiz' s line would be as follows: there are other means of
feeling fulfilled  in life than through consummation  of sexual passion.

These are minor shortcomings in an otherwise outstanding rendition of this
poem of complex beauty.

War cemetery in Leningrad

Another truly universal poem is "The War Cemetery in Leningrad." Written in
1976 in Leningrad, it commemorates the grief that has touched all nations. It
thus dramatizes the common humanity of all of us.  Faiz's very short lines,
understated but strongly felt emotion, and a chantlike elegiac note
characterize this poem:

Lazard's translation of this poem, despite its faithfulness to the original,
creates some problems:

1.  The translator has reversed the image of the opening three lines.  In
Faiz's poem, the sprinkled flowers are like dabs of living blood on the cold
and pale gravestones.  Lazard has changed the image by making the dabs of
blood look like flowers. In Faiz, however, it is the flowers that remind him
of the blood of the dead soldiers.  The original simile is the appropriate one
because it is flowers, not dabs of blood, that we see in the cemetery. The way
those flowers are sprinkled and by associating the visible (flowers) with the
invisible and imagined (blood of the buried soldiers), the flowers look like
dabs of blood.  This simile evokes the violence with which the soldiers' lives
raced to their end, leaving the bereaved country like a mother in mourning.

2.  In line 5, "the unforgotten dead" doesn't correctly translate "ghafil soné
vale."  Faiz's words refer to the dead soldiers as "oblivious sleepers" (not
the same thing as "unforgotten dead.")

3.  Lazard left out the poem's fourth-from-the-last line: "Apne lahu ki tãn ke
chãdar" (wrapping themselves in the sheet of their own blood).  The sons of
the soil are asleep, enveloped in a sheet of blood.  This line is necessary
for the poem's total impact.

4.  The fifth-from-the-last line in Lazard' s translation- "She [the mother]
makes them [the dead soldiers] all small again "--doesn't exist in the
original.  It sounds like an unnecessary addition.

Prison meeting

Prison's dark night is the setting of Faiz's poem, "Prison Meeting." This
meeting with the beloved is probably imaginary.  The blackness of this
night is modified by two touches of light- the poet's own song and the
golden stream of the beloved's glance.  The hope of the preceding poem here
gives way to a strong belief in the approaching dawn of freedom:

	Morning of the grief-stricken,  the heart-broken,
	is not somewhere  in the future;  it is here
	the shafts of pain have flowered  into dawn's coral streaks.
	It is here the murderous blade of grief
	is changed into sparks, light-ray  against light-ray.
	The gift of this night
	is my faith that morning will come.
	Ah, this faith which is
	larger than any pain,
	this morning that is on its way
		is more bounteous than any night, (p. 53)

Lazard' s translation of the poem's last stanza, cited above, demonstrates her
work at its best.  Faiz's last prison poem to be discussed from this volume is
starkly titled, "Solitary Confinement." The subject of the poem,
understandably, is the hope that torments but does not elate. The mixture of
"today's gall" with "yesterday's bitterness," however, does not prevent the
poet from raising a toast: I make a toast to my friends everywhere, here in my
homeland and across the world: "Let us drink, my dear ones, to human beauty,
to the loveliness of earth."  (p. 77)

How true are Naomi Lazard's own words about Faiz: His "sweetness, uncut by
rancor or despair, is characteristic of Faiz's poetry.  It expresses the
quality of his heart, a largeness and generosity of spirit. Under the worst of
circumstances, something in his essential nature held fast."  (p. xvi)

The Day Death Comes

Like so many other poets, Faiz toys with the idea of death, imagining the
time and manner of his death and seeing in it both magic and agitation of
heart. To someone whom emotional turmoil and spiritual anguish have killed
many times before, death would appear just like the murderous beloved. In
that case, after the fever and fret of life, death would come as a relief.
However, the reality of death cannot be dismissed with a fanciful simile.
Therefore, after raising a song of thankfulness to honeyed lips and mouths
(that were perhaps instrumental in bringing about this fatality), Faiz's
concluding lines throb with pain. Reaffirming once again the preciousness
of life and describing with great subtlety his reluctant yet inevitable
meeting with the grim reaper, he regards death as an assassin:

	What will it be like, the day death comes?
	Perhaps like a vein screaming
	with the premonition  of pain
	under the edge of a knife, while a shadow,
	the assassin holding the knife,
	spreads out with a wingspan
	from one end of the world to the other,  (p. 131)

In translating this poem, Lazard has changed the original sequence of
stanzas. Faiz ends his poem with the shadow of death spanning the world-a
realistic rendition of the dying person's mental condition.  Lazard, however,
ends the poem with the speaker's praise of "the meeting of lips/ the honeyed
lips I have known."  This change makes the poem end on a positive note.

Praise

From other poems, numerous instances reveal Lazard' s gift of economy,
impressive word choice, and striking imagery. Here are some samples:

1.  The road of memory you have walked so long
    will end a few steps further on
    where it turns on the way to oblivion.
    Neither you nor I exist there.
	("Any Lover to Any Beloved," p. 5)

Here Lazard has captured in four lines the essence of Faiz's first five lines
of the poem.

2.  At this hour when night comes down,
    When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes. . . .
		("Be Near Me," p 25)

The "gash of sunset" is Lazard's stunning creation to underscore the
vampiric nature of the poem's black night.  We may contrast Victor
Kiernan's otherwise very competent translation: 

	That hour when the night comes, 
	Black night that has drunk heaven's blood comes  ...


3.  In bedrooms exhausted by desire
    someone will roll and unroll his loneliness.
		("The Hour of Faithlessness," p. 71)

Prevalence of the Passive in Urdu

	In the poetry of Faiz this problem is intensified because his language
	in Urdu is singularly devoid of active verbs.  Images and passive
	constructions abound.  A great part of my work has been finding active
	ways of expressing in English what Faiz has expressed more passively
	in Urdu, (p. xv)

[but this sometimes backfires, as in Lazard's changing the passivity of Faiz's
poem "A Scene" robs it of its appropriate tone.  ]

	The weight of silence crushes doors, walls, windows:
	pain streams down from the sky;
	moonlight tells its malancholy legend
	that mingles with the roadside dust.
	Bedrooms lie in semi-darkness,
	and life's harp strums its worn-out tune
	in soft, lamenting notes,  (p.  115)

Lazard has changed the original in two ways:

1.  The original is a fragment-apparently so to match the impressionistic
nature of its thought content.  Impressions are seldom enclosed in complete
thoughts. Lazard has changed Faiz's fragmentary lines into complete sentences,
thus taking away the burdened, subdued, muffled tone and the teasing
incompleteness of the original.

2.  By changing the passivity of the original, moreover, Lazard ends up
introducing an inappropriately strident note of action in a poem that is still
life portrayal of a nocturnal scene.  Faiz's

	"Doors and walls, crushed under the weight of silence"

becomes, in Lazard's  translation,

	 "The weight of silence crushes doors, walls, windows."

And all incomplete thoughts (impressions) of Faiz become complete sentences in
Lazard's translation.

Frances Pritchett on Translations of Faiz

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, by Frances W. Pritchett
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/15/07pritchett.pdf

considers the different translations of the poem
rang hai dil kā mire by faiz

Original: Rang hai dil kā mire

(1)  tum nah ā'e the to har chīz vahī thī kih jo hai
(2)  āsmāñ h.add-e nazar, rāh gużar rāh gużar, shīshah-e mai shīshah-e mai
(3)  aur ab shīshah-e mai, rāh gużar, rang-e falak
(4)  rang hai dil kā mire, "k.hūn-e jigar hone tak"
(5)  champa'ī rang kabhī rāh. at-e dīdār kā rang
(6)  surma'ī rang kih hai sā‚at-e bezār kā rang
(7)  zard pattoñ kā, k.has o k.hār kā rang
(8)  surk.h phūloñ kā dahakte hū'e gulzār kā rang
(9)  zahr kā rang, lahū rang, shab-e tār kā rang
(10)  āsmāñ, rāh gużar, shīshah-e mai
(11)  ko'ī bhīgā hū'ā dāman, ko'ī dukhtī hū'ī rag
(12)  ko'ī har lah.z.ah badaltā hū'ā ā'īnah hai
(13)  ab jo ā'e ho to t.hahro kih ko'ī rang, ko'ī rut, ko'ī shai
(14)  ek jagah par t.hahre,
(15)  phir se ik bār har ik chīz vahī ho kih jo hai
(16)  āsmāñ h.add-e naz.ar, rāh gużar rāh gużar, shīshah-e mai shīshah-e mai

Five Translations

(A)
BEFORE YOU CAME
translated by Victor Kiernan

Before you came, all things were what they are--
The sky sight's boundary, the road a road,
The glass of wine a glass of wine; since then,
Road, wineglass, colour of heaven, all have taken
The hues of this heart ready to melt into blood--
Now golden, as the solace of meeting is,
Now grey, the livery of despondent hours,
Or tint of yellowed leaves, of garden trash,
Or scarlet petal, a flowerbed all ablaze:
Colour of poison, colour of blood, or shade
Of sable night.  Sky, highroad, glass of wine--
The first a tear-stained robe, the next a nerve
Aching, the last a mirror momently altering....
Now you have come, stay here, and let some colour,
Some month, some anything, keep its own place,
And all things once again be their own selves,
The sky sight's bound, the road a road, wine wine.

(B)

Before you came : Naomi Lazard

Before you came things were just what they were:
the road precisely a road, the horizon fixed,
the limit of what could be seen,
a glass of wine was no more than a glass of wine.
With you the world took on the spectrum
radiating from my heart:  your eyes gold
as they open to me, slate the color
that falls each time I lost all hope.
With your advent roses burst into flame:
you were the artist of dried-up leaves, sorceress
who flicked her wrist to change dust into soot.
You lacquered the night black.
As for the sky, the road, the cup of wine:
one was my tear-drenched shirt,
the other an aching nerve,
the third a mirror that never reflected the same thing.
Now you are here again--stay with me.
This time things will fall into place;
the road can be the road,
the sky nothing but sky;
the glass of wine, as it should be, the glass of wine.

(C)
BEFORE YOU CAME
translated by Agha Shahid Ali

Before you came,
The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 13things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.
Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, or thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.
And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.
Don’t leave now that you’re here--
Stay.  So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

(D)
THE COLOUR OF THE MOMENT
translated by Shiv K. Kumar

Before you came, everything was what it is--
the sky, vision-bound
the pathway, the wine-glass.
And now the wine-glass, the pathway, the sky's tint--
everything bears the colour of my heart
till all melts into blood.
Sometimes the golden tinge, sometimes the hue of the joy of seeing you,
sometimes ashen, the shade of the dreary moment--
the colour of yellow leaves, of thorn and trash,
of the crimson petals of the flower-beds aglow,
the tint of poison, of blood, of sable night.
The sky, the pathway, the wine-glass--
some tear-stained robe, some wincing nerve,
The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 14some ever-revolving mirror.
Now that you’re here, stay on
so that some colour, some season, some object
may come to rest
and once again everything may become what it was--
the sky, vision-bound, the pathway, the wine-glass.

(E)
IT's THE COLOR OF MY HEART
translated by Frances W. Pritchett

Before you came everything
was what it is:
the sky the limit of sight
the road a road, the glass of wine
a glass of wine.
And now the glass of wine, the road, the color of the sky
are the color of my heart
while it breaks itself down
into blood.
Sometimes a gold color--a color of eyes’ delight
that sooty color, the color of disgust
the color of dry leaves, straw, thorns
the color of red flowers in a blazing garden
poison color, blood color, the color of black night.
The sky, the road, the glass of wine
are a sodden cloak, an aching vein,
a mirror changing every moment.
Now that you’ve come, stay--let some color, season, thing
stay in place.
One more time let everything
be what it is:
the sky the limit of sight
the road a road, the glass of wine
a glass of wine.