Modern Poetry of Pakistan

Reviewed by Anannya Dasgupta

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Published: December 27, 2011

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Modern Poetry of Pakistan is a new collection of contemporary poetry translated from Urdu, Panjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi, Seraiki, and Kashmiri – the seven major languages of Pakistan. This is an important anthology because it is the first to bring as many vernacular poets in translation in a single volume. It successfully complements the representative breadth of its selections with the depth of the poetic experience that it offers.

Selected by Iftikhar Arif, these poems are meant to reflect “the national psyche” of a new nation where “individuals brave the privations of a developing economy while tradition grapples with new ideas." If the anthology is meant to convey how Pakistan senses itself, then the poems and songs offer a poignant searching for a sense of self in fragile spaces and precarious times, as for instance in Hafeez Jalandhari’s “What am I?”:

In the deep and turbulent sea of human blood,

in catastrophes, in earthquakes,

in lightening and in thunder,

a voice without a voice.

……

These great thoughts!

What am I?

By arranging the poems chronologically the editors have not offered any predetermined thematic or generic grouping for the poems, leaving the reader to pick her own way through it. One way to negotiate this collection of poems could be to follow the pronoun shifts in the poetic voice. Jalandhari’s self-searching and use of the poetic “I” follows from the complex construction of the subjective voice in South Asian poetic traditions, also evident in a number of other poems in the collection. In Samandar Khan’s ghazal “None Has Such Bewitching Eyes” the concluding couplet (makhta) switches from the poetic “I” to the third person “he” and finally to the poet’s name: “How can he conceal his feelings from the world? / The eyes of Samandar well up perpetually." Even if a reader is unaware that this is a conventional signature (takhallus) that doubles up as a pun because samandar means ocean, the movement from the first to third person marks a shift from the interiority of a lover’s anguish to the exteriority of its reckoning in the eyes of the beloved and the eyes of the world.

Some of the abundant images and hyperboles of love and lament in these poems derive from conventions of classical Persian poetry, Sufi mysticism and folklore in ways that are analogous to the influence of Petrarch, Neo-Platonism and Greco-Roman mythology on the English sonneteers of the Renaissance and thereafter. Love, often unrequited, for an idealized beloved, just beyond one’s reach, is an abstraction of material existence such as that of poetry itself. In Janbaz Jatoi’s “Koel”, the bird’s “mournful songs, so full of sorrow” as she cries “My beloved lies oblivious” concludes as an imperative for poetry: “ – poet, write down these words." In other poems, deep and abiding love empowers the language of political dissent. One of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s most celebrated poems Zindan ki ek Raat or “A Prison Evening” draws hope as only a lover can from the unextinguished moon:

Those who stir tyranny’s poison

Will succeed neither today nor tomorrow

So what if they have extinguished

the candles of the bridal chamber of love

Show us if they can put out the moon.

The poem begins with the image of night descending, as if down the stairs, into the prison yard: “From the winding maze of stars, / step by step descends the night”. The gathering momentum of the downward descent of the poem comes to an abrupt halt as the last line stops on the landing with a bold affront: “show us if they can put out the moon”. Khwaja’s translation of this ghazal is remarkable for its agile economy and closeness to the Urdu original. Compared to its celebrated translation by Agha Shahid Ali which offers an interpretation of such an evening spent in prison, Khwaja’s version leaves the reader, as the originals does, to contemplate stubborn hope and love.

Stubborn resistance and challenges to poetic and social conventions are a part of the tradition of Pakistani poetry that this volume represents. The koel’s lament gives way to a different song, and an imagination of a beloved rapt in herself. Meeraji’s “Strange Waves of Pleasure” is a tantalizing invitation to the voyeur:

I want the world’s eyes to watch me, as if

Watching tree’s tender branch,

(a tree’s tender, yielding branch)

its leafy burden heaped, like cast- off clothes, on the floor

beside the bed.

……….

I am sitting,

my scarf, slipped from my head.

I don’t care if anyone sees my hair!

The circle of pleasures contracts.

Let nothing new enter the circle of my rapture.

Meeraji an eccentric, avant garde poet who died young, shocked and impressed the literary establishments of the 1930’s Lahore. His poetry is a haunting measure of poetic utterance for spaces of desire.

Although dominated by men, several women poets have had a significant presence in the public sphere of poetry, as engendered by the mushairas or the traditional setting of public readings. Poets such as Kishwar Naheed, Yasmeen Hameed, Shabnam Shakeel, Fahmida Riaz, Pushpa Vallabh and Hasina Gul, among others, have eked out a feminine and feminist presence in the culture of poetry. Shakeel, for instance, gently critiques the uselessness of quietly gathering conformist traditions in “Heritage”, as a mother comes to realize the full value of the heritage she is passing on to her daughter:

This may all be good, but I don’t know why, still

I often think of something in my heart and become agitated

and now my look-alike, my fondly nurtured daughter,

is gathering the heritage of all my rejected, useless thinking

and is filling up her lap.

The inheritance of silenced time that makes indistinguishable the passing of one day to another is the subject of Hameed’s “Another Day Has Passed”: “In the playhouse of day and night, only I remain / And this fortress of stone and brick / There are footfalls of bleeding apprehensions."

If poetic voice makes available the subjective interiorities within social conventions, attention to the recurring theme of time makes visible the process of forging personal and political narratives from subjective interiorities. Jamiluddin Aali’s “Orthography” calls attention to the intertwining of language and time by equating the beginning of time with beginning of the alphabets, aleph bey: “These centuries were but the start of the alphabet / or bey aleph, without beginning at all”. One beginning of known time, that began the history of the present times for Pakistan and India, was the violent partition of British India in 1947 to which many of the poets repeatedly return. Kishwar Naheed who witnessed the horrors of Partition as a child writes about a personal and national history blindsided by the moment that she calls the “Nightmare”: “My country and I were born at the same time / but we both lost our ability to see in our childhood." Nasreen Anjum Bhatti’s “Kafi”, a genre of Punjabi mystical poetry, draws on the folk romance Heer Ranjhan to allude to the Partition as a separation that turns time on itself:

An ancient land, shaken with violence, pulled apart thread by thread,

a roll of ginned cotton, a bunch of cotton locks, a boll in a damp husk,

then bud then seed-

in the end dust returns to dust to erase all difference.

Turning around we return to our beginning.

The passage of time and its narration in history is hardly a matter of chronology for the two nations; the “Kafi” continues: “Centuries are sewn around their origin, / the past only drifts further."

While the poems in this collection will yield much to a reader sensitive to verse and familiar with the techniques of poetic appreciation, the poems also rely on the reader’s familiarity with the history, culture, tropes and conventions particular to the sub-continent and to Pakistan. Although brief, Iftikhar Arif’s Preface and Waqas Khwaja’s Introduction to the volume are useful guides for those new to the traditions, terrains and textures of Pakistani poetry. The Preface stresses the Progressive Movement of the 1920s as a key historic moment that influenced the aesthetics and politics of some of the early poets of this new nation, including the most internationally known Urdu poet Faiz. Similarly, a barebones list of some major Muslim poets from Amir Khusro (1253-1325) to Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), the revered national poet of Pakistan, functions as a point of reference for the poetic heritage of the contemporary poets.

Khwaja’s Introduction is a critical reflection on the practice and process of translation. He elaborates on the cultural and textural differences of the poems as the main challenge for the translators. The practice of translating cultural difference depends on the politics that motivate any project of translation. “The imperial absorption of texts” from colonies “into the colonial language” goes back to the Orientalism of William Jones, the earliest English translator of Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit texts, which made the complicity of translation with colonization obvious. How then does this volume of English translations prepared for the western audience avoid the Jonesian dual trap of making some aspects of difference exotic while homogenizing the rest into a homily for the West? Khwaja and his team of translators approach translation as a “recoding, a mapping of one language system onto another” that does not so much transport the text as “re-creates” it. The re-created texts reflect the editorial decision to leave untranslated such terms and images that have no cultural equivalent in the target language. Explanatory and contextual notes are also kept at a minimum : “For readers to encounter unfamiliar names or terms in a poem be moved to find out more about them on their own may actually bring the originary experience of the poem closer, making it more personal and intimate." The enumeration of the challenges of translation also serves as an explanation of the conventions, tropes and verse forms that the reader will encounter in the volume; these include tropes and traditions from Classical Persian poetry and Sufi mysticism, such as the indeterminate gendering of the poetic voice, and brief descriptions of the ghazal, nazm, azad nazm, kafi,qita,marsiya, masnavi, doha and geet.

Modern Poetry of Pakistan is poised to become indispensible to enthusiasts and scholars of South Asian literature. The forty-four poets it brings together are well known in Pakistan and its diaspora in the West, but only a few among them have a reputation that has extended beyond their vernacular audience. This volume is likely to change that. It has put together a new and inclusive canon that might encourage more extensive translations of individual poets anthologized here and others like them that have not yet been translated. This volume will sustain in-depth studies of poetic themes and verse forms that are both enduring and modern about the poetry of Pakistan.

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