Urdu Quatrains

Section SIX
Urdu-English
Hali
Ghalib

Insha
Mus-hafi
Mir
Dard
Akbar
Iqbal

PRAELUDIUM

I must confess that in my own attempts at versifying in translation I very quickly abandoned the Omar Khayyam stanza for reasons which crystallised in my mind upon reading an essay by Robert Graves. He writes that not only are the chances extremely remote of finding three rhymes in English which will exactly match the sense of the Persian (in my case the Urdu) verse, but "an unvaried sequence of iambics tires the alertest ear." How true! You might well ask, Wherein lies the solution? Precisely in so ordering the metre - with appropriate variations - as well as the types of rhyme and stanza that voice and movement become as important as E. V. Rieu's principle of equivalence and intelligibility. This means that one must create afresh, and not merely retain "every peculiarity of the original" or convey "the same impression as was made by the original on its contemporaries" (F.W. Newman).

Therefore, in place of metaphrase there would appear to be some justification for introducing a new, significant concept that might be termed metapoeia, and defined as: "A creative turning of verse from one language to another, where the style and/or form may be rendered afresh to conform to the dictates of voice and movement." Will it - or, more immediate, does it - work out in practice? Judge for yourselves. You may wish to tackle the quatrains immediately (via the appropriate hotlinks) without recourse to the accompanying commentaries , but I would recommend that even a cursory glance at my explanatory notes would help you to appreciate better the whys and wherefores of metapoeia, and its creative potential.

HALI (1837-1914)
It is not my intention to give a biography of Hali in this article as the basic facts of his birth and childhood, life and education are only too well known. He excelled in both prose and verse, and in the latter field he explored most of the traditional genres, examples of which are to be found in his divan. Undoubtedly, he abided by the views set out in the introduction to his anthology that poetry should above all be natural, and it is his simplicity and straightforwardness - albeit mixed with seriousness of purpose - that are best illustrated by a reading of his ruba'is on the evils of idle beggary and procrastination.

I suspect that the vigour of the first quatrain, The Beggar's Incentive, is derived from the way the rhymes and main stresses fall on the Urdu verbs. In the first line, the words tavan'a and paya find an echo in the English sound and found; the verbs sarmaya and siklaya are metapoetised in stressed positions so as to lose none of their fervour and favour, and indeed are fortified by being paired with rhyming English monosyllables - blame and shame in the second line, and wrought and taught in the last.

In my opinion, Hali - with touches of his somewhat heavy-handed humour - lends himself admirably to a mixed treatment of seven- and four-footed lines. Furthermore, in this particular mock-serious ruba'i the idle beggar's unique brand of philosophy has been rendered in the manner of a Cockney's patois - his dropped h's helping, I feel, to create the right ambience. Perhaps, the glottal stop in sa'il gave the clue subliminally.

Note the pyrrhic in the second foot of the second line - repeated in the third - which I think imparts lightness to the seemingly harsh phrases beginning with the words shame and curses respectively; the ensuing enjambment's when anon / Quoth he and are upon / The 'eads ensure the continuity of the swinging rhythm.

Moving on to The Ultimate Tax, I find this quatrain to be almost an epigram, and so conceived its metapoeic form as being a cross between the gay, tripping measure of a shortened, modified trochaic metre rhyming in pairs, and E. C. Bentley's humorous clerihew. The result is two stanzas of catalectic verse against Hali's one.

GHALIB (1797-1869)
By contrast, Ghalib uses a poetic language that is often involved and concentrated, but never merely clever and artificial. He may have been addicted to drinking and gambling, as the ruba'i on old age bears out, yet he was a deeply religious man - provided the cost was not too high in terms of personal discomfort à la Ways and Means! He was proud of his noble birth and high position in society; even so he could be warm-hearted and tolerant in spite of his pedantry - as "explained away" in the third quatrain, The Pedantic Poet.

The second couplet of the first quatrain, Old Age, was originally translated as:

Now that I have reached the brink of old age,
Oh past life! Pass on with hand extended.
It was thus cast in the form of an Omar Khayyam stanza; but the paraphrase with hand extended did not convey the welcome of the Urdu istiqbal, so I decided upon an aabb scheme vice aaba when revising the couplet. One consequence was a more faithful rendition of the sonorous iqlim-i 'adam as No Man's Land than the implied "old age", which I have sought to retain in the title only. Other rhyming pairs considered but rejected were old age / cortege and nullity / welcome me.

In Ways and Means, a beautiful example of the great poet's quatrains, I have introduced the Urdu radif or end-rhyme. In the last line the temptation to use the word "refreshment" in place of "iced water" was very strong, but I found that the beginning rhyme on the abab pattern sufficed to cohere the two couplets in a lasting embrace. This metapoeic idea was perhaps born out of Ghalib's own vowel-rhyming a-a in the opening words saman and aram of the first couplet; the -ab ending of the qufiya was surely another inducement! Some of the gentleness of Ghalib's verse has been preserved in metapoeia by using a pyrrhic in the second foot of each line. But lest there be any suspicion of levity "as a result thereof", the measure of the iambic pentameter is there to allay it - or so I believe.

It is in such situations as posed by The Pedantic Poet that a metapoeic approach is virtually de rigeur. The last line for instance is a Persian misra, which literally translated means, "I said difficult, otherwise I said difficult." Interpret it as you will, there is always someone claiming a better and more lucid explanation. The swing from iambic in the first three lines to trochaic in the last three is a measure of the simplifier's dilemma.

INSHA (c. 1756-1818)
Ogden Nash and Insha! I discern a poetic - apart from phonetic - resemblance between them. Both can be brilliant, frothy, and devastatingly witty, especially when versifying eloquently the foibles and frailties of human nature. And both are extremely subtle in their play on words, quite unique in their fanciful and frivolous use of grammar and language. Versatility and virtuosity are the twin traits I have sought to marry in the levity of the teasing ruba'i, Poking Fun.

My original quasi-literal, four-lined drafts patterned on abcb metapoetised willy-nilly to 12 lines in an abundance of gaiety and sprightliness. They have ended up with an intriguing rhyming sequence: abcb / adcd / aece, and I like to think that the a-c's, running joyfully through the unevenly-threaded fabric, have knit the whole more tightly - and meaningfully - together.

MUS-HAFI (c. 1750-1824)
Mus-hafi occupies a separate niche in the annals of Urdu poetry. He was remarkably prolific, but with no marked style of his own. Caught, as it were, between the two great masters Sauda and Mir, and his virtuosic pupil and rival, the vivacious Insha, he chose the style of one school, then the other, and ended up by being merely imitative. However, his importance cannot be denied, and his misfortune and (perhaps) frustration are seen as the undercurrents of the otherwise light and comic quatrain which I have chosen to call, The Flirt & Her Fancy.

The metapoeia makes use of double iambic metre using the device of a Leonine rhyme and Gilbertian stress on the antepenultimate syllable of the end-rhyme to convey the lilt and lightness of the original without losing sight of the underlying heaviness of heart.

MIR (c. 1722-1810)
Going back in time, one must inevitably dwell awhile on the high plateau attained by the creative Mir, whose poetry is, in every way, a true reflection of his own sensitive nature. His sadness and introspection are deeply embedded in such gems as Of Death and Dust and La Vie, which in metapoeia have defied eschewal of the - now - archaic device of inversion.

The last line - the punch line - of the first quatrain presented me with some difficulties. The prosaic and literal / But filled it completely with dust have I / kept the acephalous anapaestic line going till the bitter end with "a hey and ho and a hey nonino". In order to slow down and weight the verse, it was metapoetised to / But choked and clogged it .../ where the past participles were stressed - with a syllable dropped betwixt - and made to hearken back to the opening / The cloak of seclusion.../ in both voice and movement.

DARD (1721-85)
Mir's contemporary, the high-born Dard, is represented here by Her Eyes, a ruba'i in which his chaste classical style is seen to great effect. Nevertheless, the richness of its romantic imagery and its individualism remind one of Baudelaire's poetry, and unconsciously echoing the great Frenchman there appears in metapoeia a broken rhyme in the second couplet.

AKBAR (1846-1921)
Turning now to Hali's successors, Akbar the religious mystic comes first to mind. His was a medieval daemon, always opposing, always up in arms against "this modern age". He distrusted worldly things, and believed that man should strive for spiritual union with God. And in criticising materialism he stood our amongst his contemporaries as a noble and heroic figure.

In Let Go, the opening alliteration in the first hemistich underscores the poet's revulsion in near-Miltonic terms: thus, the metapoeia "Let go the selfish lust of this mean world" recalls the resounding "Capricious, wanton, bold, and brutal lust is meanly selfish". As to stanzaic form I opine that the spirit incarnate of the Middle Ages born anachronously in modern times must make do with tercets - and unrhymed at that!

IQBAL (1873-1938)
Called by Anwar Beg "The Poet of the East", Iqbal is best known for his lyrical description of nature. Such an immense body of literature has grown up round his work that any commentary would be superfluous.

In the four lines of God's Creation, Iqbal has wrought a miracle by employing economy of expression to achieve immensity of impression: the alliteration in the first and third lines, though using the same labial consonant m, gives rise to movements which seem quite different - one of grandeur, the other of power. In metapoeia the voice has been preserved, and I do believe that the feel of the original movements is likewise kept intact and transmitted through the majestic flow of the iambic pentameter.

POSTLUDIUM

One may perhaps conclude that - in the words of Muhammad Sadiq - the school of poetry inaugurated by Hali came to an end with Iqbal. But has the type indeed exhausted itself? True that the poverty of this genre of literature since 1947 is in some respects the direct result of the partition of India and its aftermath, but I cannot accept that all is lost and that there is no creative poet in the contemporary field of modern Urdu poetry, who can evolve the technique and style right for his day and age. Therefore, although the literary ideals of the Age of Iqbal are, in fact, anachronistic and "beyond resuscitation", there is nothing to prevent the progressive poet of today from finding inspiration in, say, modern English poetry and ushering in a vital new era in the history of the Indian ruba'i. I am by no means suggesting that he must make a complete break with the poetry of the past, but due to the break-up of the old culture caused by scientific discoveries and by industrial growth and development, he must recognise the problems and difficulties of his times, and in a spirit of poetical endeavour bring order out of the prevailing disorder, cosmos out of chaos, by speaking to us and for us, here and now, in the contemporary Urdu idiom.

Bibliography

A History of Urdu Literature by Muhammad Sadiq (London, O.U.P., 1964)
An Anthology of Classical Urdu Love Lyrics by Matthews & Shackle (Delhi, O.U.P., 1972)
Three Mughal Poets by Ralph Russell & Khurshid ul Islam (London, 1969)
English Verse by T.R. Barnes (London, Cambridge U.P., 1967)
The Faber Book of Modern Verse ed. Michael Roberts (London, Faber & Faber, 1965)
Reference: Cassell's Encyclopaedia of Literature (2 vols)(London, 1953)

Guide to Pronunciation

1) Underscored vowels are long
2) Underscored consonants indicate special sounds:
     e.g. gh approximates to the French "r"
            t approximates to the English "t"
             s approximates to the English "sh"
3) c is always like the ch in "church"
    x approximates to the Scottish ch in "loch"