THE SKY, THE ROAD, THE GLASS OF WINE: On Translating Faiz.

by Frances W. Pritchett
Columbia University

Many of us have tried to translate Urdu poetry into English. In fact there are more
and more of us nowadays, which is an encouraging sign for the future. But there are all too few
chances for mutual discussion or for learning from each other’s experiences. I want to suggest
some thinking points for us all-- what can (and can’t) we reasonably expect to achieve in a
translation? What kind of problems are solvable, and what kind are probably not?
My own experience started with a great desire to translate classical Urdu ghazal. I
was always looking around for clues to how it could be done. The search was a frustrating one,
but I was young, naive, and hopeful. For various reasons, I did not like most of the translations
that I saw. But could I do any better myself? I was not interested in making technically accurate
translations that sounded awful in English and/or did no real justice to the original. Nor was I
interested in producing free “transcreations” that used the Urdu originals merely as jumping-off
points for new English poems. I read some translation theory, but I found that it tended to be
either extremely abstract and philosophical, or else grounded on specific successes in other
languages that were not easy to emulate in Urdu. If practical advice was offered, it was often
just common-sensical (the translator was urged, for example, to respond to the needs of the
intended audience).
So I began to think about the whole process in quite concrete terms. Naturally (to
me at least), I began by asking myself what sort of features of a poem were more “translatable”
than others. One obvious choice: formal features that could be replicated in English. And of all
such formal features, repetition
. was surely the easiest and the least problematical. So, since I
wanted above all to work on Ghālib, I began to look for ways I could translate ghazals and
preserve the radīf. Some ghazals obviously had eminently preservable radīfs: Mīr’s . “maiñ
nashe maiñ hūñ,” for example, or Momin’s “tumheñ yād ho kih nah yād ho,” or Ghālib’s “jal
gayā” or “mauj-e sharāb.” In a few such cases, I thought I had some limited success.1 But most
ghazals, of course, had unpreservable radīfs, or sometimes none at all. And the further
. “meaning-creation” (ma‚nī āfirīnī) and wordplay kept thwarting my
difficulties of multivalent
best efforts to translate Ghālib, the “difficult” poet, the one on whom my heart was set.
When I looked at modern poets, however, I felt a bit more hopeful. Since modern
Urdu poets so often make a point of avoiding the traditional kinds of complex wordplay,
multivalent meanings, subtle allusions, and so on, there tends to be less to lose: starkness,
simplicity, deliberate prosiness, colloquial language seem to travel so much better across the
language barrier. Moreover, nazms as a genre travel better than ghazals, since they usually
operate in units of thought larger¨ than the two-line shi‚r, and create their own contexts rather
than requiring the reader to bring and use so much prior knowledge of the tradition. Thus even
____________________
1
Some of these were published as “Two Ghazals” and “Stanzas from Ghalib” in New Letters, 1985.
when modern nazms are complex and subtle (as the best ones often are), they tend to require less
background on the ¨ part of the reader. The result has been that the poetry I’ve translated (A
Listening Game, An Evening of Caged Beasts) has mostly been modern, and has mostly
consisted of nazms.
= =¨ = = = = =
Of all modern poets, in practice the inescapable, indispensable one is Faiz.. He is
generally perceived as the hinge between the classical and modern ghazal; he is widely known,
loved, and even revered. Compared to his great contemporaries Nūn Mīm Rāshid and Mīrājī, he
has been by far the most amply translated: at least five translators have produced whole English
volumes of his work, and he appears in countless anthologies. Partly because of this lavish and
often high-quality set of translations, I never added my own two cents, though I have studied and
taught Faiz.’s poetry for years.
I first came to know Faiz. through Victor Kiernan’s very helpful book (which is now
long out of print, alas, though I am trying to get it reprinted). Of all the poems Kiernan included,
my eye fell on one in particular that seemed born for translation. What a pleasure it was to read
it and think how the translation might be done! Here is the poem that seemed to me so relatively
translatable:

Rang hai dil kā mire

(1) tum nah āƒe 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) champaƒī rang kabhī rāh.at-e dīdār kā rang
(6) surmaƒī 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 hūƒe gulzār kā rang
(9) zahr kā rang, lahū rang, shab-e tār kā rang
(10) āsmāñ, rāh gużar, shīshah-e mai
(11) koƒī bhīgā hūƒā dāman, koƒī dukhtī hūƒī rag
(12) koƒī har lah.zah badaltā hūƒā āƒīnah hai
¨
(13) ab jo āƒe ho to t.hahro kih koƒī rang, koƒī rut, koƒī 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 nazar, rāh gużar rāh gużar, shīshah-e mai shīshah-e mai
¨
For purposes of discussion, I give the poem here in the definitive form in which it appears in
Faiz.’s kulliyāt, Nusk.hahhā-e vafā, with spacing and punctuation exactly as in the Urdu.2
I was encouraged by the very marked formal structure of the poem; anyone who
looks at the Urdu will surely see it immediately. Most obviously, line (2) and line (16)--the final
line--are exactly the same, and each consists of triple pairs: “sky limit-of-sight, road road, glass-
of-wine glass-of-wine.” Within the poem, moreover, these three pairs form basic organizational
____________________
2
Faiz., Nusk.hahhā-e vafā, pp. 365-366.

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 2

elements. Line (3) alludes to them in reverse order (altering one for the sake of a crucial rhyme),
and line (4) links them to the title of the poem. Line (10) repeats them yet again, and lines (11)
and (12) implicitly turn sky, road, and glass of wine into a wet garment-hem, an aching vein, and
a mirror changing every moment. Thus by the time they are so starkly repeated in the last line,
the trinity of sky, road, and glass of wine have formed an evocative, if deliberately elliptical,
framework for the poem. I felt that they were a gift from God (or Faiz.) to the translator.
Here are the first lines and the last lines of four translations of this poem. I am going
to label them A through D, in chronological order; the key will be found in the Bibliography.

(A) 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;
...
And all things once again be their own selves,
The sky sight’s bound, the road a road, wine wine.

(B) 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.
...
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,

things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.
...
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) Before you came, everything was what it is--

the sky, vision-bound
the pathway, the wine-glass.
...
and once again everything may become what it was--
the sky, vision-bound, the pathway, the wine-glass.

It is not hard to see that each of these translations obscures Faiz.’s careful structure of elegant,
slightly oblique, paired repetitions. Though A preserves strong similarities, only in (D) can the
reader guess that the second and final lines of the original might be totally identical--and (D)

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 3

doesn’t reflect Faiz.’s repetition of the three items at all. Moreover, (D) has the problem that
“vision-bound” is most naturally read in English as “bound by vision” or “bound for vision”
rather than “the boundary of vision.” Both (B) and (C) introduce a moralizing note: (B) speaks
of “the glass of wine, as it should be, the glass of wine,” and (C) of how “things were as they
should be”; the Urdu offers no hint of any such “ought-ness.” Thus the translators either
overlook or consciously ignore the very marked, and conspicuously translatable, formal structure
that Faiz. has given to the poem.
=======
Faiz.’s careful--and carefully unexplained--set of correspondences in lines 10-12
suffers the same kind of damage. Loosely linking his trinity of items, as a group, to a second set
of three items, Faiz. says:

(10) āsmāñ, rāh gużar, shīshah-e mai

(11) koƒī bhīgā hūƒā dāman, koƒī dukhtī hūƒī rag
(12) koƒī har lah.zah badaltā hūƒā āƒīnah hai
¨
Sky, road, glass of wine
is some wet garment-hem, some aching vein,
some mirror changing every moment

Here is how the translators deal with it:

(A) Sky, highroad, glass of wine--

The first a tear-stained robe, the next a nerve
Aching, the last a mirror momently altering....

(B) 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.

(C) 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.

(D) The sky, the pathway, the wine-glass--

some tear-stained robe, some wincing nerve,
some ever-revolving mirror.

Since the translators do not take care to preserve the unmediated exact repetitions of these three
crucial items throughout the poem, they cannot get the maximum effect from a passage like this.
(D) is the closest to the Urdu, though “wincing” is a facial expression and thus applies to people
rather than nerves, “ever-revolving mirror” sounds like a lighthouse fixture rather than a mirror
that actually “changes” at every moment (as does the surface of a glass of wine), and “wine-

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 4

glass” could easily be an empty glass, rather than a full one such as would create a mirror in its
liquid surface.
Apart from (D), the other three all feel the need to give the reader extra prompting:
(A) through explaining that the “first” is one thing, the “next” another; (B) through enumerating
“one,” “the other,” and “the third”; (C) through actually making the identifications explicit (“The
sky is...” and so on). They thus link the three items to their three metaphorical counterparts in a
flatter, more pedestrian way than Faiz. does. It is easy to imagine their reason for doing so: it
might not be entirely evident to the reader that these three new items were meant to correspond
one-for-one to the three items in the line before, so it would be better to clarify it a bit.
Yet this whole “clarification” process, it seems to me, is a fix for a problem that
could have been avoided in the first place. Faiz. has set up a structure in his Urdu poem that cues
any reasonably alert reader to make exactly these identifications. It is no harder for the reader to
do this kind of thing in English than to do it in Urdu; English poets routinely expect much more
difficult feats than this from their readers. No special cultural background or baggage is
involved here--only a genuine, close attentiveness to the language of the poem as it develops.
Only because the translators have not reproduced Faiz.’s careful and systematic formal structure
in English, although they easily could have, do they have to insert artificial clues and “helps” for
their readers--and thus in every case make the poem simpler and more prosy, less fluid and
mysterious, than the original.
=======
There are legitimate problems too, of course, that the translators face--problems that
cannot be resolved merely by replicating a formal structure. One such problem is the translation
of bhīgā huƒā dāman. No doubt the sense of dāman as “garment-hem,” meaning something like
the trailing edge of a long robe, is clumsy to express in English, and the classical Persian-Urdu
idiom of a “wet garment-hem” as a sign of pollution or sinfulness (cf. tar-dāmanī vs. pāk-
dāmanī) does not really come through in English very well. All the translators seem to have
decided, however, that the wetness on the garment-hem is that of tears. I don’t know of any
reason in the Urdu to make such an explicit identification.
If anything, to see the sky as a dirty, stained, bedraggled garment-hem, a garment
that has been trailing in the mud, a sign of sin and pollution, seems much more in keeping with
Faiz.’s poem. After all, in the poem there are clear references to moods of exaltation, as well as
blood and poison, and no references at all to tears--much less to the kind of endless weeping that
would drench a garment. In fact Faiz. is not at all a lachrymose poet: when you think of the
range of moods he describes in his poems, it is hard to come up with many examples of tears,
and easy to find situations in which tears and grieving have been emphatically rejected in favor
of more meditative or politically inspirational moods.
Moreover, (B) has decided that the tear-wet garment is “my tear-drenched shirt,” (C)
describes it as “a shirt wet with tears”; there’s no warrant in the poem, however, for turning the
sky or a robe or a garment-hem into a “shirt,” much less “my” shirt. The sky, after all, is much
more like a spread-out cloak or other long flowing garment, than it is like a shirt, so that the
altered metaphor becomes much less effective. And since the lover’s tears in the ghazal world
tend most often to be tears of blood, the vision of a possibly blood-drenched garment would rise
involuntarily to the traditionally-trained reader’s eye. This association of ideas is another reason
Faiz. is unlikely to have wanted us to think of the sky primarily as wet with (bloody) tears.
Translations (B) and (C) have turned an image of cosmic bleakness--the sky as a stained,
polluted cloak--into a piece of personal emotional expression--the sky as a shirt wet with tears

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 5

(presumably shed by the wearer). In the process, they have replaced Faiz.’s ambiguity--he
pointedly does not tell us what the sky is wet with--with an explicit piece of (pseudo-
)information.
=======
If we look at the middle part of Faiz.’s poem, we see a separate movement of thought,
one that involves the basic three items (sky, road, glass of wine) in an intense play of colors:

(3) aur ab shīshah-e mai, rāh gużar, rang-e falak

(4) rang hai dil kā mire, “k.hūn-e jigar hone tak”
(5) champaƒī rang kabhī rāh.at-e dīdār kā rang
(6) surmaƒī 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 hūƒe gulzār kā rang
(9) zahr kā rang, lahū rang, shab-e tār kā rang

In lines (5) through (9), we see that the word rang, “color,” is repeated no fewer than nine times,
three of them in the final line. This repetition is almost as conspicuous and obtrusive in Urdu as
it would be in English; it goes well beyond the creation of end-rhymes, and plainly represents a
deliberate, emphatic effect that the poet is creating. Here is how the translators render lines (5)
through (9):

(A) 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.

(B) 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.

(C) 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.

(D) 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,

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 6

 of the crimson petals of the flower-beds aglow,
the tint of poison, of blood, of sable night.

Even without a detailed discussion, it’s easy to see that all the translations have avoided Faiz.’s
incantatory repetition of the word “color.”
Perhaps the translators thought “color” in English could not be as evocative as rang
in Urdu? It is easy to sympathize with them, and yet the attempt could have been an interesting
one. It seems to me that the translators didn’t trust the English-reading audience to like what
Faiz. actually did in this passage. But what is unlikable about it? Incantatory, rhythmic
repetitions are not exactly unknown or powerless in English poetry--talented translators like
these might have had a go at recreating Faiz.’s actual effects in English. Instead, however, they
have let that opportunity pass.
In line (5), moreoever, all four translations take rāh.at-e dīdār, “comfort of vision,”
the sight of something very pleasant, to mean meeting with the beloved; this is one possible
interpretation, but it still involves replacing the carefully ambiguous Urdu with a pseudo-
specificity that is in fact misleading. For we notice that line (5)’s apparent opposite in line (6),
sā‚at-e bezār, “a time-interval of disgust/distaste,” pointedly avoids equating such a time with
separation from the beloved (although translation (C), on its own responsibility, makes this
equation as well). Faiz., as is his wont, is being elliptical here, leaving it for the reader to assign
a meaning to these moods. There is no “you” in the Urdu--only the rhythmic enumeration of
wildly changing dark and blazing colors and moods. Versions (B) and (C) have even depicted
this “you” as an active agent, responsible for creating the color-changes: in Faiz.’s Urdu, it’s
clear that the lover lives in his own mind, undergoing wild but private shifts in mood; but in (B)
and (C) the lover has been turned into a sort of helpless victim: the Svengali-like beloved is
actively manipulating his universe.
To varying degrees, all the translations have simply remade the passage,
eliminating Faiz.’s incantatory repetitions and artificially “clarifying” his carefully maintained
ambiguities into explicit, conventional phases in a love affair. The Faiz. of the translations is
much simpler and more straightforward than the real one. The changes tend to obscure what
Faiz. was doing in the poem.
=======
And what was Faiz. doing in the poem? The best evidence, I submit, is to be found in
these two lines:

(3) aur ab shīshah-e mai, rāh gużar, rang-e falak

(4) rang hai dil kā mire, “k.hūn-e jigar hone tak”

The punctuation is Faiz.’s, including of course the conspicuous quotation marks .around the latter
half of line (4). The quotation marks surround a phrase from a famous shi‚r of Ghālib’s;. and
lines (3) and (4), like ten of the sixteen lines in Faiz.’s nazm, are in the same meter that Ghālib
used for his shi‚r. And in this one case, the poet substitutes¨ for his otherwise invariable āsmāñ,
“sky,” the phrase rang-e falak, “the color of the heavens,” which both introduces the key term
rang, and creates an eye-catching . rhyme (falak, tak).
Faiz. was a notable Ghālib-lover, of course; the titles of two of his collections of
poetry, Naqsh-e faryādī (into which he inserted the iz.āfat) . and Dast-e tah-e sang (from which
this poem comes), were phrases from famous verses of Ghālib’s. In this case, the original shi‚r
is:

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 7

 ‚āshiqī s.abr talab aur tamanna betāb
¨ karuñ khūn-e jigar hote tak3
dil kā kyā rang .

Lover-hood, endurance-demanding; and longing, restless--

What color/state would I make of the heart, until it becomes blood of the liver?
.
Ghālib’s now-archaic hote tak has been modernized, by Faiz. and almost everybody else, to the
current usage hone tak. And my clumsily literal translation at least shows the way . in which
Faiz
. . ’s line rang hai dil kā mire, “k. hūn-e jigar hone tak” is a direct answer to G hālib’s question.
Ghālib poses the question, What color/state would I cause my heart to be in, how would I
manage it, caught as I am between passionate longing and forced endurance, both equally
inescapable parts of the lover’s situation? Faiz. answers, “It’s the color of my heart,” and
embodies the answer in a poem full of vividly shifting heart-colors.
Faiz.’s title itself, in fact, repeats this phrase: “It’s the Color of My Heart.”
Translation (A) rebaptizes the poem as “Before You Came”--a translation of the first phrase in
line (1)--and (B) and (C) follow its lead. Version (D) calls the poem “The Colour of the
Moment,” with even less textual warrant. Thus the translations all deny their readers a piece of
important knowledge that the poet obviously meant for them to have: the knowledge that this
single phrase embedded in the poem was to be given special importance in interpreting it. Did
the translators gain anything through their retitling that was as valuable as what they lost?
The title-phrase itself, which forms the first . half of line (4), calls our attention to the
second half of line (4), the directly quoted phrase of Ghālib’s: k.hūn-e jigar hone tak, “until [it]
becomes blood of the liver.” This phrase is to be interpreted in the light of ghazal physiology:
the heart constantly loses blood--because of its numerous wounds and lacerations, and because
the lover weeps tears of blood; in the meantime, fresh blood is made in the liver. Thus the heart
is an emblem of wild self-consuming passion, and the liver an emblem of fortitude, discipline,
endurance. There is also an evocative suggestion of the idiom k.hūn-e jigar pīnā, “to drink the
blood of the liver,” with its wonderfully suitable range of meanings: “To suppress (one’s)
feelings, restrain (one’s) emotion, or anger, or grief, &c.;--to consume (one’s own) life-blood; to
vex or worry. (oneself) to death; to work (oneself) to death.”4
Ghālib’s verse, in short, asks how the lover should manage his unbearable, mutually
contradictory needs both for wild expression of passion, and at the same time for endurance--
which means among other things a kind of stoical suffering in silence. The first line states the
dilemma, and the second asks the question, while also making it clear that the question is only a
short-term one. For one only has to ask this question, and to worry about a color/mood (rang)
for one’s heart, k.hūn-e jigar hone tak--until the heart turns completely into liver-blood, until it is
ground down between the two millstones of passion and suppression and becomes a mere
quivering blob of blood. The single idiomatic expression “to drink the blood of the liver”
carries, as we have seen, the whole range of meanings: one may simultaneously “suppress
(one’s) feelings” and “vex or worry (oneself) to death” for only a relatively short time, because
the process itself requires that one “consume (one’s own) life-blood.”
____________________
3
. .
Ghālib, Dīvān-e ghālib, p. 63.
4
Platts, A Dictionary, p. 497.

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 8

 To make the liver a poetic organ in English is a tall order. How have the translators
dealt with this complex, multivalent, virtually untranslatable allusion?

(A) all have taken

The hues of this heart ready to melt into blood--

(B) With you the world took on the spectrum

radiating from my heart:

(C) Now everything is like my heart,

a color at the edge of blood:

(D) everything bears the colour of my heart

till all melts into blood.
.
In all the versions, the heart-liver opposition, so central to what both Ghālib. and Faiz. were
thinking about, drops out entirely. Well, since nobody can really translate Ghālib anyway--as I
have been gradually and painfully realizing over the years--why should I be surprised if this
complex phrase proves un-conveyable? I as a translator certainly can’t do it justice either. I also
agree, in literary contexts, with the translators’
. omission of a scholarly footnote that would
identify the phrase as borrowed from Ghālib (though Faiz., through his quotation marks, made a
point of his borrowing). In cases like this all translators encounter, I would say, genuine,
legitimate, essentially insuperable difficulties. They might as well go ahead and “transcreate” as
best they can.
=======
Looking at the larger designs of the translations, we can see a tendency--especially
in (B) and (C)--to increase the presence of the “you” in the poem, and to turn the poem into
something more like a familiar kind of romantic lyric in English. I would. argue that, on the
contrary, the organization of the poem around a crucial phrase from Ghālib tends to anchor it in
the more austere, tough, pessimistic world of the classical ghazal, in which as a rule the beloved
is more important for his or her absence than for any other quality.
For this reason I also have some doubts about the translators’ reading of the
conclusion. The lover says in lines (13) and (14), “Now that you’ve come, stay; so that some
color, some season, some thing / Would stay in one place.” Line (15), given here in context, is
the crucial one. On the face of it, it would seem to mean literally, “Again one time every thing
would be that which it is.”

(13) ab jo āƒe ho to t.hahro kih koƒī rang, koƒī rut, koƒī 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 nazar, rāh gużar rāh gużar, shīshah-e mai shīshah-e mai
¨
Yet the translators all blur the “one time” (ik bār). Here is how they render line (15):

(A) And all things once again be their own selves,

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 9

 (B) This time things will fall into place;

(C) Stay. So the world may become like itself again:

(D) and once again everything may become what it was--

They all, as far as I can judge, leave the implication that the lover is asking the beloved to stay
with him from now on, so that the poem seems to anticipate a kind of reconciliatory “happy
ending,” and possibly a better future.
My own reading would, by contrast, take the “one time” (ik bār) quite seriously.
The lover has no illusions. He knows that he is doomed--that the beloved has basically gone,
and will not be with him in the future. He is asking only for a brief moment of respite from his
vertigo--a reprieve, a temporary fix of stability. Let the beloved stay for just a bit, let the lover
“one time” again see things as themselves rather than as a helplessly whirling blaze of dark and
bright colors, moods, passions.
Of course Faiz. has cleverly used t.haharnā, a verb that can mean “to stop, rest, pause,
cease, desist; to stay, remain, abide, wait, tarry,”5 so that he preserves the ambiguity and thus
keeps the question at least slightly and intriguingly open. Here translations (A) and (D) have
taken perfect advantage of the conveniently ambiguous English phrase “once again.” Who could
say that “once” is not a satisfactory translation of ik bār, and “again” of phir se? And yet “once
again” can carry a charge of futurity--as “one more time” cannot. “My love will be with me
once again” and “My love will be with me one more time” have very diffent implications. I
would argue that the anchoring of the poem on k.hūn-e jigar hone tak, signalled forcefully by
quotation marks and by its very title, should sway our judgment toward the grimmer, less
hopeful, more literal reading. After all, the very next poem after this one in Faiz.’s volume Dast-
e tah-e sang is called Pās raho, “Stay With Me,” and makes it clear that the poet uses rahnā as
the verb for real “staying.”6
The beloved in “It’s the Color of My Heart” is envisioned almost as a drug. Before
the beloved comes, everything is what it is. Then the beloved comes, and everything is a
whirling mass of bright and dark. The lover begs the beloved to stay a while, so that,
paradoxically, “one more time” everything can be what it is. Drugs too first take one out of
one’s normal perceptions of reality; then eventually they become necessary for one to be in one’s
normal perceptions of reality, rather suffering some wild chaos of withdrawal. All this can come
to no good end--except the death of the heart, which may come almost as a relief, as it consumes
itself and turns into k.hūn-e jigar. A hopeful, optimistic reading of the conclusion is, I submit,
untrue to the Urdu poem Faiz. actually wrote; and if the real poem is too bleak to be enjoyed in
its own right, why translate it?
=======
By now it is probably clear that I am urging a kind of middle ground between
extreme literalness and free “transcreation.” It seems to me that we translators ought to try most
carefully to understand the originally poem very accurately in the Urdu. Then we ought to steer
____________________
5
Platts, A Dictionary, p. 365.
6
Faiz., Nusk.hahhā-e vafā, pp. 367-368.

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 10

between Scylla and Charybdis. Here are some principles that I suggest for the careful translator
who respects and enjoys an Urdu poem:
*Preserve the poem’s formal structure as much as possible. (If the poet takes pains
to repeat a line in identical form, so should the translator.)
*Maintain the poem’s ambiguities and obscurities; do not over-explain, do not
provide “information” that the poet has not provided. (If the poet says the sky is a “wet garment-
hem,” don’t turn it into “my tear-stained shirt”; if the poet speaks of a sight that delights the
eyes, don’t turn it into a meeting with the beloved.)
*Give readers information that the poet clearly wants them to have. (If the poet has
used a line in the poem as its title, don’t retitle it.)
Of course, it will all too often be impossible to do all this. There will be plenty of
situations in which “transcreation” will be the only option--it is hard to argue that “k.hūn-e jigar
hone tak” should be translated literally as “until it turns into blood of the liver.” Since there are
always all too many such impossible situations, why not save the transcreation for those truly
hard cases? Why remake the poem unnecessarily, if a great deal of it can be brought over
directly over into English instead?
Certainly I have no universal solution for the problems of translation, or even for the
problems of translating this poem.7 In an appendix I have given the four translations, (A)
through (D), and have added a fifth translation (E), which is my own (unpublished) one. It
seemed only fair that I too should have a go, and see how far I could succeed or fail. My heart is
with my fellow translators: our task is impossible, but nevertheless it must be done. As Cynthia
Ozick recently put it,
The issues that seize, grab, fall upon, overwhelm, or waylay translation are not
matters of language in the sense of word-for-word. Nor is translation to be equated
with interpretation; the translator has no business sneaking in what amounts to
commentary. Ideally, translation is a transparent membrane that will vibrate with the
faintest shudder of the original, like a single leaf on an autumnal stem. Translation is
autumnal: it comes late, it comes afterward.8

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A) Kiernan, Victor, trans. Poems by Faiz. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971. pp. 252-
255.
B) Lazard, Naomi, trans. The True Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Pp.
32-35.
C) Ali, Agha Shahid, trans. The Rebel’s Silhouette. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Books, 1991.
Pp. 56-57.
____________________
7
I want to thank my colleague and friend, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, for his comments and suggestions on
this paper.
8
Cynthia Ozick, “The Impossibility of Being Kafka” (The New Yorker, January 11, 1999), pp. 83-84.

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 11

D) Kumar, Shiv K., trans. Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Selected Poems. New Delhi: Viking Books
(Penguin Books India), 1995. Pp. 126-127.
Faiz. Ahmad Faiz.. Nusk.hahhā-e vafā. Delhi: Educational Publishing House, 1986., pp. 365-
. 366.
.
Ghālib, Mirzā Asadullāh K.hān. Dīvān-e ghālib. H.āmid ‚Alī K.hāñ, ed. Lahore: Punjab
University, 1969.
Kamal, Daud, trans. The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl. Selected and edited by Khalid Hasan.
Ahmedabad: Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1988.
Platts, John T. A Dictionary of Urdū, Classical Hindī, and English. London: Oxford University
Press, 1930.
Pritchett, Frances W., trans. A Listening Game: Poems by Saqi Farooqi. Translations, and an
introduction, by F. W. Pritchett; with a general introduction by Shamsur Rahman
Faruqi. London: Lokamaya Publications, 1987.
------- and Asif Aslam, trans. An Evening of Caged Beasts: Seven Post-Modernist Urdu Poets.
Selected and introduced by Asif Aslam; translated by F. W. Pritchett and Asif
Aslam. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
-------. “Two Ghazals” and “Stanzas from Ghalib.” New Letters 51,4 (Summer, 1985):126-130.

===========
APPENDIX: TRANSLATION TEXTS
===========
(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.

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 12

===========
(B)
BEFORE YOU CAME

translated by 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 13

things 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 14

some 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.

===========

The Sky, the Road, the Glass of Wine, page 15