***
Here I feel like I need to clarify and apologize for one heretical literary innovation and example of bad taste. The reasons I’ve given glosses to the Persian poetry are two: for one, the new generation of readers can’t understand Persian; and, secondly, neither do I. Long story short, the inglorious truth of the matter is that yours truly officially studied Persian for only four days when in the fourth grade. Memorizing the Amad Namah terrorized me so much that I gave up and switched to drawing class. Although in drawing class there was no need for memorizing verb declensions, there was still ample room for sighing and crying out in disappointment because up till the tenth grade, my drawing skills hadn’t advanced beyond a parrot and a goblet, which were the only two things I could draw even before dedicating myself to that craft. My drawing teacher used to remark that I signed my name with such love and attention, and that my cursive was so beautiful, that he didn’t have the heart to fail me: ‘Don’t label it a grapevine, and you’ll get a perfect score for drawing a water pitcher.’
Three of my well-wishers know very well that I don’t know any Persian. So naturally whenever they write or we have an occasion to speak, they take out their quills of Persian poetry and use me for target practice. For about a dozen years, I put up with this in a state of profound wonderment, friendly indulgence, and respectful incomprehension. Then I finally came to my senses and realized that I had a number of friends who knew just as much Persian as I did (meaning, zilch), and I could torment them in just the same way! Doing this increased tenfold others’ awe of my Persian erudition and proportionately cut down on their letters and the pleasure of their company. So wherever Persian poetry appears in this book, it’s through the graces of these three well-wishers. One is my dear friend, the beardless straight-shooter Manzur Ilahi Sheikh (the author of Dar-e-dilkusha [The Beautiful Door] and Silsilah-e-roz o shab [The Hours of the Day and Night]) who calls from Lahore to enquire about my health, and yet the first things out of his mouth are lines of Persian poetry! I have to ask him to translate what he’s just recited and subsequently interpret it, and, in the meantime, his money has run out and the operator disconnects us. The next day he writes a letter filled with apologies and yet more Persian poetry: ‘I’m sorry that yesterday all our time on the phone was wasted on translating. In fact, what I had meant to ask was about your operation. What was it for? And how are you doing now? When I heard about it, I was very worried. Actually, on the subject of wasting time, Sadi said something very wonderful… But Bedil — now he really raises the bar — O, does he ever! — when he says…’
My second well-wisher is Dr Ziauddin Shakeb. Every time he goes to the British Library, he first drops by a bookstore and buys a postcard of a beautiful, recognizable scene and then proceeds to ruin it by scribbling all over it verses from Faizi, Bedil, or Talib Amli. Then he addresses it to me and drops it in the mail. The third is my dear and most wise friend, the inimitable Mukhtar Masood, who has wasted a quarter of a century trying to fill in the gaps of my impoverished store of knowledge. For hours on end he can hold forth on topics near and dear to his heart (and his alone), and in the course of this, he works himself up into a real-life state of ecstasy. Several times I’ve asked him, ‘My dear sir, pardon me, but how do you know that I don’t already know all this stuff?’ And yet he constantly underrates himself. He doesn’t take credit for anything. He points with his index finger toward the heavens, pulls on his earlobes with the same finger, and then, if he’s standing up, he sits down, or if he’s sitting down, he stands up. This is his peculiar way of expressing his modesty and his submission before God, and his friends and enemies alike are fond of this routine.
These three men provided me with glosses for the Persian poetry, which I wrote down to establish a standard and so that if I forgot what the poetry meant, then later I would have the glosses for reference and so wouldn’t have to ask anyone. Especially Mukhtar Masood: after he got back from his official RCD8 tour of Turkey where he watched with wonderment the astonishing dances of Rumi’s whirling dervishes, ever since then he’s been explaining Persian poetry as though it has something to do with Turkey. If I needed to, I guess I could have consulted with another of my oldest friends, Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus, MA, BT. But the thing about that is that with his infinite erudition, he ends up making even simple poetry impossible to understand.
You make what’s simple hard.
Funny how if I don’t pay you any heed
Even hard things turn out simple!
The truth is that today’s readers can’t survive an onslaught of Persian poetry. Especially when it drops in as if from outer space. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad gussies up his prose just so that he can work in his favourite lines of Persian poetry. You might say that with him it’s not the poetry but the prose that’s out of place: he weaves his wordy prose around the silken cocoon of his Persian poetry. But bear in mind that since ancient times there has only been one way to make silk: take a live silkworm and drop it into boiling water — up till its death, the silk is its own.
Mirza says that the hardest part of Ghalib’s poetry is all the commentaries. That if it weren’t for them, understanding Ghalib wouldn’t be half so bad. That Ghalib is the only poet in the world whose poetry gives you twice as much pleasure when you don’t understand it!
With these three men around, may God please have mercy on me! After I got sick, I started to worry about them — who knows where misfortune will strike next?
Once I commented to Manzur Ilahi that he had a lot of Persian poetry in his two books, and yet the new generation of readers is as ignorant of Persian as I am. I told him how, with my beginner’s knowledge, I can try to guess at its meaning here and there, but in the end, this only kills it. I suggested that in any new edition he should explain this poetry in brackets so that everyone could understand him.
He paused. He closed his eyes, pursed his lips, and smiled in his pleasing way. Then he said, ‘But then its whole point would be lost.’
Mirza chimed in on this subject: ‘The same can be said about how many English words you’ve crammed into this book.’ He went on: ‘The British show great forethought and cunning in using words from other languages. For instance, food. Their food is insipid — just awful. But use French to describe it, and ta-dah! That’s what the fancy restaurants do. Even today French is thought of as a language of politesse and sophistication. So whenever the British have something to say that either bears upon art or bares too much, they talk it up, or tame it down, in French. You must know that Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) wrote his world-famous diary — in which he wrote in great detail about his debauchery and “nightly exploits”—all in shorthand so that his butler couldn’t read it. Whenever he got to a part where the British would usually rely upon their conventional understatement, say, “oh, so naughty!” and then move on, he wrote those parts in French. But when he got to parts that were so unmentionable that even French would seem too sultry (which were most parts), then without missing a beat he switched over to Spanish to narrate his nightly adventures. Almost like he chose a language to match the degree of debauchery in evidence! Now just take a look at some other disciplines. The British have taken their words for plants and most of their legal terms straight from Latin — as is. When they talk or try to act wise, they use Greek words in quotation marks so that no one will catch their drift. In opera, it’s got to be Italian. And in philosophy, the hard words are always German. In doing so, they make incomprehensible language worse — they make it physically unbearable.’ After this rambling primer, he added, ‘We use English words only when we’re sure that whatever we’re hinting at could be expressed far better in Urdu.’