IN THE LATE 1940s, the 18-year-old American poet WS Merwin made a pilgrimage to Saint Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC to meet another poet—Ezra Pound. Though Pound was under indictment for treason against the United States, following radio broadcasts during the Second World War in which he declared his support for Benito Mussolini, Merwin admired the poet and had wandered into the hospital looking for advice from a revered figure. Pound argued that if Merwin was serious about being a poet, he should write 75 lines every day. “But at your age you don’t have anything to write about,” he continued. “You may think you do, but you don’t. So get to translating.”
In a career that spanned almost seven decades, Merwin followed Pound’s advice to learn the art of translation so as not to be at the mercy of other translators. He translated poetry into English, from languages including German, Russian, Chinese, Egyptian, Welsh, Urdu, Japanese, Persian and Sanskrit. Translating gave Merwin more control over English—so much so, that it led the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali to declare, in an interview, that “Merwin became Merwin-esque by translating.” Shahid, who knew Merwin personally, is now located in this exquisite lineage of poets who learned to break the barriers of language through their work in translation.
Shahid is celebrated most for The Country Without a Post Office, a collection of poems that reflects on the Kashmiri people’s resistance, and the suffering brought on by the Indian government’s repression. He spent the last decade of his life reinvigorating modern American poetry by popularising the ghazal as a poetic form in the West and introducing the sensibilities and excesses of Urdu traditions into conventions of English poetry. But Shahid was also a prolific translator who familiarised the American audience with poets such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Mirza Ghalib. By working as a translator—a legacy that is often overlooked—he enriched his poetry, adding depth to it.
His translations of Faiz, first published as The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems in 1991, have gained a new meaning in the current political milieu of the subcontinent. Translating his works helped Shahid formulate a language that was aesthetically elegant as well as politically charged, through which he expressed the suffering of the Kashmiris, as well as his own. Today, at a time when Shahid is one of the defining literary voices of Kashmir, it is important to look at the manner in which, and the reasons why, he translated poets such as Faiz and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who, like him, were poets who documented injustice and whose work resonated with millions.
IN MAY 2018, I met the historian and translator Saleem Kidwai at his house in Lucknow to speak about Shahid. The living room had a framed photograph of Kidwai and the singer Begum Akhtar placed on a table—someone had gifted the photograph to him but had oddly chosen to crop Shahid out. “The photograph was taken right after a concert in New Delhi,” Kidwai told me. “There’s even a Doordarshan recording of Begum Akhtar, where at one point, she looks at the both of us while singing and smiles.” Smiling somewhat coyly, he told me about their friendship with Begum Akhtar. As we spoke about Shahid and Akhtar, Faiz came up—almost as if one could not talk about them without mentioning him. “He loved to recite Faiz, always Faiz!” Kidwai said as we sipped coffee, with a pile of Shahid’s books in front of me. “He had inherited Faiz’s poetry from his father. He made sure to send a copy of each collection till he died.”
While Shahid was growing up in Kashmir, Faiz’s poems were recited on both sides of the border. Faiz had once stayed at Shahid’s house in Srinagar, before Partition. In the introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette, Shahid wrote that Faiz was an essential part of his childhood: “I must have then begun to internalize Faiz, because I often found myself repeating these, as well as other lines, to myself. Without having any clear sense of what the lines meant, I still somehow felt the words, felt them through their sounds, through the rhythms of my father’s voice.” But it was Begum Akhtar who amplified his admiration for Faiz. At Shahid’s house, tapes of Begum Akhtar were played even in the 1950s, and the children of the house were exposed to her music at a very young age. Agha Iqbal Ali, Shahid’s younger brother, remembers that their parents attended and hosted mushairas—symposiums of poetry—in Kashmir in the 1950s and 1960s. “We were all supposed to be upstairs, but we were kids, so we’d come downstairs and try to understand what was going on, listen to the performance since we weren’t allowed there,” he told me. “We were very young and we obviously didn’t understand what was going on, but the ‘wah wah’ got to us. When we heard the ‘wah wah,’ I remember that we repeated it along with the elders and would break into laughter. But this environment had an impact on Bhaiya—and even all of us—and as we matured, we started understanding this world. So naturally, when he met Begum Akhtar, he was already aware of her music and influence and all she could do.”
In 1968, Shahid moved to Delhi, for his master’s degree in English literature at Hindu College, and met Akhtar through Kidwai. Shahid and Kidwai would make it a point to attend all her Delhi performances. “We were her chamchas, who would follow her around everywhere,” Kidwai told me. “We never missed a chance to meet her.” Through her renditions of various ghazals, Shahid became aware of the potential of the form, writing in the introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette:
What Begum Akhtar did was to place the ghazal gently on the raga till it, the raga, opened itself to that whispered love, gave himself willingly, guiding the syllables to the prescribed resting places, till note by syllable, syllable by note, the two merged into yet another compelling ethos. She, in effect, allowed the ghazal to be caressed into music, translated as it were.
In some ways, Begum Akhtar’s ghazals—especially the ghazals of Faiz—led Shahid to realise the potential of the form, of the effect the repetition could create, or all that could be done with the couplets and the power they had.
Two years after Begum Akhtar’s death in 1974, Shahid moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in English literature at Pennsylvania State University. Once he was there, he realised that no one had heard of Faiz. “To have to introduce Faiz’s name seemed a terrible insult to a very significant element of my culture,” he later wrote, in Grand Street. Though poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke, CP Cavafy, Octavio Paz and Osip Mandelstam had deeply influenced Shahid, he shared aesthetics as well as political concerns with Faiz. Both poets, though separated by generations, geographies, and languages, never sacrificed the aesthetic for the political subject matter.
“The subject must happen to the poem, not be forced upon it,” Shahid once said in an interview. Once Shahid was captivated by Faiz, he was disarmed. Naturally, then, Faiz’s absence from Western culture was appalling for him.
In 1980, Shahid wrote to Faiz, asking him for permission to translate his poems. At the time, Faiz had been exiled by Zia-ul-Haq and was living in Beirut, working as an editor with The Lotus Magazine—a trilingual magazine of international literature jointly funded by the Soviet Union, Egypt, East Germany and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In the letter, Shahid bribed Faiz with a rare Begum Akhtar tape, in which she was singing his poems, and asked if he could translate Faiz’s ghazals. Two weeks later, Faiz replied, saying, “Feel free to make adaptations of my poems. Please send the Begum Akhtar tape.” And so, Shahid’s translation, which would take nearly a decade to manifest as The Rebel’s Silhouette, began.
Two weeks before the communications blockade and mass arrests in Kashmir, which followed the effective abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, I met Shahid’s elder sister, Hena, in Srinagar. She told me how Shahid would come to Kashmir during the summer vacations when he was teaching at Hamilton College, and how his mother, Sufia, who was well-versed in Urdu, helped him translate Faiz. The first step, Hena told me, was that Shahid and his mother selected poems that they felt would best suit English. Once the poems were decided, they would transliterate the poems, which Shahid would subsequently work on for months. “There were times when he would spend days and days on one line,” she told me. “One time, I woke up at 5 am and saw that the light in his room was on—Bhaiya had stayed up all night working on one line. Just one line. Imagine! That was the level of precision involved.”
Shahid gauged that Faiz had been made to sound too formal in the English language, and concluded that there was no way in which Urdu—especially Faiz’s Urdu—could be recreated in English. Reading the English translations of various Urdu and Persian poets, he had become aware that his task as a translator was not to remain faithful to the original or carry out a literal translation but to fashion a new poem altogether—one that would read, to someone without knowledge of the Urdu original, like a poem in its own right. Shahid had also come across Merwin’s translations of Ghalib, which had been commissioned by the Pakistani critic Aijaz Ahmad. “What emerged was sometimes, spectacular, sometimes magical, sometimes passable—but always interesting,” Shahid wrote in his introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette, “Merwin and Rich’s efforts struck me as particularly compelling, some of which have inspired me in my attempts.” This example led Shahid to the understanding that while it was not crucial for the translator to be a master of the language from which they were translating, they needed to be a “poet of the language” into which they were translating.
In his introduction, Shahid also pointed out the duality of meaning in certain words in Urdu. He noted that the words tera dard can be read as “the sorrow you’ve caused” as well as “the sorrow you feel,” which poses a problem for the Western translators of Faiz who were not as comfortable with Urdu. While Faiz’s long-time translator Naomi Lazard translated the line, “tera gham hai to gham-e-dahar ka jhagra kya hai”, as “The torments of the world meant nothing/ you alone could make me suffer,” and the Marxist historian Victor Kiernan translated it as, “The time’s pain nothing, you alone were pain,” both of them failed to address the duality of “your sorrow.” Shahid tackled it by extending it to three lines:
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?
Shahid wanted to capture Faiz’s emotional excitement, to recreate his energy in English. He took some liberties, leaving a line here, adding a word there, and even taking a line from the bottom and placing it on top. In Shahid’s version of “Evening,” for instance, he rearranges lines for emphasis, placing the line “history to tear itself from this net” before “silence to break its chains,” so that there is a silence, followed by the forceful phrase, “a symphony of conch shells.”
The sky waits for this spell to be broken,
for history to tear itself from this net,
for Silence to break its chains
so that a symphony of conch shells
may wake up the statues
and a beautiful, dark goddess,
her anklets echoing, may unveil herself.
Shahid’s translations of Faiz are similar to, but never identical to, the Urdu original in terms of metre, movement as well as the choice of words. Faiz ends the poem with the lines “koi but jaage, koi sanvli ghunghat khole”—a moment when a statue comes to life. Kiernan translated it as “Some idol awaken, some swarthy beauty open her veil,” while Lazard tackles it by translating it as “it waits for a goddess to awaken, her dark veil cast off.” Shahid, on the other hand, writes, “and a beautiful, dark goddess,/ her anklets echoing, may unveil herself.” Shahid’s goddess is dark—a direct reference to Kali—and the act of “unveiling” stems from and belongs to a tradition that is deeply rooted in the culture of the subcontinent, that is often seen as the moment on the silver screen and also as the moment of revelation in the myths.
BY THE MID 1990s, Shahid was ready with the manuscript of The Rebel’s Silhouette and had established his position as an exceptional translator, publishing various translations in esteemed journals. Ever since Shahid had set foot in the United States, the hypocrisy of the US media and its biases in the Israel–Palestine conflict had frustrated him. Once, in an irate manner, he called out the New York Times for a report titled, “Palestinian’s Poem Unnerves Israelis.” He wrote that the Times “is not interested in the culture of the Palestinians nor, really, in that of any of the Arabic-speaking peoples.” He questioned their knowledge of Palestinian poets and wrote, “Professors and students in the country’s Master of Fine Arts writing programs have read the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, but who has heard of Darwish or any other Arab poet?” So, when the academic Edward Said approached Shahid for translations of Darwish’s poems, he instantly agreed.
Along with Ahmad Dalal, Shahid translated 11 poems by Darwish as “Eleven Stars over Andalusia,” which is a direct reference to Yusuf’s dream from the Quran. Shahid had sympathised with displaced people and histories throughout his life, and his translations of Darwish—though only an Arabic speaker can comment on the fidelity of his versions—in Rooms are Never Finished are deeply arresting. In the 11 poems that Shahid chose, Darwish speaks of an Arab’s loss of Muslim Granada as a metaphor for Palestine. He also evokes the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who had written gacelas—ghazals—in the 1940s, a form he had inherited from his Andalusian Moorish heritage.
The act of translating Darwish’s poetry was quite personal to Shahid; he often claimed to be in a “self-imposed” exile, preferring this term over “expatriate.” In a review of Rooms are Never Finished, published by Poetry Foundation, the American poet Craig Arnold wrote that in his translations of Darwish’s poetry, Shahid “has shown us how the terms of loss may be not merely personal, but shared—in every sense of the word, common.” In Shahid’s translations, Darwish dazzles as an Arabic poet whose longing for his homeland allows him to compress history and reality into one, and transcend time as well as space, while speaking about Palestine without ever evoking it. Shahid’s translation of “In Exodus, I Love You More,” for instance, conveys the strain and heaviness in Darwish’s voice:
Palm trees have become weightless,
the hills have become weightless, and streets in the dusk have become weightless;
the earth has become weightless as it bids farewell to its dust. Words have become weightless,
and stories have become weightless on the staircase of night. My heart alone is heavy,
so let it remain here, around your house,
barking, howling for a golden time.
Numerous writers and translators, such as Munir Akash and John Berger, went on to translate Darwish’s poetry, but Shahid’s translations came at a time when Darwish’s works were unknown, and his decision to translate them was as politically charged as his choice of Darwish’s poems about exile and loss of the homeland.
DESPITE SHAHID’S INITIAL apprehensions about translating ghazals, by the late 1990s, he had transformed and pioneered ghazal writing in America. In the late 1990s, he edited Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English—an anthology of ghazals written by American poets—wrote numerous essays about the form, and his collection of ghazals was posthumously published as Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals. Shahid familiarised the American audience with the formal demands of the ghazal. In the introduction to the anthology, he wrote, “the ghazal is made up of couplets, each autonomous, thematically and emotionally complete in itself,” and added that “one should at any time be able to pluck a couplet like a stone from a necklace, and it should continue to shine in the vivid isolation, though it would have a different lustre among and with the other stones.” In September, I spoke to Christopher Merrill, the director of the international writers’ programme at the University of Iowa. As we talked about Shahid’s ghazal-writing, he informed me how the form has become “a staple of American creative-writing programmes” because of Shahid, and that he thinks of Shahid as one of the great connecting forces of modern poetry who “bridged the gap between the East and the West.”
In the late 1990s, Shahid finally took on the task of translating a Ghalib ghazal. Though he breaks the formal demands to fully covey the sense of grief—in his English ghazals, Shahid strictly followed the formal demands of the Persian ghazal—he managed to retain the poem’s essence. A couplet from the original reads: “ranj se ḳhugar hua insaan to mit jaata hai ranj/ mushkileen mujh par padi itni ki aasan ho gai.” The couplet belongs to Ghalib, but Shahid used it thrice in his poetry. Naturally, it cemented its position in Shahid’s oeuvre and he, trying to stay faithful to the essence of the couplet and invoking its musicality through the use of refrain, translated it as:
See me! Beaten by sorrow, man is numbed to pain.
Grief has become the pain only pain erases.
Another couplet from the ghazal, which Merwin and Adrienne Rich too translated in Ghazals of Ghalib, that Shahid reworked numerous times to capture its essence, to recreate the true feeling of being in love, is perhaps a testament to his achievements as a translator:
All is his—Sleep, Peace, Night—when on his arm your hair
shines to make him the god whom nothing effaces.
In fables, one hears of Arabic, Urdu and Persian poets who were asked by their masters to memorise thousands of verses of other poets by heart only to forget them before writing their own. This practice allowed them to learn from their precursors and to keep the tradition alive. In doing so, they expanded the universe of the metaphors and at the same time, acquired a barometer against which they could measure their works. In a similar vein, when Shahid turned to his poems, he had gained Faiz, and by extending metaphors from the verses of Faiz and Ghalib that were deeply strained in Urdu tradition, he helped break the boundaries of English poetry, introducing new ideas and themes that enriched the language. “Poetry is what is gained in translation,” the poet Joseph Brodsky had stated, and Shahid understood how translation, too, was a way of extending the language. At times, to recreate moments from his “Urdu past,” he would often translate, imbibing the phrases of others, touching the geographies and languages through his words. When Faiz died, in 1984, Shahid wrote an elegy to him, which was published in the collection The Half-Inch Himalayas. In the poem, he recounted his correspondence with Faiz, how he grew up with Faiz’s words and how Faiz “became, like memory, necessary”:
Twenty days before your death you finally
wrote, this time from Lahore, that after the sack
of Beirut you had no address…I
had gone from poem to poem, and found
you once, terrible alone, speaking
to yourself: “Bolt your doors, Sad heart! Put out
the candles, break all cups of wine. No one,
now no one will ever return.”
In “From Amherst to Kashmir,” part of his collection Rooms are Never Finished, Shahid writes about the journey back to Kashmir with his mother’s body—“a coffin carrying a coffin”—as he chronicles his sense of loss, using the battle of Karbala as a metaphor. In the third part of the poem, he speaks of how they attempted to translate Faiz’s poem “Memory” together, and writes, “‘Memory’—two years after your death they tell me—has no translation.” He goes on to translate the poem in the fifth part, and extends his grief through Faiz:
Desolation’s desert. I’m here with shadows.
Of your voice, your lips as mirage, now trembling.
Grass and dust of distance have let this desert
bloom with your roses
One reason The Country Without a Post Office is so evocative and elegiac is because Shahid breaks the conventions of English and uses a language that is deeply steeped in the traditions of the subcontinent and its culture. Thus, in “Farewell,” a poem that laments the loss of the other, one can sense the influence of “Hum Joh Tareeq Rahon Mein Mare Gaye,” Faiz’s elegy to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—US citizens who were executed, in 1953, on charges of spying for the Soviet Union—which Shahid had translated as “We Who Were Executed.” Apart from Faiz, Shahid’s reading of Darwish’s poetry is evident throughout the collection, when he reflects on the distance between the past and the present or when he imagines what ought to be, when he talks about his homeland as a place in the past or about the human toll of the conflict. When Shahid translated Darwish’s poems in Rooms are Never Finished, then, he did so with Kashmir as a metaphor for his lost homeland. Unlike other Western translators of Darwish’s poetry, Shahid could understand what it means to be far away from a homeland that is under occupation, a place where, in Shahid’s words, “We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark.”
The German poet Paul Celan translated a dozen poets before writing his poetry, which led him to break the syntax of German to express his Jewish experience of the Holocaust. This led Anne Carson to remark that “Celan is a poet who uses language as if he is always translating.” Shahid, too, altered the syntax of English to express his subcontinental experience in a language that he considered his own.In Shahid’s collections such as Half-Inch Himalayas, written during the 1980s when he was still working on the translation, Faiz’s presence in his poetry is almost palpable. His use of phrases such as “One morning, she says, the air/ was dew-starched” and “Mecca scarlet-women/ with minarets of gold,” as well as his description of the Dacca gauzes as “woven air, running/ water, evening dew” reveals how he introduced Urdu sensibilities to English.
“The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved,” Faiz wrote in a letter to Alum Lewis in the early 1940s. The loss of—and the agonising wait for—the beloved were subjects of Faiz’s poetry that Shahid consciously inherited. This is most apparent, perhaps, when he writes, “I enter this: The Beloved leaves one behind to die” in the canzone “Lenox Hill,” or when, in “The Fourth Day,” he exclaims, “The Beloved is gone/ The Beloved is gone.” Staying within a tradition, and at times borrowing from it, helped Shahid stay loyal to the cultures and languages to which he belonged—something he was constantly aware of. The question of loyalty was crucial for Shahid, and one of the reasons he chose to work on ghazal writing in English—a point where the two cultures and literary traditions met. But as Shahid translated Faiz, he learned more about Urdu poetry and the English language, and it helped him to find the right words to express his subcontinental experience as well as his life in America, and remain a part of both cultures at the same time. In his introduction to the translation, he wrote, “These loyalties, which have political, cultural, and aesthetic implications, remain so entangled in me, so thoroughly mine, that they have led not to confusion but to a strange, arresting clarity.” This sense of clarity helped him explore his subjects in the remarkable manner and style of Faiz and Darwish.
IN THE LATE 1990s, the Israeli-American artist Izhar Patkin and Agha Shahid Ali met for the first time, in New York. Izhar wanted to paint Shahid’s poems for a collaborative project that was the brainchild of his friend Anne Macdonald—an editor from San Francisco. As a patron of the arts and writing, Macdonald felt that while artists ended up making money, writers lived up to the cliché and were always underpaid. She wanted to start a publishing company, with the primary focus on a series of collaborative projects between artists and writers, and wanted Patkin’s to be the first. Though Patkin agreed instantly, the search for his writer counterpart went on for almost twenty years. It was only when the American novelist Jim Lewis suggested Agha Shahid Ali that Patkin found the poet he wanted to work with.
Over the course of the next few months, they met numerous times, and grew close, but did not work on the project. “One year had passed,” Patkin remembered, “but we never discussed anything. We were too busy talking about the world.” In February 1999, Shahid was diagnosed with brain cancer, and told Patkin that they should start thinking about the project. But Patkin had already envisioned what he wanted to do, though he had never discussed it with Shahid. “I wanted to make rooms of veils, that one could enter. But I was surprised when I realised Shahid had something similar in mind,” Patkin told me.
“Our meeting point should be the veil,” Shahid suggested when they met for the first time. “It’s funny that a Jew and a Muslim should meet at the veil,” Patkin replied. Shahid asked him how he wanted to go on about it, and Patkin said: “Well, let’s not do the Jew-Muslim, feel-good thing. Let’s give them hate.” “Ah! Darling, perfect,” Shahid had started laughing at this point, “We should have separate book launches from the start, nobody should know we’ve been talking to each other. We’re going to milk this to death.”
They chose “Veiled Threats” as the working title of the project and Shahid promised him that he would write a poem for Patkin to paint. Before his death in December 2001, Shahid had faxed Patkin a canzone—a 65-line poem with a strict rhyme and metre. Deeply layered with concerns that he had written about throughout his life, the canzone is, arguably, one of Shahid’s toughest works. But along with “The Veiled Suite” and “The Dead are Here,” Patkin had also decided to paint Faiz’s “Evening,” “You Tell Us What to Do” and Darwish’s “Violins,” because they resonated with Shahid’s poetic sensibilities.
One evening this September, Patkin told me he believed that in art, the metaphor was everything. “In Shahid’s translation of Faiz, metaphor has been taken to the level of witchcraft. And for a visual artist the meaning is in the metaphor, in the figure itself that comes alive like the statue in the poem. You can see, as an artist, that Shahid and Faiz are on the same page. Their voices are very compatible and there isn’t much distance between them. Basically, it’s the same voice—he didn’t have to translate because the voice was already there.”