Autumn moon - Aa Gulzar, hum bhi aaj khila ke dekhen chaand...

This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of posts on this blog. I have on my desk currently a book of poems called Autumn Moon translated in English by J.P. Das and were originally written in Urdu by Complete (Sampooran) Singh Gulzar, as I sometimes fondly call him :D.

Here is the short introduction of the book from the writer himself -

"Autumn Moon is a reflection of Gulzar's penchant for the sublime. He is one of the most versatile Urdu poets on the scene today. The anthology presents some of Gulzar's most significant Urdu works in translation for the first time.

The poems in this seminal collection, Autumn Moon, are in deep exploration of love, longing, passion, ecstasy, absence and loss."

What I want to do in this series is to try to translate these poems back to Urdu. Sounds like a foolish idea? Well...

I have been wanting to do this exercise for quite some time now but everything starts only at the right time which for this is, I guess, now.

They say that one always loses a part of the soul of the original work in a translation. However if the translation is not entirely literal, sometimes the effect created can be much better than the original (the movies Chachi 420 and Hum Tum are examples). This perhaps hints at what my goal is with what I am trying to do. That can be seen as one of the goals but that is too ambitious.

So, the reasons I want to do this are the following.

• To understand poetry better - It has been only a couple of years since I began to appreciate poetry. But, to like something is far from understanding it well enough. It is often the case that you like some poetry and if someone asks you for the meaning of some part, you are lost.. this, at times, results in statements like, "These lines can only be felt. They cannot be explained" :D.. so translation is a fantastic exercise in this respect I guess. Even if we are not able to explain the emotion well, we should be able to express/phrase it in another language if we understand it. This can take a lot of effort and can take going back and forth to the original making you understand more each time.
• To improve at expressing the thoughts - I sometimes wonder what is it that makes the great writers actually great. Is it the thoughts that matter more or is it the ability to express? Where does someone like me lack? There are some lines that simply leave the reader in awe at how fantastic the lines are... here is an example of a few by Gulzar, "Jiska bhi chehra cheela, andar se aur nikla, masoom sa kabootar naacha to mor nikla, kabhi hum kameene nikle, kabhi doosre kameene". Simply awesome. Although not exactly the same, the idea is in a way similar to something I wrote a while ago.. so perhaps i don't lack as much in idea/observation/thoughts as in expression. Hence this exercise is definitely worth doing :)
  
• to challenge my language skills- having a very limited vocabulary in both English and Hindi/Urdu, this could be a good way to improve on that..
  
• Writing fiction is the best way to disguise your thoughts and still be able to express yourself... so lets get better at writing fiction in the meanwhile :)
  
• To give the world the next Gulzar - :D ... since the great person is already in his seventies, he might not have a lot of years left.. bitter truth of life, as they call it.. so we need someone to replace him 8-)  [I know bahut bahut zyaada ho gaya but ki farak painda hai .. apna blog hai :D :D]..
  
• To give the readers time to ponder over something interesting - poetry books gone through quickly make you lose charm and this will be a interesting exercise to anyone dropping by.. and thinking that maybe this could be phrased better, etc etc..
  

ok, lots of bullshitting.. basic baat hai ki apna mood hai.. of course this does not mean this will be the only thing appearing on this blog from now on. It will just come from time to time.


The reason for choosing this book is kind of obvious. Since it was originally written in Urdu, there HAS to be a way to get it back.. and so it is reasonable to hope that back translation might make it better than the English version and/or as good as the original.  I will give my rating from 1 to 10 for each one, 5 meaning that the English version, to me, sounds just as good as my translation and 10 meaning the Hindi/Urdu version is much better than the English version. The interchange between Hindi and Urdu in my version will be frequent. I will kind of treat them as one language in the spirit of what Ghalib used to say, "Hindi and Urdu are the same languages but with a different script." 

Will want to compare it with the original later sometime. So, lets begin this journey towards trying to find out what was lost in translation.


Ek couplet humaari taraf se shuru karne ke liye :D


Aa Gulzar, hum bhi aaj khila ke dekhen  chaand,
Ki mere saawan mein tere patjhad sa nasha hai ki nahi