Poetry-in-Translation: Noon Meem Rashid’s اندھا کباڑی
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Noon Meem Rashid
Mavra (1941)
اندھا کباڑی
ن م راشد
شہر کے گوشوں میں ہیں بکھرے ہوئے
پا شکستہ سر بریدہ خواب!
جن سے شہر والے بے خبر
گھومتا ہوں شہر کے گوشوں میں روز و شب
کہ ان کو جمع کر لوں
دل کی بھٹی میں تپاؤں
جس سے چھٹ جائے پرانا میل
ان کے دست و پا پھر سے ابھر آئیں
چمک اٹھیں لب و رخسار و گردن
جیسے نو آراستہ دولہوں کے دل کی حسرتیں
پھر سے ان خوابوں کو سمت رہ ملے
''خواب لے لو خواب۔۔۔۔''
صبح ہوتے چوک میں جا کر لگاتا ہوں صدا
"خواب اصلی ہیں کہ نقلی"
یوں پرکھتے ہیں کہ جیسے ان سے بڑھ کر
خواب داں کوئی نہ ہو
خواب گر میں بھی نہیں
صورت گر ثانی ہوں بس!
ہاں مگر میری معیشت کا سہارا خواب ہیں
شام ہو جاتی ہے
میں پھر سے لگاتا ہوں صدا
"مفت لے لو مفت، یہ سونے کے خواب"
مفت سن کر اور ڈر جاتے ہیں لوگ
اور چپکے سے سرک جاتے ہیں لوگ
دیکھنا یہ ''مفت'' کہتا ہے
کوئی دھوکا نہ ہو؟
ایسا کوئی شعبدہ پنہاں نہ ہو؟
گھر پہنچ کر ٹوٹ جائیں
یا پگھل جائیں یہ خواب؟
بھک سے اڑ جائیں کہیں
یا ہم پہ کوئی سحر کر ڈالیں یہ خواب
جی نہیں کس کام کے؟
ایسے کباڑی کے یہ خواب
ایسے نا بینا کباڑی کے یہ خواب
رات ہو جاتی ہے
خوابوں کے پلندے سر پہ رکھ کر
منہ بسورے لوٹتا ہوںر
ات بھر پھر بڑبڑاتا ہوں
یہ لے لو خواب۔۔۔۔''
اور لے لو مجھ سے ان کے دام بھی
خواب لے لو، خواب
میرے خواب
خواب میرے خواب
خواب
''ان کے دام بھی
Blind Scrap-Dealer
Noon Meen Rashid
In the corners of the city are
Scattered, broken, aimless dreams
Of which the city-dwellers are unaware.
I wander the corners of the city, morning and night,
So that I might compile them,
Reignite them in the forge of my heart,
Clear off old, accumulated dirt,
So that their hands and feet may emerge again,
Their lips and cheeks and necks arise with a sparkle,
Like the unfulfilled desires in the heart of a newly adorned groom
That these dreams may again find direction.
“Dreams, get your dreams---,”
As morning comes, I go to the square and give my call.
“Are the dreams real or counterfeit?”
They investigate as if
There were no greater authority on dreams than them!
A maker of dreams, I am neither
A maker of the second face, nothing more
Although, yes, the backbone of my livelihood is dreams
Evening comes,
Again, I give my call
“Free, completely free, these dreams of gold”
Upon hearing “free”, people become even more fearful
And wordlessly move away
“Watch out; ‘free’ he says,
Might it be a hoax?
A hidden trick?
That they might break upon reaching home,
Or that these dreams might melt,
Fly away in a puff of air,
Or perform some sorcery upon us,
Oh no! What use are they?
These dreams of a mere scrap-dealer,
These dreams of a sightless scrap-dealer!”
Night falls,
With stacks of dreams resting upon my head,
I return with a dejected expression,
All night I again murmur,
“Take these dreams…
Take more…and take from me their cost as well…
Dreams, take these dreams…
My dreams…
Dreams oh my dreams…
Dreams…
Even their cost”
NOON MEEM RASHID was a Pakistani poet and writer, noted for his progressiveness and rich, adventurous use of language. He served in the Royal Indian Army, and after Independence, worked with Radio Pakistan before going on to work for the UN for the remainder of his career. Writing at a time when much of Pakistan’s literary community was harkening back to the Arab roots of Urdu, Rashid chose to highlight the Persian influence on Pakistan and Urdu. His language is layered with modern Persian verbiage and displays a mastery of sound that defies simple explanation. This very poem has a rhythmic rise and fall, a natural flow of language that rolls like honey off the tongue. Coupled with the abstractness with which Rashid examined the topics of free will, oppression, love, and beauty, his work emerged as the first marker of ‘modernist’ Urdu poetry. Rashid also became the first prominent user of free verse in Urdu poetry, rebelling against the traditional ‘ghazal’ format in Urdu poetry. He passed away in 1975, at the age of sixty-five, and asked to be cremated after his death (as opposed to the traditional Muslim burial), a hard-line individualist till the end.
Translator’s Note:
The translator’s dilemma is truly a world apart. On one hand, you feel the purest form of joy, sharing something so powerful and evocative to a whole new class of readers; on the other, you feel immeasurable loss for all the nuance and connotation that you somehow could not put on paper. There are questions every translator wrestles with: How true should one remain to source material versus the understood meaning of the work? Should line breaks happen as they are, or reflect the thoughts in the translated tongue? Is punctuation to be adjusted depending on the end language?
In translating Noon Meem Rashid’s اندھا کباڑی (Blind Scrap-Dealer), I quickly came to realize that Rashid’s sonic mastery was something I would never be able to capture in my end product—I thus opted to keep the line breaks exactly where they were, to at least preserve the original form. Surveying the analogies and abstractions Rashid uses (likening his heart to a forge, to the sparkling dreams of a groom), I attempted to capture, more artfully, the larger metaphors he constructs. Choosing the tenses of the verbs in the first stanza was an active choice to highlight the narrative Rashid composes of the speaker himself reinvigorating the dreams.
Additionally, the notion of "the second face" was difficult to explain. Simply put, “the second face” implies an external representation or symbol. Essentially, the speaker is asserting that he simply burnishes and presents these dreams, giving them an external appearance, but is not responsible for the content, the essence of the dream itself. I thought it more appropriate to footnote this explanation than to change the expression that Rashid uses.
Without a doubt, the most difficult part of translation was the title and the subject of the poem. کباڑ, in Urdu, roughly translates to “scraps” or “rubbish,” and one who collects said scraps and sells them is a کباڑی. In Pakistan, such individuals wheel around their goods, hawking their wares to people. Thus follows the plot of the poem: this scrap-dealer, whose call for dreams exists in the same form of a milkman, fruit-seller, or any other street merchant who might be passing through. It was not even that the equivalent word did not exist, but that the very concept did not exist in the English language or Western culture. Rather than alter the fabric of the work, I chose to include this explanation instead.
