Book & Author
Naomi Lazard: The True Subject — Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL
Faiz Ahmed Faiz is a radiant star of the poetic galaxy. He is regarded as one of the most prominent Urdu poets of the contemporary era. Thanks to recent translations, Faiz Sahib’s poetry — renowned for its lyric elegance and humanism — is being admired and enjoyed globally. In The True Subject — Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Naomi Lazard has translated forty-five poems of Faiz Sahib.
Naomi Lazard (March 17, 1928 - December 22, 2021) aka Naomi Katz was an American poet, playwright, and translator. She had served as Poet-in-Residence at Kirkland College, Clinton, NY, the Provincetown Center for the Arts, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Montana. She was a visiting lecturer in poetry at the Poetry Center of 92 nd Street Y, Manhattan, NY, and State University of New York at Purchase.
Her poems have been published in major magazines and newspapers including The Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, and The Paris Review. Her work has also been included in two Pushcart Prize anthologies, The Norton Book of Light Verse, and The New Yorker Book of Poems. Her published work includes three books of poetry: Cry of the Peacocks (1967), The Moonlit Upper Deckerina (1977), and Ordinances (1984). She is also the author of the children's book What Amanda Sow. She wrote the screenplay for The White Raven and the play The Elephant and the Dove. In 1986, she received a scholarship to study Urdu at Columbia University’s Middle East language department. In 1987, she published translations of Faiz’s work: The True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Princeton University Press). Her collaboration for translations began in 1979, when she met Faiz Sahib at a writers' conference in Honolulu.
Lazard served as the President of the Poetry Society of America (1978-1980) and co-founded The Hamptons International Film Festival. She received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and won Columbia University’s Robert Payne Translation Award for her translations of Faiz’s poetry. She also served on the board of Columbia’s Translation Center.
Commenting on meeting Faiz Sahib and the subject of his poetry, the author observes in the preface: “2011 is a year of convergence. It is the centenary of Faiz's birth…It's been thirty-one years since I met Faiz in Honolulu at the writers' conference to which we had both been invited. It was there we began the work of translating his poetry from Urdu into English. I wrote the introduction for these translations in 1987 when Princeton University Press published this book under the same title, The True Subject. I have written about the derivation of this title in the introduction. It is integral to Faiz, to the poetry, to our meeting and collaboration. It is a translation from a Sufi teaching, a tenet of Sufism, ‘... the true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.' Within the meaning of this phrase, 'the beloved', many meanings coexist. It can refer to a person, a home, a country—anything that is beloved, whose meaning is love. A generation has come of age and may have already produced children themselves since Faiz and I worked on these poems. Our respective countries have undergone many changes. Violence and repression, cruelty, and war have wrought havoc. The forces that imprisoned Faiz are gone, replaced by equally violent and repressive regimes. What has endured are the things of the spirit; Faiz's poetry has become the voice of the Pakistani people, the cri de coeur of a people betrayed soon after they thought their newly formed country was on its way to becoming, out of feudalism, the promised republic.”
Reflecting on the title of the book, the author notes: “The Sufi teaching from which the title of this book is taken, `... the true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved', has come with Faiz to have many meanings. Loss encompasses many losses—loss of home, of family, livelihood, country. Love inhabits many places. Life and loss is expressed as Dylan Thomas wrote, `... I must enter again the round/ Zion of the water bead/ and the synagogue of the ear of corn. The Pakistani engineer Saiyid Ali Naqvi, a close reader of Faiz and of Urdu and Persian literature, translates the loss of the beloved also as absence of the beloved. Absence becomes the perception of loss, itself the experience of loss, the death of the beloved. Another innovative and brilliant poet, T. S. Eliot, wrote about the essential primacy of tradition in his essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent'. His advice to poets might have been directed to Faiz Ahmed Faiz. That essay was published in 1921 when Faiz was ten years old.”
Expounding on the nature of Faiz Sahib’s poetry viz a viz Persian and Urdu poetic traditions, the author states: “The classical Urdu forms of ghazal and lyric, old Persian and Arabic poems of God and love, old songs of the absence of love or the loss of love, and the yearning for God were the forms Faiz used. He invested these forms with social consciousness, the pain of poverty, of exploitation, of war. The archaic abstract poetic language becomes in Faiz's poetry the concrete language of everyday life. The time-honored metaphorical yearning for God becomes something new, a vital living poetry that speaks of the struggle to survive against the crushing weight of colonialism, imperial war, against the injustice that strangles our lives every day. That was the individual talent Faiz brought to tradition and created a new poetry. This is the great gift of transformation that Faiz brought to Urdu poetry, a poetry already loved by millions of Urdu speakers. He brought them the truth of their own lives, their own voice to share with the world. Naomi Lazard, East Hampton, NY November 2011.”
Commenting on the challenges of translating poetry, the author observes: “A natural problem that comes up over and over again in translating from a literal text is the one of making it more specific, since the literal text is usually a summation, more or less general, of the original meaning. In the poetry of Faiz this problem is intensified because his language in Urdu is singularly devoid of active verbs. Images and passive constructions abound. A great part of my work has been finding active ways of expressing in English what Faiz has expressed more passively in Urdu. There is also the problem of a certain construction that is prevalent in Urdu poetry that is exemplified in phrases such as these: city of pain, land of isolation, disturbance of hope. These phrases are contained in the poem that follows. The trouble with this construction is that it becomes boring in English if too many of them appear in the same poem. It has been my work to change this construction whenever possible into language that is more active, more specific, clearer. Here is the literal version of Solitary Confinement.
On some distant horizon a wave of light begins to play
and in my sleep the city of pain awakens
and the eye (eyes) become restless in sleep;
over the timeless land of isolation morning begins to dawn.
On some distant horizon a wave of light is playing,
a snatch of song, a whiff of perfume,
a glimpse of a beautiful face
pass by like travelers bringing the disturbance of hope.
I fill the cup of my heart
with my morning drink,
mix the bitterness of today with the poison of yesterday,
and raise a toast to my boon companions
at home and abroad,
‘To the beauty of earth, the ravishment of lips.
I wasn't able to eliminate all the phrases I referred to earlier without violating the spirit and the meaning of the poem. However, most of them were transformed into more active constructions.”
Reflecting further on the difficulty of translating Faiz Sahib’s poetry, the author observes: “The passage that gave me the most trouble is ‘Songster bird of dreams...’ down to ‘and the bird-hunter had not even strung his bow.’ It was particularly difficult to render this construction that links the loss of their songs to their becoming strangers (exiles) to their song. Here is the final version.
This is the way that autumn came to the trees:
it stripped them down to the skin,
left their ebony bodies naked.
It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves,
scattered them over the ground.
Anyone at all could trample them out of shape
undisturbed by a single moan of protest.
The birds that herald dreams
were exiled from their song, each voice torn out of its throat.
They dropped into the dust even before the hunter strung his bow.
Oh, God of May, have mercy
Bless these withered bodies
With the passion of your resurrection;
Make their dead veins flow with blood.
Give some tree the gift of green again
Let one bird sing.”
Naomi Lazard, through her labor of love and conviction, succeeded in keeping the translation of each poem of Faiz Sahib, faithful to its true spirit. The following samples of her work illustrate the high fidelity of her craft.
Introduction
Someday perhaps, the poem,
murdered but still bleeding on every page,
will be revealed to you.
Someday perhaps, the banner
of that song bowed low in waiting
will be raised to its great height by a tornado.
Someday perhaps, the stone
that is an abandoned heart on the verge,
will pierce you with its living vein.
Be near me
Be near me now,
My tormenter, my love, be near me—
At this hour when night comes down,
When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes
With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets, When it comes with cries of lamentation,
with laughter with songs; Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step.
At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places,
Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil For hands still enfolded in sleeves;
When wine being poured makes the sound of inconsolable children who, though you try with all your heart, cannot be soothed.
When whatever you want to do cannot be done,
When nothing is of any use;
—At this hour when night comes down,
When night comes, dragging its long face, dressed in mourning,
Be with me,
My tormenter, my love, be near me.
Spring comes
Spring comes; suddenly all those days return,
all the youthful days that died on your lips,
that have been lost in the void, are born again
each time the roses display themselves.
Their scent belongs to you; it is your perfume.
The roses are also the blood of your lovers.
The torments return, melancholy with the suffering of friends,
intoxicated with embraces of moon-bodied beauties.
All the chapters of the heart's oppression return,
all the questions and all the answers between you and me.
Spring comes, ready with all the old accounts reopened.
The flowers of love - the ashes of parting
Today I weave jasmine into the strands
of my pain, each one a memory of you.
I pick tulips in this forsaken place,
tributes to all our years together.
Once again I bring to your memory
this offering, the ashes our parting has left.
I consecrate the jasmine, these tulips,
to our nights and nights of love.
Tonight there is no one
No one is near the heart tonight.
The fabulous rooms that are open to dream after dream
are too distant; I cannot see that far.
Even if they were visible, what would be the use?
They are abandoned, silent and empty.
I have been abandoned by perfume, by music.
There is no face of devastating beauty,
not one transient hope, not even a passing desire.
I am not troubled by sorrow or pain;
faith and doubt have also deserted me.
You alone, wherever you may be.
are the only one who quickens my life.
If you have left me, there is no one anywhere.
and nothing at all.
There is no one near the heart tonight.
It is as though nothing exists anymore
It is as though nothing exists anymore,
neither sun nor moon,
nor night nor morning.
I may have heard the footsteps
of the last passerby in the street,
or, very probably, it was an illusion.
No dream builds its nest in the branches
of the tree known as imagination.
There is no love, no hate, no friendship,
no ties at all—none. No one belongs
to you; no one is mine.
Even though this dire moment is upon us,
remember, my heart, it is only a moment.
It's courage we need: after all,
terrible as it is right now,
what's left of our life remains to be endured.
If my suffering found a voice
A song without a voice: that is my suffering.
An atom of dust without a name: this describes my being.
If my suffering were granted a voice
this speck of dust would have an identity.
If I discovered my own identity the secret of the universe would be revealed to me.
If I were privy to that secret
my silence would be transformed into eloquence.
If all this came to pass
I would be master of the cosmos, owner of all this world and the next.
In today’s technology-infested modern era — thanks to translators like Naomi Lazard — Faiz’s poetry continues to provide solace and peace to the stressed minds and perturbed souls around the globe. The True Subject — Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz by Naomi Lazard is a unique gift for all poetry lovers!
(Dr Ahmed S. Khan - dr.a.s.khan@ieee.org - is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar.)
