Book & Author
V. G. Kiernan: Poems from Iqbal
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL
Allama Dr Muhammed Iqbal aka Shair-e-Mashriq (the poet of the East) had emerged as the most important poet of Muslim British India in the twentieth century. Today in the twenty-first century, his fame continues to grow globally as his poetry gets translated into English and other languages. Poems from Iqbal: Renderings in English Verse with Comparative Urdu Text by V.G. Kiernan presents a rendering of over a hundred poems selected from the four collections of Iqbal’s poetry: Bang-e-Dara (The Call of the Bell/Road), Bal-e-Jibril (Gabriel’s Wing), Zarb-e-Kalim (The Rod of Moses), and Armaghan-e-Hejaz (The Gift of Hejaz).
Victor Gordon Kiernan (1913-2009) was an emeritus professor of history at Edinburgh University. He is recognized as a historian of the left, an ideological warrior against the British empire, and a witness to India's anticolonial movements. He was born near Manchester. He attended Manchester Grammar School, and then Trinity College, Cambridge. He then went on to undertake research in modern diplomatic history and won a College Fellowship. He stayed in India for eight years before the Partition; he worked as a radio broadcaster and also taught at the Aitchison College, Lahore. During his stay in Lahore, he got to know Faiz Ahmed Faiz and other Urdu writers.
Kiernan was a prolific writer; his major books include The Dragon and St George: Anglo-Chinese relations 1880-1885 (1939); British Diplomacy in China, 1880 to 1885 (1939); Translation (1955), The Lords of Human Kind (1969); Marxism and Imperialism: Studies (1974); America, The New Imperialism: From White Settlement To World Hegemony (1978); State & Society in Europe, 1550-1650 (1980); European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815-1960 (1982); The Duel in European History: Honor and the Reign of Aristocracy (1988), Shakespeare, Poet and Citizen (1993); and Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare: A Marxist Study (1996). Kiernan loved classical poetry, especially of Shakespeare and Horace; he also appreciated Urdu poetry and translated works of Ghalib, Faiz and Iqbal.
In the preface of the 2004 edition, Kiernan observes: “The three-quarters of a century since Muhammad Iqbal's death he has lost none of his stature as one of the last great poets of his part of the world. We must hope that he will not prove to have been the last great poet bred by his native soil, a fading away too frequent in some other latitudes or longitudes. This selection from his poems, translated into English verse, was as its second edition, revised and brought out in London in 1955… His Urdu poems are even today still vibrant with the spirit of a new age, of hurrying movement, of dynamic effort. His message was that the time had come for action; that India, especially Muslim India—the commanding force during the many years of the Mughal era—had sunk for too long into sleepy routine. It was a message welcomed by the . aspiring youth of all the communities. But in whatever manner the call for action might be hailed, the direction it was to take was much harder to foresee…”
Commenting on his arrival in Lahore, Kiernan recalls: “Iqbal died shortly before my arrival in his historic city of Lahore. I had therefore no chance to meet him; a great pity for me—he was said to be very accessible and fond of discussion. But there were many others who had known him, and could talk about him. Hence arose these translations, composed in their first version at the Aitchison College of Lahore, where I was teaching during the War years…I was also kept busy with talks and programs about the War and its background, for the newly established All India Radio, which was left a good deal to its own devices. This work grew more pressing as the Japanese army drew closer to India, and public opinion grew more equivocal. I was getting to know a variety of people, a good many of them active socialists, pro-British since 1941 because of the growing pro-Russia trend…”
In the preface of the 1955 edition, referring to Iqbal’s work, Kiernan observes: “Apart from a handful of Persian poems the verse chosen here for translation is taken from Iqbal's work in Urdu, which consists of short and medium-length pieces only. The selection extends over the whole of his working life, and may serve to illustrate its main phases; it includes a good proportion of those poems that have been most admired by the judicious. …In Urdu, lqbal is allowed to have been far the greatest poet of this century, and by most critics to be the only equal of Ghalib (1797-1869). He was the first prominent Urdu poet who was a native of the Punjab, and his emergence marked a shift of Muslim Indian culture away from the Deccan and the United Provinces towards the north. In Persian, in which he published six volumes of mainly long poems between 1915 and 1936, his rank is less easy to determine…. Iqbal, like Shakespeare or Goethe in other modes and degrees, belonged to a stage in which society had begun but not yet finished crystallizing into exclusive sections, and emotion had not yet fully crystallized into thought. Iqbal hated injustice; his protest, first made in the name of India, continued in the name of Islam; in this form it was reinforced, rather than superseded, by a protest in the name of the common man, the disinherited of all lands...”
The following renderings of selected poems of Iqbal represent Kiernan’s craft:
God and Man
GOD
I MADE this world, from one same earth and water,
You made Tartaria, Nubia, and Iran.
I forged from dust the iron's unsullied ore,
You fashioned sword and arrowhead and gun;
You shaped the axe to hew the garden tree,
You wove the cage to hold the singing-bird.
MAN
You made the night and I the lamp,
And You the clay and I the cup;
You—desert, mountain-peak, and vale:
I—flower-bed, park, and orchard; I
Who grind a mirror out of stone,
Who brew from poison honey-drink.
Before the Prophet's [PBUH] Throne
(Huzur e Ris’salat Maab (PBUH) maiN)
SICK of this world and all this world's tumult
I who had lived fettered to dawn and sunset,
Yet never fathomed the planet's hoary laws,
Taking provision for my way set out
From earth, and angels led me where the Prophet [PBUH]
Holds audience, and before the mercy-seat.
`Nightingale of the gardens of Hejaz! each bud
Is melting', said those Lips, 'in your song's passion-flood;
Your heart forever steeped in the wine of ecstasy,
Your reeling feet nobler than any suppliant knee.
But since, taught by these Seraphim to mount so high,
You have soared up from nether realms towards the sky
And like a scent come here from the orchards of the earth—
What do you bring for us, what is your offering worth?'
`Master! there is no quiet in that land of time and space,
Where the existence that we crave hides and still hides its face;
Though all creation's flowerbeds teem with tulip and red rose,
The flower whose perfume is true love—that flower no garden knows.
But I have brought this chalice here to make my sacrifice;
The thing it holds you will not find in all your Paradise.
See here, oh Lord, the honor of your people brimming up!
The martyred blood of Tripoli, oh Lord, is in this cup.'
Modern Man
LOVE fled, Mind stung him like a snake; he could not
Force it to vision's will.
He tracked the orbits of the stars, yet could not
Travel his own thoughts' world;
Entangled in the labyrinth of his science Lost count of good and ill;
Took captive the sun's rays, and yet no sunrise
On life's thick night unfurled.
Life and Strife
(In reply to a poem of Heine)
`LONG years were mine', said the sea-shattered cliff,
`Yet never taught me what is this called I.'
A headlong-hurrying wave cried: 'Only if
I move I live, for if I halt I die.'
East and West
SLAVERY, slavishness, the root of our
Disease; of theirs, that Demos holds all power;
Heart-malady or brain-malady has oppressed
Man's whole world, sparing neither East nor West.
Psychology of Power
(The ‘Reforms’)
THIS pity is the pitiless fowler's mask;
All the fresh notes I sang—of no avail!
Now he drops withered flowers in our cage, as though
To reconcile his jailbirds to their jail.
Reproach
YOUR fate, poor helpless India, there's no telling—
Always the brightest jewel in someone's crown;
Your peasant a carcass spewed up from the grave,
Whose coffin is moldering still beneath the sod.
Mortgaged to the alien, soul and body too,
Alas—the dweller vanished with the dwelling—,
Enslaved to Britain you have kissed the rod:
It is not Britain I reproach, but you.
Civilization's Clutches
IQBAL has no doubt of Europe's humaneness: she
Sheds tears for all peoples groaning beneath oppression;
Her reverend churchmen furnish her liberally
With wiring and bulbs for moral illumination.
And yet, my heart burns for Syria and Palestine,
And finds for this knotty puzzle no explanation—
Enlarged from the 'savage grasp' of the Turks, they pine,
Poor things, in the clutches now of 'civilization'.
To my Poem
I must complain of your self-flaunting airs—
My secrets, when you go unveiled, lie bare.
Instead of floating like a truant spark,
Seek out the fastness of some glowing heart!
Counsel
AN eagle full of years to a young hawk said—
Easy your royal wings through high heaven spread:
To burn in the fire of our own veins is youth!
Strive, and in strife make honey of life's gall;
Maybe the blood of the pigeon you destroy,
My son, is not what makes your swooping joy!
Eastern Nations
REALITY grows blurred to eyes whose vision
Servility and parrot-ways abridge.
Can Persia or Arabia suck new life
From Europe's culture, itself at the grave's edge?
A Student
GOD bring you acquainted with some storm!
No billows in your sea break in foam,
And never from books can you be weaned
Which you declaim, not comprehend.
Solitude
SOLITUDE, night—what pang is here?
Are not the stars your comrades? Clear
Majesty of those silent skies,
Drowsed earth, deep silence of the world,
That moon, that wilderness and hill—
White rose-beds all creation fill.
Sweet are the teardrops that have pearled
Like gleaming gems, like stars, your eyes;
But what thing do you crave? All Nature,
Oh my heart, is your fellow-creature.
Slavery
MAN let himself, dull thing, be wooed
By his own kind to servitude,
And cast the dearest pearl he had
Before Jamshed and Kaikobad;
Till so. ingrained his cringings were,
He grew more abject than a cur—
Who ever saw at one dog's frown
Another dog's meek head bow down?
Time
WHAT was, has faded: what is, is fading: but of these words few can tell the worth;
Time still is gaping with expectation of what is nearest its hour of birth.
New tidings slowly come drop by drop from my pitcher gurgling of time's new sights,
As I count over the beads strung out on my threaded rosary of days and nights.
With each man friendly, with each I vary, and have a new part at my command:
To one the rider, to one the courser, to one the whiplash of reprimand.
If in the circle you were not numbered, was it your own fault, or was it mine?
To humor no-one am I accustomed to keep untasted the midnight wine!
No planet-gazer can ever see through my winding mazes; for when the eye
That aims it sees by no light from Heaven, the arrow wavers and glances by.
Quatrain
SWEET is the time of Spring, the red Rose cried;
Sweeter an hour here than an age outside;
Before some lover plucks you for his cap,
Sweetest to die in this green garden's lap.
Epilogue
WHEN, to leave earth, I gathered what was mine,
To have known me through and through was each man's claim;
But of this traveler none knew truly what he
Spoke, or to whom he spoke, or whence he came.
Referring to the translation process, Kiernan, “in note on the translations,” observes: “In translating these poems I have tried first of all to give the sense of the originals as exactly as possible, without addition or subtraction…in this new edition [2004] which differs from that published in India several years ago [1955], I have omitted a number of poems of lesser interest, especially from Iqbal’s earlier period, and have added those…all the others I have revised considerably, and I hope improved.” Kiernan was not a native speaker of Urdu and Persian, so he relied on the help of others to do the rendering of Iqbal’s poetry in English, as a result his perspective, commentary, and translations [2004] are still not at par with the earlier renderings of Prof R.A. Nicholson, Prof A. J. Arberry and Prof Annemarie Schimmel.
In the preface of the 1955 edition, a not very well known Kiernan was all praise for Iqbal and called him a political poet concerned about man and humanity. But in the preface of the 2004 edition, Kiernan, by then, a very well-known historian of the left, and with couple of history books under his belt, takes a jab at Iqbal by stating: “…He shows little knowledge of history, a subject very long neglected in India, in contrast with China or Europe --- or of the new social science like Economics….” In reality Iqbal understood history and economics very well; but Kiernan looked at Iqbal’s message from a Marxist historical lens, in reality his description of Iqbal follows a typical orientalist style and lacks an apolitical and holistic approach as demonstrated by Dr Annemarie Schimmel (1922-2003) in studying and explaining the works of Iqbal viz a viz Islamic perspective. Despite Kiernan’s Marxist lens for looking at Iqbal, the global readers can still enjoy Kiernan’s English renditions of Iqbal’s verse.
(Dr Ahmed S. Khan ( dr.a.s.khan@ieee.org ) is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar - 2017-2022)
