Book & Author
Ahmad Faraz: The Wind Whistles in the Wilderness
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL
Syed Ahmad Shah aka Ahmad Faraz (January 12, 1931 – August 25, 2008) was one of the great Urdu poets of the modern era. He was born in Kohat, and studied at Edward College, Peshawar, and Peshawar University; and while pursuing his bachelor’s degree he published Tanha Tanha, his first poetry collection. He started his professional career as a script writer for Radio Pakistan and later served as Urdu lecturer at Peshawar University.
Ahmad Faraz was influenced by the poetry of Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Ali Sardar Jaffri. His literary journey had gone through a modulating sequence of trials and tribulations — from his first poetic expression while in grade nine (after getting disappointed at receiving a “Kashmira” for his Eid suit)
Jab kay sab kay waas’tay laa’eay haiN kap’ray sale say
Laa’ey HaiN maray lee’ay Qai’dee kaa Kam’bel jail say
Everyone got elegant clothes from the sale
And what I got, a prisoner’s blanket from the jail
— to becoming a master of his craft and producing his signature ghazal:
Ranjish’he sa’he Dil he Dukhaa’Nay kay lee’ay Aa
Aa pher say muj’hay chorR kay Jaa’nay kay lee’ay Aa
Even with sorrow, come, if to break my heart again
Even to abandon, come, if to torment me again
Ahmad Faraz's poetry resonates well with the Urdu speaking world. Young and old can relate to his passionate, romantic, and progressive poetry. Fourteen of his poetry collections have been published; some of the well-known titles include Pas Andaaz Mausam, Sab Awazain Meri haiN, Khuwab Gul Pareshaan haiN, Janan and Ghazal Bahana KarooN. During the 1980s, faced with curbs on his freedom of expression, he spent six years of self-exile in the UK, Canada, and USA.
M.H.K. Qureshi has translated some of Ahmad Faraz’s poetry into English under the title The Wind Whistles in the Wilderness. Commenting on Ahmed Faraz’s poetry, M.H.K. Qureshi in the Introduction observes: “In his abhorrence of persecution, misery and injustice, Ahmad Faraz has shown himself to be a true descendent of his literary ancestors. Faraz started his poetic career as a romantic but soon began to concern himself with the stark realities of the time. He was also influenced by the Progressive Writers' Movement; this influence showed itself in his liberal humanism and his rebellion against political oppression and exploitation. Physically, even today, he has the look and bearing of a lean, tall romantic, but there is a slight difference: now the expression of defiance on his face has acquired a pinkish glow. He has set himself up against the usurpers of power. Faraz's poems in this collection reveal that he is preoccupied with the fight to deliver humanity from bondage. He portrays the invisible cruelty of our time, the misery of the seemingly good life, and the vanity of leadership. He is direct and forthright in his portrayals. His diction is contemporary and does not employ sugar-coated cliches of the bygone days. His poems make us conscious of our humanity and of its inherent dignity.”
Referring to the task of translating Ahmed Faraz’s work, the translator states: “In this translation of Faraz's poetry an attempt has been made to preserve the spirit of the original. No effort was made to interpret. The translation is a literal and faithful rendering, and it has avoided the temptation to use better and more lucid alternative expressions especially where the original images and metaphors were derived from the religion of Islam and from the Muslim tradition in the Indian sub-continent. The rhythmic patterns of the original have also not been disturbed. The aim has been not just to translate a poet's ideas into English, but also to retain the flavor of the original diction and phrasing. I hope with these translations a window will be opened to contemporary Urdu poetry…"
American poet, Mary McAnally, capturing the essence of Ahmad Faraz’s poetry observes, “Ahmad Faraz is the people's poet. He speaks in metaphors of prophecy and vision that transcend rhetoric and narrow nationalism. He is truly an international poet, a pan-humanist of the rarest sort. Rare because his poems are all love poems, even when they decry, denounce, lament, or accuse. As he states in his poem ‘In praise of the Prophet’, ‘Your message was love,’ and ‘my heart joins with the destitute.’ He cannot tolerate violence against the people, in whatever form, under whatever political guise or expediency. He wrestles with his own sin and guilt and transcends it by denouncing the first as well as the last crime against the people: ‘my conscience never forgave Cain,’ he says. Faraz is also pan-humanist in another way — in addition to the prophetic. He spans theological enterprise and speculation by his simple and all-inclusive formulation in the poem ‘I Am Alive’: ‘Word — the beginning of the truth, A talking flame of intuition, God of all.’ For Faraz, the poem is the word in the act of creating a new world. Speech is [an] act. Word is movement. The true people's poet ‘carries the sword, and the flag and the horn’ (from his poem ‘Word and Order’). He uses the sword to cut through the crap, the flag to rally the people, the horn to proclaim a new order. His vision goes beyond his own country to include ‘Beirut’ (the massacre there), ‘Norman Mayer’ (the ritual assassination of an American terrorist in Washington, DC), and ‘Black Wall’ (a tribute to the victims of the war in Vietnam). All people are united in struggle against the oppressor, in the creation of a new world, and Faraz is speaking it for us, through us, in us. Hear this voice and recognize it. It is yours.”
In the foreword, Faiz Ahmad Faiz expounding on the growth of Urdu language, states: “Unlike some other Oriental literatures, both classical and modern, Urdu language and literature are very little known to Western readers. Perhaps the only major poet in this language known in the West, at least in the learned circles, is the Pakistani poet, Muhammad lqbal, Allama (the great scholar) as his countrymen reverently call him. But even lqbal first attracted attention for his Persian rather than his Urdu verse, and for its ideological content rather than aesthetic appeal. One reason for this indifference is obvious enough. Compared to Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian, Urdu is a much younger language. It matured only during the last two or three centuries and it cannot, therefore, boast of their opulence of tradition. Another reason is that by the time Urdu, particularly its poetry, attained a fully developed school of its own, its homeland was over-run by factors of the British East India Company. They sought to assert their cultural overlordship in the field of their subjects' language and literature by stamping these with their familiar Victorian patterns. And familiarity naturally bred contempt. This, however, is past history, and it is time that this communication gap is bridged. Firstly, Urdu today is a fully developed language, and its literary idiom is familiar to millions in almost all parts of Pakistan and India. What is more, its contemporary literature, poetry in particular, is also the favorite and much-loved reading of Indo-Pakistani communities settled in many Western countries. Secondly, it has long outgrown the swaddling clothes of the more developed literatures that nurtured its growth, and it has produced, in the last four or five decades, a whole crop of very gifted writers in both prose and verse. Among them a highly celebrated name these days is that of the poet Faraz.”
Commenting on the traits of Ahmad Faraz’s poetry, Faiz observes: “Faraz began his poetic career as a lyricist in the classical style and chose for his formal medium the age-old and very elusive form, the ghazal, at once the most facile and the most exacting. The most facile because it provides the poet with a lavish store of readymade images, symbols, metaphors and other imaginative paraphernalia perfected by the great masters in Urdu and Persian to choose from and to pass as his own. And it is most exacting for the same reason because it demands from the poet an unusual degree of intensity of feeling combined with ingenuity of expression to establish his own distinctive identity. Faraz's ghazals and related love poems were, and are, distinguished for both these qualities. This brought him almost immediate popular acclaim, particularly among the youth who felt in this part of his writings the pulse of their own heartbeat. However, Faraz was too sensitive a poet to be oblivious to the demands of the more urgent social realities around him, the heartbreak and suffering, the threats and blandishments, the anger and frustration, the hopes and despairs, that a tyrannical social order inflicts on its victims. For a perceptive mind these exterior factors enter into and color even the most intimate subjective experience. And this is the stuff that Faraz's later poetry is made of as represented in this volume. He protests against injustice as passionately as he professes his love, although the voice at times becomes [a] little too strident, and the expression a little too rhetorical. Nevertheless, it is genuine poetry. The classical poetic idiom that Faraz employs, laden with symbols peculiar to our eastern feudal tradition, and multi-layered meanings of apparently simple words, peculiar to our poetic usage present the translator into another language with almost insuperable difficulties, particularly if the language happens to be as far removed from Oriental poetic tradition as English is. The translator of this volume has wrestled bravely and assiduously with these problems, and I hope it proves a useful addition to the library of English translations from Urdu. - Faiz Ahmed Faiz, London, August 29, 1983”
The following selected translations show the high-fidelity rendition of Ahmad Faraz’s poetic expressions by the translator.
In praise of the Prophet [pbuh]
O my prophet you are the illumination
I think of you as of the morning light;
You do not need my eulogies
Nor my praise can do justice to your exalted self
You are the messenger of light.
And our history is filled with the darkness of persecution.
Your message was love
But in my world, with hate minds and hearts are mazed.
This is your greatness, O' high stationed
That you conversed with us, the earth's inhabitants.
But, these muftis, preachers, ombudsmen and priests
Who are known for their crafty moves
Will sell God's name; but God forbid
If they be moved by the cries of the world.
I do not wear kohl nor are my clothes fragrant
As my heart joins with the destitute.
Hearing me the pulpiteer becomes surly
And my questions enrage the city's evangelists.
How could I make peace with killers
When my conscience never forgave Cain?
I am an ordinary poet but with your grace
I enjoy respect better than men of pomp.
The Same Uncertainty of the heart
Since I was set to depart from your city
Why then cast a longing glance at its walls?
The moon was at the threshold of the darkened evening
Even at that fine hour, what was your helpless traveler to do?
The heart did ask to stay on, but how could I?
When I first stepped into the unknown valleys
The way memories from homeland implored me to return,
The very same feeling overcomes me today;
As if I would go through the same agonies and pains.
As it, someone would call me again, "Come back"
You and I
Every day when the sun descends from the mountain
A long falling, anxious shadow
Says to the wall,
"Come with me,"
And the wall, drunk in its pride,
Evasive of the bondage of accompaniment
Would only smile at its old companion's desire.
Which wall has ever walked with its shadow?
And which one has forever stood in its place?
Time is a friend, neither to the wall
Nor to the shadow.
And now under the rubble Of stones and dust lies scattered,
The pride of that wall.
The sun shines,
But who knows where the shadow is?
Return
"Listen,"
She said, "Don't come back merely to keep the word.
Such people often return,
As they become tired of
Being helpless
And lonely in separation.
You go ahead,
Quench your thirst at every river.
My anguish would not protest;
No matter what eyes you allure,
What heart you entice.
But,
When the flame
Of your yearnings for me
Flares up and intensifies;
And your heart cries out,
Then You should return."
Dreams do not die
Dreams do not die
Dreams, unlike the heart,
The eyes, the breath,
Would not scatter, if shatter,
Or wither away with death.
Dreams,
They are the light,
The melody and the breeze
They could not be stopped by black mountains,
Would not burn in the hell fire of persecution.
These flags of light, sound and breeze
Would not bow even in shambles.
Dreams are words,
Dreams are lights,
They are Socrates
And Mansoor.
I am Alive
I am still alive
You pelted stones at me,
Entombed me,
Had me stung by snakes
Crucified,
Poisoned,
Burned,
Yet, I am alive, eternal
Like the truth.
My face, eyes, arms,
Lips
Are all alive
I, the meteor of the night
Fell, broke and scattered
Yet I go on dancing, shining
My strength lies
Neither in my hair, nor in my nails.
I did not hide myself in the confines of city walls
Nor walked amidst the protective shadow of swords;
My power and strength was
The word.
From word, the heavenly fountain,
I drank the elixir of life.
Word — the beginning of the truth,
A talking flame of intuition,
God of all.
Word and Order
Mad and carefree is the poet
Alone, without a court or a shelter.
To create the word is his religion
He shares everyone's pain.
He tells the truth and suffers
And yet speaks the truth.
The dictator has many lackeys
The world is afraid of him.
He carries the sword, and the flag and the horn
Dreams are his as are the interpretations.
Yet he fears the poet
And is killed by truthful words.
Karbla - Beirut
My children's bodies
Have attires of wounds.
Empty laps of mothers are
Graves without epitaphs.
The young ones we used to have
Are killed every day.
The flowers of my garden
Are diminished every moment.
Bloodied are the streets and paths.
Puddles of blood in every house-yard,
Doors and thresholds strewn with bodies,
Every corner now a shamble.
Few living shadows and some tents
Still survive;
A few flags and songs
Remain after the storm.
Merchants of oil fields,
The generous ones are but happy;
In the haven of their palaces
The eunuchs are sitting pretty.
The Wind Whistles in the Wilderness is a valuable endeavor to share the beauty of Ahmed Faraz’s poetic expressions with the global audience. M.H.K. Qureshi has done a wonderful job of rendering Ahmad Faraz’s poetry into English. Indeed, in growing uncertainties and agonies of today’s post-pandemic world, Ahmad Faraz’s verses are a very much needed remedy for pacifying the aggravations of human behavior.
