Hazaar Rang Shaairi; The Wonderful World of the Urdu Nazm is a sequel of sorts to your earlier collection of translated poetry Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi; The Wonderful World of Urdu Ghazals (HarperCollins, 2019). While ghazals remain the most popular form of Urdu poetry and their musical renditions are familiar to a much larger, non-Urdu-knowing audience, nazms, on which the current volume focuses, are not as well known. Would you please briefly explain the Urdu nazm to the reader?
When you
Hazaar Rang Shaairi; The Wonderful World of the Urdu Nazm is a sequel of sorts to your earlier collection of translated poetry Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi; The Wonderful World of Urdu Ghazals (HarperCollins, 2019). While ghazals remain the most popular form of Urdu poetry and their musical renditions are familiar to a much larger, non-Urdu-knowing audience, nazms, on which the current volume focuses, are not as well known. Would you please briefly explain the Urdu nazm to the reader?
When you think of Urdu poetry, you automatically think of the ghazal. This is so for obvious reasons. The ghazal is musical, pithy, and precise. Its shers get committed to memory quite naturally and are quoted spontaneously in day-to-day life. And there is a sher for every occasion or condition of life, which makes it dear to its readers and users. As for the nazm, let me put it simply that it stands for all kinds of poetry in Urdu, other than the ghazal. It is extremely diverse in form and content and represents a different world altogether in comparison with the ghazal. You have a great variety of secular, religious and cultural representations here. During the five centuries of its history, the nazm has configured and reconfigured itself in different poetical and metrical structures. In the introduction to my book, I have discussed 18 kinds of nazm and 12 kinds of metrical constructions, which will give you a fair idea of what the nazm is. Perhaps, the nazm represents our times much more comprehensively than the ghazal does.
How was the experience of translating nazms as opposed to ghazals? Was there a difference in the theory or praxis of the translation? Please share particular challenges with the readers.
Translating the nazm was an entirely different experience. This time, I had a greater variety of poems to negotiate with. As each nazm was different from the other, it called for a different translational methodology every time. Also, as every nazm has a central thread of an idea, unlike the ghazal, I had to find and hold that thread firmly in the act of translation. Yes, translating the classical poets and those who wrote before the 1930s, precisely when the progressive poets came to the fore, was far more difficult than translating the modernists. Since the earlier poems were much more cultivated and metrically well structured in terms of varying stanzaic patterns, their translation was more demanding than the later ones written with greater freedom. Let me say that the freedom the modernist poets enjoyed also came to me by proxy as a translator and helped me move with respectable freedom.
What was the criteria for your selection process with regards to the poets you brought in and those you left out?
I scanned through the history of Urdu poetry from the beginning to the present day and marked those poets who held the canon. By this I mean that I identified those poets who brought maturity to the forms of the nazm and chastened its idiom. I put them into six sections and checked if they represented the entire trajectory of nazm writing in a justifiable manner.
In your book, you have also charted out a periodization and described genres and/or schools of nazms. How would you describe and classify the nazm being written in the present?
My periodization is entirely personal. I began with those who laid the foundations and created a tradition. Subsequently, I moved on to identify those who drew upon that tradition and evolved modernist stances in their apprehension and expression. I went on like this in a chronological order until the modern times so that I could bring to my reader a comprehensive view of the Urdu nazm over five centuries. Today, the Urdu nazm is extremely vibrant, politically conscious and secular in the broadest sense. It redefines the nazm itself and it is in line with international modernism.
What is the state of the contemporary Urdu nazm, in India and elsewhere? Are there any particular poets for whom we should keep an eye out? Are there any that you admire but have not included in the collection for any reasons?
The contemporary Urdu nazm has evolved a new narratology. It is typically postmodernist, informal, eclectic, introspective and bohemian, by turns. This nazm has evolved its own myths and created its own marks of identity. Writing from different locations – India, Pakistan and elsewhere – contemporary poets configure themselves and their location, write real and surreal poems, and evolve an idiom that is reflective and interrogative. Today’s nazm is remarkable for at least one major reason: it keeps acquiring its strength regularly in the process of being and becoming. It would be too presumptuous to mark those poets to keep an eye out for, and there is none I wanted to include but could not.
READ MORE: Review: Hazaar Rang Shaairi, selected, edited and translated by Anisur Rahman
You have been a professor of English literature with your early research on Australian and Canadian literature. Why did you shift to translation and Urdu poetry? And why is Urdu poetry in translation relevant for Anglophone Indians and citizens of the world?
As an academic, I taught and researched in different areas – mostly British, American, and postcolonial poetry from different locations. In the later part of my career, I realised that literature in a multilingual and multicultural country like India could best be studied and taught in a comparative perspective. This took me to translation, comparative, and Urdu studies. In the recent past, Urdu literature has reached larger sections of readers and younger scholars in Western academia. Literary studies are in a state of great flux everywhere and it is now time to switch over from the local to the global.
Who are your favourite ghazal and nazm poets? Please pick just one poet for each category.
I really don’t know how to choose one from each category of ghazal and nazm poets. Allow me please to go back to the canon of the old and let me mark Mir Taqi Mir for his ghazal and Mir Babar Ali Anis for his nazm that he wrote in the marsiya genre. I go for them because they have created a grand tradition of eloquence and style that all poets and readers have drawn upon and will continue to do so forever.
Maaz Bin Bilal is the translator of Temple Lamp: Verses from Banaras and The Sixth River: A Journal from the Partition of India, and the author of Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu. He is associate professor at Jindal Global University and currently a writing fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.
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