Review: The Homeland’s an Ocean by Mir Taqi Mir, translated by Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote’s selection of 150 verses from over 13,500 across six collections published by the 18th century poet, one of Urdu’s greatest, is a deeply personal one
A bayāz — as Ranjit Hoskote reminds us in the introduction to the book under review here — is the personal diary of an Urdu poetry aficionado, who notes the select shers or verses they like as they listen to full poems, most often in the ghazal form, at Urdu mushairas or poetry gatherings. The Homeland’s an Ocean by Mir Taqi Mir, translated by Ranjit Hoskote, is really the latter’s bayāz of 150 verses that he has selected from over 13,500 verses across six divans or collections published by the 18th century poet, Mir, arguably Urdu’s greatest. It is a deeply personal selection, for which the title of the volume gives us a good insight.
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Now, to begin at the beginning, Ahlawat Gunjan’s cover design with its bright yellow base holding, in splendid contrast, the blood-red, embossed lettering of ‘Mir Taqi Mir’ in an exquisite serif font with novel strokes for the ‘M’ and the ‘A’ immediately grasps the reader’s attention. The cover makes you want to own this book, even if you don’t know Mir or Hoskote. Some of us know both and were delighted to find this symphony. The text between the covers only adds to the pleasure.
In Hoskote’s long introduction, he quotes the Mir sher from where he has taken the title of the book, ‘Like the whirlpool, still centre of a giddy circling,/the homeland’s an ocean that scatters us in all direction.’ In his commentary to this very sher, Hoskote seems to explain at a deeply personal-political level, the possible raison d’être of his engagement with Mir in our own time: ‘Perhaps this is the only way to imagine a homeland in our disorienting historical present, when many of us have been turned into migrants to one degree or another, all vulnerable and in danger of displacement or marginalization, cast adrift — certainly some of us far more so than others. Out of such a centrifugal predicament, we try and compose provisional frameworks of home and belonging, lattices of affinity and sustenance, and some shifting definitions of common ground, just as Mir did before us.’ In times of inter-/national turmoil and deeply divided societies, when fine anti-violence sensibilities appear to have nowhere left to live or to run, even as they are forced to flee and choose exile, for Hoskote to read Mir appears to be an attempt to give order to disorder, by remembering this sensitive voice that was witness to another disorder in another time. If we got past that and inherited beauty and culture, even in the laments for the destruction such as Mir’s, we might get past this too: ‘Of the heart’s desolation, what report? This city’s been looted a hundred times over.’
It is as if Hoskote has brought alive Mir’s torment at the havoc wreaked by Abdali on 18th-century Delhi to comment on the destruction on different people forced into exile in various parts of our own world to which we all, helplessly or/and in collusion, turn a blind eye: ‘The sun burns up the corpses of those driven from their homeland. Your lane did not offer them even the shadow of a wall.’ There are many in prison on trial who should be free, with many free who lament for the prisoners, ‘In prison, it could dream of someday-open skies, but it’s been trapped in sadness, this heart set free.’ Hoskote admits that it is his attempt to bring to light the often-ignored political verses of the prolific Mir who has been canonized as primarily a poet of grief. He gives us verses to draw joy and hope out of misery, ‘Quickly, to those in pain, Heaven, bring relief. Bring rest to our hearts, dreams to our eyes.’
As should be apparent in the verses quoted thus far, Hoskote has maintained a translational praxis for Mir’s verses that focuses on the two-line verse or the sher, as a complete poem in itself, rather than the longer ghazal poem of which it is an autonomous part connected to the rest by form — rhythm, rhyme, refrain — and mood. He also translates each verse with a modern, colloquial, spare diction comparable to Mir’s own colloquial register to bring out most dexterously the ‘diaphanous’ quality (as Hoskote astutely calls it) of Mir’s verses rather successfully: ‘My eyes ran blood last night, they did, but hey, no big deal./I’m all shook up from the heart’s mad beat, but hey, no big deal.’ Also consider: ‘It’s not difficult to crush those of us who are weak./Like ants, we could be taken and trampled underfoot,’ which compares favourably to the English Bard Shakespeare’s verse from a century earlier, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport.’
READ MORE: Ranjit Hoskote: “Mir is very much our contemporary – a wounded sensibility”
As a creative poet-translator, winner of Sahitya Akademi Award for his translation of the Bhakti poet Lal Ded, Hoskote also takes interesting leaps of faith in his Mir translations, inserting a word or image that doesn’t exactly appear in the Urdu original, but rings just right in the English verse, such as the use of ‘posh’ in verse 7 which has no comparable word in the Urdu original. It gives a modern gravitas to ‘word’ and better balance to the rhythm of the verse: ‘How would I know what folks call the heart’s pleasance?/That posh word hasn’t made its way into Hindi yet.’ There are of course, the stray verses, where these imaginative leaps also lead to some puzzlements, such as in verse 71, where the pronoun referring to God, who is usually masculine in the tradition is translated as ‘It’, or 47 where maikhana, a bar, is translated as the arcane ‘dive’. But these are the exceptions rather than the rule.
Hoskote also exposes the reader to the pluralistic, skeptical, and heterodox Mir, who would have perhaps courted retribution if he were writing such verses today: ‘The wise man, naked in the mosque, was out on the town last night./Robe, patched tunic, shirt, cap — drunk, he handed them out as gifts’, and ‘You want to know about Mir’s religion? He’s striped himself/ with sandal paste, parked in the temple, given up on Islam long ago’, and finally, ‘Its splendid beauty sets all things shimmering with light,/ whether it’s the lantern of the Kaaba or the lamp of Somnath.’
In keeping with this emphasis on plurality, Hoskote also explains, in his introduction, how Mir called his own language Hindi like most people in the 18th-century. This emphasizes the political and almost artificial divide of Hindi-Urdu, that the work of a poet like Mir does not allow to remain tenable. For Mir, those who bring about such divisions are either forgotten completely or certainly not remembered with the fondness reserved for poets and artists: ‘Today, no one here even breathes the names/ of those who lorded it over this country yesterday.’ It is ishq that was most important for Mir as it filled every ounce of his own being and that of the universe, and included his lament for what the world was losing in his time, as it is, again, in ours, at the hands of corruption and hate, ‘People keep asking me: Sir, tell us, what is love?/ Some call it a divine mystery, some call it God, this love.’
Hoskote’s homage to Mir is a paean to this shared culture, adab, of love and the immense strength and skill required in the creation of beauty in the face of yet another cycle of violence.
Maaz Bin Bilal is the translator of Mirza Ghalib’s Temple Lamp: Verses on Banaras (Penguin, 2022) and teaches at OP Jindal Global University.