Honeyed Poison’ — Translation of Modern Persian Poetry by Malik Muhammad Danish
Malik Muhammad Danish is a young (serving) Pakistani diplomat with a passion for languages and literature —- ‘a polyglot, at home in Urdu, Punjabi, English, Persian, Chinese, and Spanish’. He is an LLB from LUMS, MA in Persian from Punjab University, and MS from Georgetown University, US, as a Fulbright scholar.
The instant work comprises a volume of sixty poems in English, picked up and translated from the poetic work of twenty modern Persian poets whose brief profiles have also been added to the appendix. They include Nima Yooshij, Fereydoon Moshiri, Forugh Farrokhzad, Ahmad Shamlou, Sohrab Sepehri, Hushang Ebtehaj Sayeh, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Jaleh Esfahani, Yadollah Maftun Amini, Rasul Yunan, Siavash Kasrai, Nosrat Rahmani, Rahim Moeini Kermanshahi et al.
The translator’s preface and introduction to the collection serve to enlighten the reader on his mission and vision vis-à-vis the book in hand. He rightly ascribes the reason of their ignorance or constricted knowledge of modern Persian poetry to ‘dearth of translation’, and thinks that classical Persian poets have a larger following in non-Persian linguistic circles such as English, thanks to the translations by famed orientalists, Edward Fitzgerald, RA Nicholson, AJ Arberry, WM Thackston, and Alan Williams. But there are few multilingual writers who could be credited with translating modern Persian poetry in other languages.
Renowned Urdu poet Noon Meem Rashid took the lead by translating some sixty-one modern Persian poems by twenty-one modern Iranian poets into Urdu. (Cf. his book ‘Jadeed Farsi Shayeri’- 1987). In the second edition of the book (2010), he added another twenty poems. Fahmida Riaz, Moeen Nizami, Uzma Aziz Khan, and Ahmad Shehryar are purported to have followed him in the venture
Malik Muhammad Danish (translator of this publication) attributes its emergence to his erstwhile teacher and mentor Dr. Muhammad Athar Masood, a serving civil servant, a reputed musicologist, and scholar of Persian. He also expresses his debt of gratitude to M. Athar Tahir, a renowned Pakistani poet of English, who reviewed these translations with due care and concentration together with Prof. Nazia Barani Entezarhojat at the University of Salamanca, Spain for advising and guiding him on the intricacies of modern Persian verse.
In his Introduction to the book, the translator briefly traces the history of Persian poetry from the classical period when the Arabs conquered Iran in the 7th century AD, and cast their linguistic and literary influence on the local language, Pahlavi which gradually evolved into Persian (c. 224-651). Ferdowsi, Khayyam, Rumi, Saadi, and Hafiz were the cream of this period (940-1390). The transition from the classical and neo-classical forms of poetry to a modernistic jargon and construct, took place around the turn of the 19th century when Nima Yooshij (1897-1960), also called the father of modern Persian poetry, broke with the formal tradition of versification, and wrote poems with hemistiches (mis’ra) of unequal size and length in regards to meter. Thus he is regarded as the exponent of She’r-e Nau (New Poetry) in Persian. Deviating from the formal rules of rhyme and prosody, he followed the rhythm and rhyme emanating from the inner recesses of his own psyche and soul. He was supported in his poetic endeavours by his peers and contemporaries such as Ahmad Shamlou, Sohrab Sepehri, Mehdi Akhavan- Sales, Forugh Farrokhzad, and Shafiei Kadkani.
A group of so called avant-garde poets in the latter half of the last century comprising Ahmad Raza Ahmadi, Yadollah Royaee, and Majid Nafisi composed poetry of ‘sheer symbolism and hyper-ambiguity’ as a post-modernistic reaction to the contemporaneous poetic compositions that was unacceptable to the readers and the connoisseurs alike. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a major event that among others, also impacted the literary intelligentsia and their creativity. In the given political scenario, diasporic literature came to attain a distinctive status in modern Persian poetry. Translation of modern Persian poetry into some major European languages is a welcome trend issuing from this change.
The titles —- Still Its Night, Canary Bird, Birth, Tears on the Procession of History, Grandeur of Growth, Honeyed Poison, Roots in the Ground, The Hidden Fire, Sin, Mirage, Life, Hour of Tryst, Lament, The Unsaid, Song of Red Rose, Falling into Oblivion, My Heart Yearns for You etc. —- of the translated poems are quite meaningful in the context of modernism, with concomitant issues. The general pattern of verse in translation is iambic with little rhyming concord. Nonetheless, the lines are lucid, racy, and rhythmically affluent. The spirit of romantic love is the pervasive force resonating these lines. Its ‘poison’ and ‘panacea’ bewilder the monologic speaker here and there but it continues to instate and fortify him in the face of the odds falling his way.
A tender wave, twirling with the essence of life,/ Pierced through the depth of my soul/ I lost ‘I-am-ness’/ But ‘we’ remained/ Walking on the path of eternity. (Oneness). My poetry is my hidden fire/ Day and night flames burn in my soul (The Hidden Fire). Where are you hiding O bird!/ Are you behind the mesh of moist foliage/ Or amidst the branches of yearning? (The Hidden Bird). Come O my fellow-sinner to this purgatory,/ Which is both paradise and inferno (Come for a Tryst Every Night). There is a song in my heart/ A song which I love but cannot sing/ A song whatever it is …/ A song whatever it was … (The Unsaid). If the flower has no thorn/ If the heart has no pain/ If the cage is not small for the pigeon, then ….. Life/ Love/ Captivity/ Strife and amity/ Would all be meaningless … (Thorn and Flower). Our century is an age of death of humanity/ The world is devoid of any goodness/ Any mention of tolerance, nobility or empathy is foolishness (Tears on the Procession of History). Many have said, “do not fall in love!/ It beguiles, bewitches and bewilders”/ But we entangled our heart, and found/ It is poison, but panacea too! (Honeyed Poison)
These quotes are intended to demonstrate the texture, tenor, and thematic pattern of modern Persian poetry as translated in the current work which also bespeaks the competence and versatility of the esteemed translator.
