Bazaz Nusrat - The captured gazelle: the poems of Ghani Kashmiri

Translating poetry is generally understood to be a difficult task. Perhaps the most difficult challenge facing any translator is to render in translation the subtleties and multivalence of the original which the poet has deliberately cultivated and which account for its richness and beauty. In the strict sense, translating poetry may be well-nigh impossible but it is nonetheless necessary. Once, arguing in favour of the possibility of translation, Goethe had remarked that the essence of poetry lies in that which is preserved when it is translated into prose. Formal properties such as rhyme and rhythm are undoubtedly a great part of the pleasure that poetry provides, but the element by which poetry becomes poetry first and foremostand which is definitely translatableis the image or metaphor.

Ghani strikes us as a master craftsman of the poetic image. The translators have, therefore, tried to remain as faithful as possible to the content and imagery of the original. At the same time, they have also been fully aware that the worst sin in translating poetry is dullness. Steering a middle course between an overly literal and a very free rendering has thus been the guiding principle in this work.

A word also needs to be said about the selections made from the available corpus of Ghanis poetry. Here the aim has been to present before the readers what, in the view of the translators, is the best in Ghani. Consequently, only a few ghazals have been translated in full, a decision taken due to their conviction that each sher, or verse, in a ghazal is a small poem, a self-contained unit of meaning related to other verses only by virtue of the formal features of metre and rhyme. So, omitting one or more verses from a ghazal in no way hampers the enjoyment of others. Besides this, leaving out some verses has sometimes been due to the fact that they simply defy any adequate translation.

A noticeable aspect of Ghanis divan, or collection, is an unusually large number of solitary verses. The present work, therefore, features a good number of them. In addition to these, some rubaaiyaat, or quatrains, and one of the two masnavis describing Kashmirs winter have also been included. A masnavi is a narrative poem of indefinite length written in internally rhyming lines. The verses in this volume follow the same sequence as the Persian