gulon mein rang bhare

You have to know about the life of Faiz (or maybe any poet, I don’t know) before you can try to translate his work. On the face, Faiz’s poems seem to portray love and longing for the beloved but they do not. They talk about social and political issues. They talk about revolution! My first translation of ‘gulon mein rang bhare’ made it a love poem but my father-in-law corrected me. (I will show you later one stanza of this poem that was written as a love poem)

This poem - 'gulon mein rang bhare' - is one of the most famous poems of Faiz. I think that I should have kept this translation for later, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was introduced to this poem through Mehdi Hassan’s ghazal and we must have heard it over hundred times. Here I have included two stanzas that are not sung by Mehdi Hassan.

There is a fascinating personal story also attached with this ghazal. When my in-laws were in Moscow and they hosted a party on the first birthday of their daughter (my wife) and Faiz also came! (He was a friend of a friend) And mother-in-law sang this ghazal for him. Meeting Faiz, remembering the ghazal in full, and having a singing voice, that is a chance in a million!

So, I had to translate this poem now. But again, I think if I had translated it after doing a few more of Faiz, I would have understood him better and put more into this beautiful poem. A lot of its beauty is lost in translation but for now, I cannot do anything more. So, this is it.

How I wish flowers take new colours!

And the breeze brings fresh winds of change.

I plead you, come to me now, my love,

Maybe, if you come, my garden may bloom again.

My caged body is cheerless today,

Someone please fill hope in the morning breeze.

For god's sake! don't let it not go empty,

Let it carry with it the story of our friends.

When will we wake into the morning,

To the sweet sound from your lips,

And when in the evening will we rest,

Taking in the scent of your hair.

Strong is the bond of pain,

though we are weak and poor,

When we hear your call,

We, all your friends, will come together.

We went through hell, but all right.

Once this evening of separation is over,

Our tears would have,

Cleaned you for your next life.

We welcomed them as friends,

But later their greed for power ruled,

They tied us down, and cut through us,

They divided us, bits and pieces flew.

O’ Faiz, in my exile, no place,

Gave me any pleasure,

After I left my circle of friends,

I found solace only in gallows of death.

My first translation

In my earlier post, I mentioned that I randomly selected a poem and translated it. That is not true. I picked the first one in the list. And it had to be one by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

The poem is - "aaye kuchh abr kuchh sharaab aaye". If you follow Urdu, you can read the original from here.

First came clouds, then came wine, much later the curse came.
Every night, moon set from my terrace, and sun rose from my glass.

Warm blood gushed through my heart when I saw her again.
On every page of my life was there, a chapter of her love and sacrifice.

Sitting idle, I was counting what I have lost and I thought of her.
Her pain hadn’t left me, everyday it brought in me fresh thunderstorms.

Many a happy gatherings have I ruined, when I came in,
My silence echoed, from every nook and corner, my yearning for her.

O’ Faiz, but the path I took was my goal,
And where I reached, I was always welcomed by success!!

Just like one should never explain a joke, a poem also shouldn't be explained. To each one his own interpretation. During the translation I was imagining a person who had to left his loved one to pursue material goals. The last two lines were difficult for me to comprehend. Later I got to know from my father-in-law that the last line should have been something like - " I had no goal and the journey was my destination, and so, whatever came my way, I took it as success" Here I'm trying to learn the nuances of translation and the Urdu language. if there is any reader who can correct me, I will be happy to know his interpretation.

Urdu poetry

I am SHE. OK, when exactly did my fascination for Urdu start? I think it started from my high school days, with the poetry written for Hindi films songs by the likes of Sahir Ludhianvi, Shakeel Badayuni and Shailendra. (Note: Hindi and Urdu are interchangeably used.) However I did nothing to give credit to this fascination. I picked up a few words from the movie songs and from ghazals and just sat up tight . I also wrote some childish poems in my school days and I remember winning a (class-level and not any bigger) prize in my 7^th standard for a silly poem. I wrote more bad poems during my Engineering and had the audacity to read it aloud to my friends. I believe no one (including me) had any inclination for poetry and hence I escaped unscathed, without any one remembering anything about those poems and I’m glad that when we meet, many more unpleasant things may be brought up for the innocent purpose of laughter but not the poems.

OK, coming back to Urdu, the most attractive part of Urdu for me is the phonetics. It’s very sweet to the ears. I can speak five languages (of which two languages have no script) and follow 3 or 4 more. So, I think you can take my word for it. Even if someone does a research on the sweetest languages, you can be sure that Udru will figure in the list. Another attractive part for me is that the pronunciations in Urdu will always allude me, no matter how much I try. Tell me, how many of you have a personal tutor to get the pronunciations of your mother tongue right? Many Muslim families, who speak Urdu at home, get a personal tutor for their children to help them get the right pronunciations of the difficult to pronounce Urdu syllables. (For example, ka in qayamat or kismat or taqdeer. Kha, Ga, pha are relatively simpler)

I read my first Hindi novel about six years back. I would have liked to say I have come a long way from there but no. Recently I read Ismat Chugtai’s novel which had at least ten unknown Urdu words on each page and the publisher was kind enough to give meanings of these words on the footer of each page. This helped me read the book but I don’t really know how many of them I remember now.

Five years after first listening to Abida Parveen’s recitation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, considered one of the greatest Urdu poets of our times, I got curious to find out what is the meaning of the poem. There was another favourite Faiz’s poem ‘ Gulon me rang bhare’ sung by the great Ghazal artist Mehdi Hassan. We knew this was a poem about revolution and had a vague idea of what it means but again, not giving any leeway to my fascination, I left it there. I cannot rule out a certain thrill when there was an unknown word in the poem that sounded good and was open to any interpretation, limited only by one’s imagination.

Last week I read a random poem by Faiz and looked up online Urdu dictionary and this led me to try my hand at translating it. This rekindled my interest in poetry and new interest in translation. I also found that translation is a sure way of remembering the difficult words that, otherwise, get wiped out of memory in no time. Just like any other fascination of mine, this will also die very soon but as long as it lasts, I want to contribute to this blog of my dearest friend who has kindly given me unrestricted permissions for a hundred years. But if he does a re-org, I will have to remind him again.