All It Seems

For me, the history of love
seems to be only this:
first, it is the truth,
then an illusion, or so it seems.

Whatever path I take, hope
appears all around me.
When you are with me,
Especially, or so it seems.

Even in the garden,
a desert seems to hold sway,
since the breeze feels cool
and my breath hot, it seems.

Now in sorrow, no one
gives even false comfort,
and now even mirage waters
Cannot slake thirst, or so it seems.

Generously, I give a share of
my happiness to the world:
I laugh when I myself am
being ridiculed, or so it seems.

This world’s bitter draught
I imbibe like wine,
Even grief now becomes
a kind of delight, or so it seems.

My meetings with you no longer
occur in this world,
now that you are truly dwelling
in my heart, or so it seems.

When she was near, far
away she seemed.
Now far from me,
she is still near, it seems.

Why else would she
want to do me wrong?
This very age is her slave.
To me, so it seems.

No one will be able to remove
me from here, Befaam.
It is called a grave and
my true abode, or so it seems.

Translator’s note: The literary genre of ghazals can be described as spoken word performance in twenty-first century parlance. The ghazal form most effectively reveals itself in recitation: couplets or series of couplets spoken out loud, often with phrases repeated with varying emphasis. When sung, popular ghazals invite similar reiterated recitation for maximum effect. This trait, while highly useful in oral art, finds itself somewhat distanced from the audience by the very nature of the written text, which cannot always reproduce the rhythm and the melody of the human voice. The ghazal form, made up of loosely linked stanzas called sher (a couplet made up of four quatrains), allows for looping back on an idea, a topic, an expression to examine all the meanings available in this varied life.

Ghazal creation in the Gujarat region began in the mid-nineteenth century, expanded in the early twentieth, and came into its own from the 1930s to the 1950s, a period coinciding with the broader Indian independence movement as well as with a conscious move to create works beyond their root dependence on the Arabic, Persian, and Urdu linguistic influences. The burgeoning movement toward an independent identity of a much-colonized country also led toward more prolific creation in the “modern vernacular languages” like Gujarati. This stage is often called “Shayda Yug,” i.e., the age of Shayda (meaning “mad with love), the pen name of a ghazalkar whose words influenced Gandhi’s own perception of the richness of his mother tongue. The third stage saw great experimentation from stalwarts like Adil Mansuri (1936-2008), leading to the fourth stage of worldwide Gujarati ghazal creation by the Gujarati-speaking diaspora in the twenty-first century.

This very minuscule sample of this rich heritage comes from Barkat Ali Ghulam Husain Virani (1923-1994). As noted in his biography, he not only received encouragement from Shayda, but also married his daughter Ruqaiyya.

The themes, motifs, emotions, and creative imaginings expressed in Gujarati ghazals touch the universal with a special joy in the riches of its chosen linguistic medium. Befaam’s poems portray the human condition and the theme of love with a wryness born of looking at the paradoxical nature of reality or human experience.

Following an oft-used tradition of including the creator’s name in the last stanza, Virani’s chosen nom-de-plume is Befaam, encompassing a range of meanings from “uncontrolled” to “reckless” and “heedless.” As is the case with other poets, he weaves those meanings into riffs within his poetic expression.

The complete ghazal has fifteen stanzas, though nine are translated in this example. Befaam plays with the notion of seeming, or appearance, an age-old theme across cultures and throughout many registers. Here, the translation into English sometimes represents the repetitions literally, and sometimes varies the words to accommodate the rhythm of the target language.

—Meena Desai