World Books Review: A Glimpse of the Heart of Modern Pakistani Poetry

Generally, the anthology smacks of the editors’ having taken the bland, easy way out at almost every stage. It takes second, third, closer readings to discern individuality among the Pakistani poets, and there are several lovely and powerful poems that emerge from such close reading, poems of love and politics and of faith — not the mere journal entries of so much Western verse.

Modern Poetry of Pakistan, edited by Iftikhar Arif and Waqas Khwaja, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010, 298 pp, $16.95

Reviewed by J. Kates

A few years ago, Dana Gioia, then chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, conceived an ambitious international plan, engaging other countries in projects of reciprocal anthologies of contemporary writing. The pieces were to be chosen by editors within the writers’ own culture, then handed over to translation editors and translators in the receiving culture. The project began in a collaboration with Mexico. Here follows a backstage disclosure: I became involved with the second volume, of Russian poetry. The process, I can testify, was risky, laborious and bureaucratic, the results interesting and uneven — but ultimately enriching the American side of the bargain.

The book under review here, Modern Poetry of Pakistan, published by the same publisher as Contemporary Russian Poetry, comes at the tail end of the project. It is clear that ambitions have been lowered, expectations diminished — but not to the point of losing all value. This new collection is no longer bilingual, as the earlier ones were; and it lacks the immediacy of contemporaneity; more than half the contributors are dead, some as long ago as the 1970s — the oldest poet born in 1877, the youngest in 1966 — a span of almost a century of writing. (By way of contrast, all the Russian poets were born after World War II.)

We as a culture know so little of the poetry of the rest of the world that all literary news is urgent and enlightening. The only questions are, how much, and in what ways? I come to Modern Poetry of Pakistan as most readers will, and are meant to, not as an expert in south Asian poetry, but as a curious outsider who knows very little about it, looking for an introduction. We find one hundred forty-eight poems by forty-four poets who have written in seven languages. The multiplicity of languages alone tells us much about where these poems are coming from, and might lead us to expect a wide diversity of verse.

The originating editor, Iftikhar Arif, seems to have drawn from a narrow aesthetic. It’s uncertain how representative this is. Has there really been so little experimentation in Pakistani poetry? No cross-fertilization from dynamic schools of writing outside the received tradition? The editor is to be commended for letting eleven women’s voices be heard among the forty-four, but none of the women included speaks distinctively as a woman, and most of the poems feel traditional in form and content. Although the younger poets — they are presented chronologically by birth — loosen up considerably, the tone echoes older diction. “Every loss conceals a victory, / your lap will bloom with flowers. / Lose everything in love and see,” written by Pushpa Vallabh (b. 1963) in Sindhi, and translated by Azmat Ansari and the translation editor Waqas Khwaja, does not sound all that different in register or language from “A thousand obstacles at every step, neither love’s company nor reason’s counsel. / It is hard to keep a steady step, for the feet find no footing on the ground, ” by Hafeez Jalandhari (b. 1923) translated from Urdu by Khurram Khurshid and the editor.

Indeed, “Persian poetry and its conventions are very often the source and inspiration” of the verse in Modern Poetry of Pakistan, according to the introduction written by Khwaja, and by far the most common single form represented in the book is the ghazal, with eighteen pieces explicitly labeled as such, and a few others looking suspiciously similar in form. Poems called ghazals are translated here in varying ways, more or less consistent with strict expectation. Nazir Kazmi’s “Ghazal: Bearing Hints of Bygone Days” appears in quatrains without any rhyme or repetition in the English of Mehr Afshan Farooqi — it would be useful to know if this deviation exists in the original Urdu or not, but the notes that supply helpful references for Qur’anic, historical, mythic, and other cultural allusions don’t enlighten us here.

Pakistani poet and editor Iftikhar Arif

There are fifteen translators among the seven languages, most working in collaboration. This does not help a reader appreciate the variety of voices of the original poets. Does Pakistani poetry of seven different languages over nearly a century really maintain such an evenness of tone and level of diction as a first reading through of this book provides? Admittedly, any different culture looks homogeneous at first glance, and only familiarity discerns difference. Admittedly, accomplished translators from these various languages may be harder to find than those from Spanish or Russian, but there are ways to include others that the editor has not, apparently, attempted. And there are odd discrepancies. When we read in Fahmida Riaz’s biographical note that “she has given great thought to . . . choosing a rustic diction for its familiarity rather than employing a more formal Persianized expression” this is useful information that might be reflected in a translation, but “If my life be spared, / I would with folded hands point out, / O noble master, / that in your perfumed chamber lies like a corpse, / decomposing” (translated from Urdu by Yasmeen Hameed) hardly bears this out.

In all, Modern Poetry of Pakistan smacks of the editors’ having taken the bland, easy way out at almost every stage. It takes second, third, closer readings to discern individuality among the poets, and there are several lovely and powerful poems that emerge from such close reading, poems of love and politics and of faith — not the mere journal entries of so much Western verse. It is remarkable how many of these poems turn on questions. Ata Shad’s “Traveler,” translated from Balochi by Azmat Ansari and Khwaja, invites the reader to

step into my heart —

the earth is burning.

Why do you turn your face from one who gave you sanctuary?

Are you sure you understand what you are doing?

Despite our eyes, we are blind,

the heart is far removed. . . .

Traveler,

step into my heart,

The whole earth is on fire.

However limited Modern Poetry of Pakistan may be as a broad cultural introduction to a contemporary scene, it does help us to step into more than one Pakistani heart.

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J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. He helps run Zephyr Press.