THE DILEMMA OF RENDERING IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

Abstract

Faiz is the greatest poet in Urdu poetry tradition after Mir, Ghalib and Iqbal. Among Faiz's contemporaries, there were some other important poets, but the acceptance that Faiz received did not come to any other. Faiz,s poetry is also great, in the sense that Faiz has created a separate universe with his creative essence, collective memory and poetic innovations. Faiz's poetry is a vivid metaphor for the greatest human emotions. This poetry, which is constantly growing on the scale of time, is immortal, is being spoken to by other civilizations, and this is only possible with the help of translations.

There have been many translations of Faiz's poetry in the English language. Prominent spokesmen of Faiz include Ghulam Ali Alana, Victor Kiernan, Sufi AQ Niaz, Mehboobul Haque, Majid Siddiqui, Agha Shahid Ali, Sain Sohna, Mahmood Hashmi, Tariq Rehman, KC Kanda, Tarrot Rehman, Shivk Kumar etc. Apart from them, a prominent name is that of Daud Kamal. Before translating Faiz, Kamal translated the selected kalam of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib under the title Ghalib: Reverberation in 1970. An analysis of these translations of Ghalib will be presented at the end. Kamal's first attempt at English translations of Faiz came out in 1984 under the name “Faiz In English”. The second book “Unicorn & The Dancing Girl” was published in 1987 after the death of Daud Kamal and the collection was compiled by Khalid Hasan. In this book, unlike the first mentioned, Urdu text is also included with English translations. “Four Contemporary Poets” consists of the translation of the poetry of Faiz ,Faraz, Qasmi and Munir Niazi. This book published in 1992. Later, in 2006, a series of translations came out under the title of “City of Lights”. This collection contains translations of both Khalid Hussain and Daud Kamal, but the subject of discussion here is only Daud Kamal's translations. An attempt has been made to translate some ghazals as well as poems in this collection. The translator has re-created the words of Faiz in his own way. Titles have also been pasted on the translations of the ghazals. With the description of these titles, it is not known whether the translated text is related to the ghazal or to the poem. The following examples will clarify how much successful is the translator in interpreting Faiz.