Last month I attended a symposium enticingly titled “What is a poem?” The organisers had posed the following questions: is a poem more like a song or a shipping container? What was a poem in the 17th century, and what is it in the digital age? Why poetry, anyway? Several well-known litterateurs presented their points of view. I came away with the conclusion that a poem, at least in its written form, consists of lines not sentences, has verses not paragraphs, and engages the heightened use of language. Then I thought of the prose poem. What is this creature that calls itself both prose and poem? The prose poem is a composition that has some of the technical or literary qualities of a poem (such as regular rhythm, definitely patterned structure, or emotional or imaginative heightening) but that is set on a page as prose. A prose poem defies the nature of formal poetry. Instead of being restricting, prose poems are flexible. So how did prose poems gain popularity in Urdu, where the transcendental ghazal with its metrical beauty and its universal themes reigned supreme?

Prose poems are a favoured medium for women writing in Urdu because of adaptability. I have been following the work of Tanveer Anjum for the past decade. She has published five collections of poetry, the most recent being Hashiyon Mein Zindagi [Life in the Margins]. She also has a volume of her selected Urdu poems in English translation, Fireworks on a Windowpane. The selected poems have been for the most part translated by Anjum herself. Some have been rendered by her husband — noted poet Afzal Ahmad Syed — and other eminent translators.

Translation is a bridge between languages, or even a mirror that brings two languages face to face on a page. It allows the reader who knows both languages to ‘see’ the text in two images. The result can be pleasing or disconcerting, much like images in a mirror. The book has a brief but incisive introductory note by the poet in which she shares her thoughts on linguistic diversity in Pakistan, the relativity and sensibilities of languages. Looking at her own poems in translation she is inspired to translate some herself. The first poem, from which the book gets its title, Shishe Mein Atash Bazi, is translated by her. This is what she says about the eponymous poem: “Are there ever fireworks on a windowpane? No, they are up in the sky … but who can stop us, the crowd on the margins, from watching the inevitable reflections of fireworks on the windowpane, feeling a storm of flames rise inside us, and getting ready to capture the embers … in writing these poems I felt like one in the crowd of the dispossessed […].”

Her input demystifies the poem. For me, it raises the prickly issue of self-translation. What happens when translating one’s own work? To what degree is the exercise more than the traditional endeavour of rendering a text in another language? Usually a translator approaches the source text as immobile, perhaps even sacred. Of course, every translation is an appropriation that involves changes, but there is often a sense that one must, in one way or another, remain faithful to the original, however flawed it may be. In self-translation, on the other hand, there is an unavoidable temptation — indeed, a compulsion — to rewrite the original, to improve upon the source.

The Mexican-American writer-translator Ilan Stavans, in his book On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language, says that how one perceives the world in any given moment depends on the language in which that moment is experienced. Language determines how we taste things, feel things, even the physicality of things. In the case of polyglots and/or bilinguals, the different languages are different versions of their selves. In the case of Anjum, a bilingual, the language which is closer to her being is Urdu, the language in which she writes poetry. Her voice, which is authentic in Urdu, loses its authenticity in English. Her poems in self-translation lose their sensitivity and become rigid. I read them over and again in Urdu, then in English, and felt that because she was self-translating she could have used her discretion in how the poems appeared on a page in English. Maybe she could have played with the line breaks and rendered the prose poems in paragraphs in English? The rhythms of Urdu and English are so distant that line to line translation for poems not restricted by metre doesn’t seem required. Here is how the poem (her translation) would look as a paragraph:

‘We are a crowd. A windowpane in front of us. Blurred figures inside merging with images from without. The fireworks exploding in the skies behind us can be seen in the windowpane. The pane protects the lives of the actors playing at important decisions. Success or failure, joy or misery, life or death. Waiting for verdicts, we are watching the fireworks on the glass pane.’

Moving on to her next book, Hashiyon Mein Zindagi, I was struck by the contemporary appeal. Here is a poet who keeps pace with the frustrations of the digital age. There are new, refreshing poems on ‘globalised’ lives, dependence on email, Google and Facebook. I have translated two for readers to sample.

[Now that you have thought of me/ After ages/ And found me through Google on Facebook/ Then why can’t I recall/ That burning rage/ And the searing pain.]

Another poem titled ‘Muft SMS, Muft Mohabbatein’, short and pithy, concludes with a twist: “Moving fast on the surface of her mobile phone/ Her fingers are charged with energy/ She has carefully searched and got/ That service package/ Which provides unlimited free SMSes/ Now she is able to send/ As many messages as she wants/ To her friends/ On happy occasions/ And sad ones/ When for a few days/ She will have to stay/ Recuperating after surgery/ At her mother’s.”

Prose poems are indeed full of twists and surprises. As a poet, Anjum relishes the freedom of form and space, burrows deep into emotions, both personal and shared. She communicates with the reader with an urgency that cannot be ignored.

The columnist is associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is writing a commentary on the mustarad kalam of Ghalib

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 7th, 2017