COLUMN: Translating love: Majid Amjad’s ‘Munich’ & other poems
THE Urdu world simply knows her as “Shalat,” a German woman whom Majid Amjad presumably met and fell in love with in the ruins of Harappa. She was studying or perhaps just touring the ancient site, but she became his muse and changed the emotional tone of his poetry. Who was this Shalat? What was her last name? How was it spelt in German? Simple questions no one has felt the need to ask. Perhaps because her actual presence in his life was so fleeting or perhaps because she was immortalised in his poetry simply as Shalat. I think Shalat written in Urdu script is the closest approximation to the German name Charlotte. I will refer to her as “Charlotte” in this essay because I want to acknowledge her as a real person who is the subject of some incredibly beautiful and unusual poems in Urdu. She was from Munich. The year was 1958, September to be more exact, and she was gone by November’s end.
Amjad’s first collection of poetry, Shab-e-Raftah (Nights Past), was published in April 1958. He had become known as a poet whose poetry was full of music with a strong undercurrent of melancholy. Although his poetry was original, it was subjective and indulged self-elegising that could make the poem uncommunicative. When Charlotte entered his life, she brought a breath of fresh air into his poetry. It was a transformative experience for him. Wazir Agha, who has written extensively on Majid Amjad, remarks that the romantic poems Amjad wrote in his early career are simply a longing for a love that he sought; it was “an endless thirst” for a shore that was nowhere to be seen. The poems he wrote after meeting Shalat are the realisation of his longings.
Charlotte couldn’t possibly have read the poems because they were written after her departure. They were probably sent to her in the letters that they exchanged for some years. I doubt if she knew Urdu or could find anyone among her acquaintances who could read them for her. This adds another dimension to the nature of the poems: the poet is pouring his heart into poetry, knowing the poems will not be read by the person for whom they are written.
The beautiful, poetic relationship between Amjad and Charlotte is one that spans continents and languages. Language plays a very crucial and complex role in the articulation of this relationship. How do these poems translate for Charlotte? How does Charlotte deal with his emotions, expressed in Urdu? She responds not in German, her mother tongue, but in English, the language in which they must have communicated. The intersecting boundaries of language and culture are where translation begins.
My unsatisfactory efforts at translating Majid Amjad into English prompted me to think about this special exchange in terms of the language of emotion. Charlotte must have asked Amjad to translate for her. He must have translated some of his poems for her. He also translated a couple of poems from English into Urdu as an experiment, probably at her behest. She takes back with her a slender notebook (nazuk bayaz) of his poems.
One wishes that the letters and photographs of Charlotte that were found in Amjad’s leather bag, along with his poetry, had been preserved for posterity. They would have helped us understand him better. The documents were put in a sealed envelope but the letters and photos disappeared (perhaps intentionally). Thankfully, the poetry was preserved.
All the poems about Charlotte were written after her departure. Thus the poems are not about Charlotte alone, but about Amjad too. They are therapeutic as the pain is shared through writing. What is unique about these poems is the cross-cultural ambience, imagery, and emotional metaphor. Charlotte’s Germanness is indigenised through the cultural lens of language.
Amjad travelled to Quetta, near the border of Pakistan and Iran, to bid farewell to Charlotte. ‘Quetta Tak’ (Till Quetta) is the first poem written on the train journey back to Sahiwal when the emotions of separation are still very fresh. Such a direct flow of personal grief is rare in Urdu. The poem is in two parts. The first captures the restlessness of the poet; the futility of the search for someone who has gone away. The second part is the treasuring of the sorrow; the comfort of sorrow. It’s a pain more precious than joy:
‘Till Quetta’
*In the valleys waiting for centuries; you
Smiled for a moment and were gone, I searched far and wide
In these valleys with the falling snow,
Fire rained everywhere, I searched far and wide
You told me you wouldn’t be able to return
Your home was so far away, I searched far and wide
The thought of you is a harvest of flowers
Sorrow for you is a warm glow whose touch is cool*
More poems followed. ‘Munich,’ written on Christmas of 1958, is about the tender reunion of Charlotte with her mother when she returns after ten years of travel. Amjad’s imagination of the snow-covered streets of Munich, the ambiance of the holiday season and the lonely mother who does not know that her daughter is on her way is like a fairytale.
But Amjad’s description of the meeting between the mother and the daughter, of the moment when Charlotte puts down the bundle she is carrying on her head and falls at her mother’s feet, turns the poem around to a profound intra-cultural experience. The mother’s greeting, her daughter’s response, the dust of the lands she has travelled is drowned in a single tear. What has Charlotte, a woman of the “first world,” to show from her long travel in the East? Among a bunch of touristy gifts is a slender diary filled with poems (bayaz) and Amjad’s name on it.
‘Munich’
*Every crease on the mother’s face
Melts into the delightful aspects
Of an astonished smile
“My Charlotte, Oh my Charlotte,
My darling girl, my life, you’re here!”
After ten long years
What has she brought with her today?
The seasons of different places in her spirit!
What did she gain from her travels?
A shard from Mohenjodaro
A slender notebook with my name
Who will understand this riddle?
What is the paheli / the riddle that the poet is talking about? The last verse has a clue:
Free from the restraint of distances
My heart is the city of Munich
Wherever one looks
Snow is falling, music is playing*
Sitting thousands of miles away in Sahiwal, Amjad is in Munich. Nasir Shazad, a younger poet-friend of Amjad’s, recalls seeing a colour photograph of Charlotte sitting in a boat, on a lake, wearing a sunhat made of twigs, dangling her feet in the water. The lake’s surface is stippled with water lilies. The photograph reminded him at once of Amjad’s poem ‘Ek Photo’ that was obviously written on the occasion of receiving the photo:
*Indigo lake, ornamental flowers, charming climes and you
Here, one colour photograph you sent; and me
A bright room, glittering memories and longing
Outside the stillness of a black night, unfathomable dark waters*
Before meeting Charlotte, (for example in Autograph), Amjad’s image of himself is full of tragic mockery: who will remember him? Now, there is hope, even joy, that someone will. This affirmation of the self seeps into the poetry that flows from him. He dilated his style to allow more experience in. His repertoire widened and he experimented with confidence.
His subjects were generally unusual and original but now they are complex. They become symbols, metaphors for deeper reflections on the meaning of existence and civilisation. Amjad is drawn to nature; the experience of nature and life work together in his poems and become a metaphor of the age: an age in which the callousness of human beings is wreaking havoc on fellow humans and nature. His poetry is close to earth; its images are drawn not from ambitious projects and ideologies of change but from moments in daily life that are to be treasured: a bird’s plumage in flight, its song, a branch trailing flowers, children walking to school, rice fields brimming with water or parched for rain — the list could go on.
Charlotte lives on within Amjad’s poems. His meeting with Charlotte opened a window for him, letting in a zephyr that recharged his soul. He experienced himself and the world in a new light. Long-standing personal sorrows were put aside. He became a citizen of the world.
*Who knows if you will ever turn back to look at me, but
I will always see you looking at me, as you did then*