The complications of Ghaffaar’s Romanised script require as much effort — if not more — to master as learning a new script does. He could have avoided that by following a standardised method of transliteration used in some recognised dictionary and, more importantly, by somehow encouraging his readers to familiarise themselves with the original script (Arabic-Persian) in which the great master of Punjabi poetry wrote his works.
He himself provides the reason why that should be the case. “[…] most Punjaabi Sufi poets play with the sounds and meanings of words simultaneously using various tones and pitches of the meanings.” Transliteration and transfer into another script should not reduce or remove this interplay, though — as Ghaffaar notes — that is not always possible. “Being more phonetic, both the Roman and Gurmukhi scripts do not have [the] facility in playing with meanings and sounds,” as much as the Arabic-Persian script does, he writes in the preface.
The last problem concerns the English translation of Bulleh Shah’s works as given in the book. “The translations prepared for this series are not designed to produce alternative literature, but are an attempt to beat a path to the original,” Ghaffaar explains. He then says that “often the metre had to be compromised” in translation in “order to preserve meaning and to follow the rhyme scheme of the original.” Here he is conceding that there have been technical limitations in the process. What if there have been limitations in understanding the meaning of a verse and also in expressing it in another language?
Without going into the merits or demerits of his translations, it is sufficient to say that any translation, even that of the best variety, is an approximation. When, however, an approximation sits right next to the original in printed text, it is likely to be seen as a substitute for the original. That is where the argument about accessibility and the loss of nuance as a result of it becomes salient.
Punjabi Sufi poetry, as Ghaffaar points out multiple times, communicates with its audiences at multiple levels. A translation can do the same only if the translator has what John Keats calls “negative capability” — the ability to know and express someone else’s thoughts and emotions as they themselves would. Shakespeare, Keats notes, possesses “negative capability” of the highest order. Whether Ghaffaar also possesses it is moot.
Explanatory notes on Sufi practices and thoughts in general, and Bulleh Shah’s poetry in specific, also limit the meaning of the original work as they invite the reader to read the original with reference to the poet’s biography and the history of his age. Punjabi Sufi poetry is definitely more universally relevant than being little more than a record of the life and time of its creators.
In an alternative universe, the book would have included poetry only in Arabic-Persian texts, supplemented by a glossary in English of unfamiliar, or less familiar, words and phrases. It could have done better by including longer essays on the history of the Punjabi language and literature (including on its scripts) and a well-sourced and detailed personal history of each poet (preferably within the broader political, religious, and cultural contexts of their respective eras). These essays should have aroused the intellectual curiosity of the readers to the extent that they could engage with the original text without the distractions of transliterations, scripts, and copious notes. That could have created a lasting connection between the poetry and its (aspiring) audience than the book — and the series — in its current format may facilitate.
The series, though, can easily claim that it has already accomplished something significant: it includes a version of Sufi poetic texts finalised after decades of meticulous research and painstaking investigation by some of the best minds in Punjabi literary circles. This feat has been achieved at a weekly sitting, or sangat, of Punjabi writers, intellectuals, historians, and lovers of the language, a constant since 1973 at the Lahore residence of Najm Hosain Syed, the doyen of Punjabi letters. On this count, Ghaffaar deserves the gratitude of all those who hanker after the universal truths infused in Punjabi Sufi poetry, but are often hobbled by multiple versions of the same verse.
The series merits a prominent place in the library of anyone interested in Punjabi literature for that reason alone, but then Ghaffaar has complemented it with CD recordings of high quality. These CDs contain compositions of Sufi poetry also developed at the sangat sessions. Many of them were sung at literary sessions that Ghaffaar himself arranged under the Lahore Arts Forum, a cultural and literary organisation he has been running in Lahore since 1986.
Unencumbered by arguments about script, glossaries, and explanations, Bulleh Shah’s songs of love, longing, and self-abnegation, as rendered in the CDs, reach straight to the heart the moment they hit the ear. The recordings are, undoubtedly, more suited to bringing the works of the great Sufi poets of Punjab within reach of modern-day audiences than Ghaffaar’s written word, which confounds the mind as soon as it catches the eye.
The reviewer is the editor of Herald magazine.
Masterworks of Punjaabi Sufi Poetry: Bulleh Shah, Within Reach
(POETRY)
By Muzaffar A. Ghaffaar
Ferozsons, Lahore
ISBN: 978-9690022806
709pp. (Two volumes and eight CDs)
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 1st, 2017