Seldom has a book of poems in English resonated with me as this slender volume, Yardstick of Life. Perhaps the poet’s visceral connection with ghazal, particularly Ghalib’s ghazal, and a certain artful way with words grabbed my attention.

I read and reread the poems; marked my favourites and began to think about their delicate structure and the deep emotions within. The emotions are cocooned in a translucent web that the reader can both see and feel. The poems are living and breathing, a heart is beating in them. The heart is the yardstick of life.

Writing about this book of poems is hard. I want my words to be as gentle, elegant and unburdened as the poet’s, as I attempt to unpack the wealth of beauty and emotion here.

M. Shahid Alam is an economist and has recently retired from Northeastern University, Boston USA. He has published important books on challenging subjects, such as Zionism and New Orientalism. He has translated Ghalib. His writings have appeared in leading journals across disciplines such as American Economic Review and Counter Punch.

Alam was born in Dhaka in September 1947 and lived there till April 1971. The next 15 years were spent in itinerant movement from one place to another. In 1988, he joined Northeastern University and has resided in Massachusetts ever since.

The years 1947 and 1971 are two benchmarks in the history of the Subcontinent. Those 24 years must have created indelible memories for Alam. When I talked with him on the phone, our conversation moved around language. Why did he choose to write in an alien language, English? Why not Bengali or Urdu?

His first language was a mixture of Bihari and Urdu (he couldn’t recall a name for the language) that his mother spoke. His father was fluent in Urdu; Alam acquired some Urdu from him and, later in college, when he discovered Ghalib. He began dabbling in poetry and wanted to get a master’s in philosophy, but pressure from his older brother made him opt for economics.

I had examined Alam’s free translations of Ghalib and wondered to myself whether what he had were translations or inspirations. There must be dozens of translations of Ghalib but Alam’s Intimations of Ghalib (2018) has a somewhat different approach. What I liked about the approach was that he sometimes had more than one translation of a ghazal. What I did not like was that he cherry-picked verses to translate.

Overall, his method was similar to Aijaz Ahmad’s pathbreaking 1971 book, Ghazals of Ghalib: Versions from the Urdu. The ghazal’s orality makes translation incredibly hard. English doesn’t have the vocabulary to give expression to the nuances of love that Urdu possesses. Alam’s translations sought a Western audience, which makes sense because they are in English. Yet, there is a substantial readership that knows Urdu but cannot read Urdu. They enjoy Urdu in translation. Alam’s Ghalib book is not meant for those readers.

Although the poems in Yardstick of Life show the influence of the ghazal and its world, they are unique in the way Alam embraces the tight tension of the ghazal form, enriched with metaphor. But he fills the poem’s space with his own specific angst.

I found his poems staying close to his life experience, which is indeed exceptional. He inhabits his poem and does not shy away from accepting the pain stitched with each word he pens. Language moulding plays a vital role in Alam’s poetry. He measures and weighs every word; listens to its sound and looks at its form on the page. He prefers brevity over length, lightness above load.

In a ghazal-poem written on the loss of his son Junaid, Alam draws the grief that Junaid’s mother feels day after day:

All day she grieves for him,/ For sunlit days unborn in him.
She tells her grief to stars./ She cancels spring for him.
In dreams she starts her day/ Still packing lunch for him.

Many poems in this collection are steeped in loss; loss felt at the change in seasons that becomes a metaphor for loss in relationships, beauty, past and present. A section titled ‘Love Song in Eight Parts’, comprises eight exquisite poems, each evocative of the pain that loving engenders.

Though I vary/ with the season’s/ drift, and change/ from sorrow/ to sorrow:/…/ I keep reaching/ for, yet drifting/ away from you.

Alam is ravaged by yet accepting of love’s wounding depths. One sees the seepage of a slower, gentler form of junoon. I perceive a filter or maybe a veil through which we, the readers, view this expression of the shades of love:

The night exudes longing/ In the languor of sighs.
One angry look removes/ Many layers of disguise.
I open another skylight/ When sleep seals your eyes.

The poems in Alam’s collection have the backdrop of the ghazal. The influence of great masters such as Ghalib, Mir and Faiz shimmer through the vocabulary of time’s garden and the ravages of seasons passing. But here we find what I would call a distinctive contemporary sensibility. These poems remind me of Munir Niazi and Shahryar, though a mistier Niazi and Shahryar version. Alam appeals to me because he does not scream in pain; he is not strident in his expression, he is wistful.

Returning to the complex question of language and thought in cross-cultural contexts, I return to orality, silence and the nuances embedded in signals of meaning. I can’t help but wonder how these poems would sound in Urdu translation. I pressed Alam to write directly in Urdu, but he begged off, saying that he doesn’t have the depth of vocabulary.

I think there is something to be said here about filtering thought through language. Alam inhabits two worlds. He is drawn to Ghalib’s world of thought but lives and breathes in the West. I think that is to his advantage, in that it gives his creative sensitivity an extra layer or layers of fine filter.

Ghalib in his inimitable way has made the the pronouncement:

Havas ko hai nishaat-i-kaar kya kya
Na ho marna tau jeenay ka maza kyag

The columnist is professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia in the US. X: @FarooqiMehr

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 2nd, 2024