Summer Afternoon
Underneath a mulberry tree a bird weighs its wings and from guava branches green parrots unacquainted with the rules of music shrilly sing. It must be afternoon.
Love
I saw my friend's pale face and said: All you gain from love is listlessness and shadows. Eradicate the word from the world's literature. Love spreads sorrow, struggle, conflict: it never gifts a moment of grace. Look, read the poem carefully: where you see love's ink smudging the lines, erase the verse.
But my words made her shiver and in the garden she looked like a sliver of light cast by the moon on the grass. She answered: How would we live then in this darkness? What would life's upheavals mean to us? You perhaps can bear the darkness in a house without candles: but then you wouldn't be able to read the world's sacred texts, nor even — crazy as you are — would you see that in the book of songs beside your lute there are so many unsung melodies.
I smiled when I heard her response, and pulled my blue silk shawl with its pattern of painted ships around my shoulders. Tonight she'd compared love to light. It was a charming notion.
Autumn Morning
That morning her face was pale and the sound of the wind was mournful like the echo of a dirge sung by a man sitting in a dark cave. I didn't say a word to her nor did she try to speak because we both agreed that two women in love should never talk to each other on bad-weather mornings. I stood by the window silent for a while counting the sea's mottled waves as she sat quiet on the couch plucking music from broken strings.
Gilded Letters
Excerpts
Hijab Imtiaz Ali
translated from the Urdu by Aamer Hussein
Listen to the poems in the original Urdu performed by Sascha Aurora Akhtar:
Hijab Ismail (later Hijab Imtiaz Ali) came to the attention of the public in 1932 with the publication of a collection of three novellas entitled Meri natamam muhabbat (My Unfinished Love). Influenced by the writer Yildirim who was well known for his free translations of Turkish fiction, Hijab broke new ground in setting her tragic and sometimes Gothic love stories in imaginary landscapes at times reminiscent of the Eastern Mediterranean and at others of South India, where she grew up ; exotic backdrops often served to disguise her subversive intent, which was to chart the lives of educated, priviliged Indian Muslim women whose destinies were circumscribed by the rigid rules of class and clan. One of her interests was in psychoanalysis: forbidden loves and convention-defying desires are at the core of her fictions, particularly the later works, which feature hysterical heroines, alcoholic heroes, suppressed homeorotic and even incestuous longings, observed and chronicled by a first-person narrator who is, herself, a poet and writer struggling to develop a fictional narrative and explore the sensibility of its characters.
In 1936, she married fellow-writer Imtiaz Ali Taj, moved to Lahore, took a pilot's licence, edited two magazines, and ran a publishing company with her husband. Though her output was of full-length fiction was sporadic, she produced at least three novels: Zalim Muhabbat (Cruel Love), which is focuses on a triangular love affair between a man, his fiancee, and his foster brother and childhood companion: Andhere Khwab (Dark Dreams), in which a psychoanalyst races the roots of a young woman's hysterical fantasies of strangulation and her obsession with alcoholic men to her childhood fixation on her alcoholic father; and, later in her career, Pagalkhana (Madhouse), a futuristic anti-nuclear novel. But she was more prolific as a writer of short fiction, of which she produced several collections: her part-playful, part-romantic approach continued to endear her to a large public and when she died at the age of about 90 (some said 96) at the end of the last century, her entire oeuvre, which included plays, poems, essays and translations along with her long and short fictions, had been constantly reprinted in new de luxe editions for about a decade.
The luminous, sensuous texts translated here are taken from a 1993 reprint of one of her least known works, Adab-e zarreen (Gilded Letters), which was published in 1936. Straddling the genres of prose poem and, with their fragments of narrative and dialogue, what is now termed flash fiction, they employ a linguistic register that combines a classical, Arabic- and Persian-inflected lexicon with a syntax of colloquial intimacy and startling lucidity.
She may have also been influenced by The Songs of Bilitis, the work of Pierre Louys, an author she was reputed to have liked. Hers are nevertheless original works firmly located in the sphere of her own linguisticand cultural imagination. They are also generically unusual, as the prose poem was not very common in Urdu at the time; in fact they refuse to be contained within generic boundaries, ranging from formal verse-like structures to loose ribbons of prose swathed across the page.
While translating these texts, I have also been reminded, over and over, of their similarity to Mughal and Pahari miniatures: their dwelling on heroines both indoors and out, lazing, playing music, hunting; and on landscapes in which bright animals are presented against a richly-coloured background, with the deliberate use of flat or limited perspectives which allow us to view different scenes and heights simultaneously, letting the eye dwell simultaneously on sky and and sea, hilltop and foothill, branch and thornbush. Nowhere is this technique more compelling than in the texts that employ a modicum of linear narration, where elliptical transitions of space (from staircase to vineyard) or time (from early twilight to darkness) reflect the shifting emotions of the first person narrator, and remind the reader of a sequence of miniatures, or of an unfolding scroll, in which we see the same character in different places at different times of day.
Though I have attempted to maintain the narrative and imagistic structure of her texts, I've occasionally and minimally reparagraphed them to maintain the thematic unity of each one, as Urdu — particularly in the quasi-poetic style she employs, with its sentence fragments and irregular lineation — has a very different appearance from English on the page, always resembling calligraphy; this is one of the many features of my mother tongue (which include an extreme compression I have attempted wherever possible to approximate) that are nearly impossible to reproduce in English.
Hijab can also be rhetorically romantic in the manner of eighteenth-century Urdu poets ('Lord! My tortured soul'!) in a way that her youth and the times permitted (beyond the boundaries of language, as is evident in writings from Spain, France, and China produced at about the same time). In at least one of the stories I've curtailed some of her repetitive sentimental refrains. Thus my work on Hijab's prose-poetry remains, at best, a muted reflection of its many shades.
In 1936, she married fellow-writer Imtiaz Ali Taj, moved to Lahore, took a pilot's licence, edited two magazines, and ran a publishing company with her husband. Though her output was of full-length fiction was sporadic, she produced at least three novels: Zalim Muhabbat (Cruel Love), which is focuses on a triangular love affair between a man, his fiancee, and his foster brother and childhood companion: Andhere Khwab (Dark Dreams), in which a psychoanalyst races the roots of a young woman's hysterical fantasies of strangulation and her obsession with alcoholic men to her childhood fixation on her alcoholic father; and, later in her career, Pagalkhana (Madhouse), a futuristic anti-nuclear novel. But she was more prolific as a writer of short fiction, of which she produced several collections: her part-playful, part-romantic approach continued to endear her to a large public and when she died at the age of about 90 (some said 96) at the end of the last century, her entire oeuvre, which included plays, poems, essays and translations along with her long and short fictions, had been constantly reprinted in new de luxe editions for about a decade.
The luminous, sensuous texts translated here are taken from a 1993 reprint of one of her least known works, Adab-e zarreen (Gilded Letters), which was published in 1936. Straddling the genres of prose poem and, with their fragments of narrative and dialogue, what is now termed flash fiction, they employ a linguistic register that combines a classical, Arabic- and Persian-inflected lexicon with a syntax of colloquial intimacy and startling lucidity.
She may have also been influenced by The Songs of Bilitis, the work of Pierre Louys, an author she was reputed to have liked. Hers are nevertheless original works firmly located in the sphere of her own linguisticand cultural imagination. They are also generically unusual, as the prose poem was not very common in Urdu at the time; in fact they refuse to be contained within generic boundaries, ranging from formal verse-like structures to loose ribbons of prose swathed across the page.
While translating these texts, I have also been reminded, over and over, of their similarity to Mughal and Pahari miniatures: their dwelling on heroines both indoors and out, lazing, playing music, hunting; and on landscapes in which bright animals are presented against a richly-coloured background, with the deliberate use of flat or limited perspectives which allow us to view different scenes and heights simultaneously, letting the eye dwell simultaneously on sky and and sea, hilltop and foothill, branch and thornbush. Nowhere is this technique more compelling than in the texts that employ a modicum of linear narration, where elliptical transitions of space (from staircase to vineyard) or time (from early twilight to darkness) reflect the shifting emotions of the first person narrator, and remind the reader of a sequence of miniatures, or of an unfolding scroll, in which we see the same character in different places at different times of day.
Though I have attempted to maintain the narrative and imagistic structure of her texts, I've occasionally and minimally reparagraphed them to maintain the thematic unity of each one, as Urdu — particularly in the quasi-poetic style she employs, with its sentence fragments and irregular lineation — has a very different appearance from English on the page, always resembling calligraphy; this is one of the many features of my mother tongue (which include an extreme compression I have attempted wherever possible to approximate) that are nearly impossible to reproduce in English.
Hijab can also be rhetorically romantic in the manner of eighteenth-century Urdu poets ('Lord! My tortured soul'!) in a way that her youth and the times permitted (beyond the boundaries of language, as is evident in writings from Spain, France, and China produced at about the same time). In at least one of the stories I've curtailed some of her repetitive sentimental refrains. Thus my work on Hijab's prose-poetry remains, at best, a muted reflection of its many shades.
Hijab Imtiaz Ali (1908-1999) was born in Hyderabad and moved to Lahore in 1936 when she married the writer Imtiaz Ali Taj. She was a renowned novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright and diarist, and the subcontinent's first woman pilot. After a period of neglect, her books were reprinted as modern classics, to great acclaim, in the 90s. The subject of several critical studies, she is now recognised as a leading name in 20th century Urdu literature.
Aamer Hussein is a contributing editor at Asymptote. He was born in Karachi in 1955 and has lived in London since the '70s. A graduate of SOAS, he has been publishing fiction and criticism since the mid-1980s. He is the author of five collections of short fiction, including Insomnia (2007), and two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). He has also edited an anthology of writing from Pakistan called Kahani (2005). His first selection of an essay and four fictions in Urdu, from which this story is taken, will appear in the journal Dunyazad (Karachi) later this year. He is Professorial Writing Fellow at Southampton University.
