ابو المعانی عبد القادر بیدل دهلوی

Bīdel’s poems ask: How can we focus, really focus, on finding truth when life is so full of distraction? The surrounding world ensnares our senses, the rush of time sweeps us ever onward, and our minds scatter in countless directions. Even our breaths race forward, pulling us along. It’s incredibly hard to rein ourselves in, slow down, collect ourselves. These poems are about concentration and distraction. They depict how hard it is to concentrate (“Composure and Distraction”) and why we must see this life as our one brief chance to focus on finding truth (“Bubble”). These poems are not celebratory. In fact, they meticulously document what it is like when experiments with lyric meditation fail.

The Persian lyric genre (the ghazal) is very fixed in form. Each poem consists of approximately five to fifteen couplets, each of which share a rhyme. This rhyme is often longer than a syllable: sometimes it is a word, even a whole phrase. I highlight this rhyme-word visually in the translations. In “Composure and Distraction,” the rhyme-words (“composure”/“collected”) stand out in their own indented column. The second poem (“Bubble”) has an especially long refrain (“a bubble has arisen,” etc.), and the translation reproduces this felicitous confluence of form and subject graphically, by allowing the “bubble” repeatedly to burst out of line. I have taken other liberties. Bīdel’s dense Persian couplets, thickets of metaphor and paronomasia that admit many possible interpretations, have been untangled into smaller lines. Many puns are impossible to render faithfully into English, like the way “water” (āb) hides at the end of “bubble” (ḥobāb), waiting to engulf it. Bīdel delights in exhuming secondary, tertiary, and even deeper meanings, and gives them new life through etymological, semantic, even graphemic echoes in nearby words. This is also very hard to reproduce, and I opt to unfold what Bīdel prefers to imply, to expand where he is densely terse.