I Will Not Sing
I will not sing—
I will sing today no rose song, no song of the nightingale,
No song of the iris, no hyacinth song,
No song to ravish nor song intoxicated
Not languor’s sweet, slow songs—
Not the least song—
I will not sing.
Not when the dust cloud of war skins the iris for its hue—
When the thunder of guns tears out the tongue from the nightingale—
When I hear the clamor and clatter of chains, here
where there were hyacinths—
where the diseased eye of lightning is webbed closed,
and mountains recoil
back onto their haunches; when black death gathers close
cloud tops to embrace—
I will not sing—Now
warlord and bureaucrat stand
girt about, eyeing my Kashmir.
I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—
Not the least song.
I will not sing.
Not the least song—
Not today—not when here is no place
where the day’s white-seething pan of light is not set, poised
to shake, spilling from quavering vessels what life there was yet
to blight my garden—
so the rose holds its breath;
the tulip its brand; quick rivers stall their song and keening koels shake
in their palpitating hearts,
where throbbing song is stilled—
all fearing,
a wild starling idly sinks into the quiet of its unsettled perch.
I will not sing. Now
warlord and bureaucrat stand
girt about, eyeing my Kashmir.
I will not sing—
I will sing no song today of incipience, no late songs favoring the spring
of first friends, the fevers willed, of new love and wildness in longing;
I will stage no song to effloresce red and yellow, with tender crests
of the blue and green stuff growing—not the least song—
I will not sing.
No such song. Not today.
spring is in flight. Autumn in pursuit, and the winds
are poison. In every forest one hears the heated rumor
of fire—man undertakes to hunt man.
Which is why the long hair of the narcissus is tangled;
the jasmine, wind torn, has fallen:
wretched flower, mangled on the vine.
I will not sing. Now
warlord and bureaucrat stand
girt about, eyeing my Kashmir.
I will not sing—
No song of fields and seeded beds of rice, no labored song
Of threshing floors and tillers in the field
following the ox-led plough, no drenched song
of sweating hours. No such song:
Not when the weeds have choked the life out of the fields.
When the threshed grain lies torn by locusts,
when sweat on the head freezes in fear:
A vortex forms around every boulder, even the grass
withers, and withered, it is as if blood
flows from roots.
I will not sing.
Now warlord and bureaucrat stand
girt about, eyeing my Kashmir.
I will not sing.
I will sing no song
no song until the rising hills
and high circuit
of eminent mountains—
until seeded field
and the earth where it lies
fallow and watered—
until bud and flower,
the red rice and white—
songbirds and their song;
autumn and spring; the forest
and garden; the flowing streams
and still water; jasmine, and rose,
royal gardens and fields of tulips,
the waterfalls and high places,
narrow pass and caravan road,
wide-crested Burzil Pass,
Naked Mountain, and Mirror Lake,
and after, Vāvajan Pass,
no song until I see them, free
from fear, and from siege, from terror.
To see them again
and in the faint light, at the joining
of the two dusks, evening and nightfall,
early
early enough—in good time
to see my purposes prosper again
that my wishes are put back again
into good order, to see my own—this darling child—
our garden, where we dwell;
to see our home again: populous and free,
gratifying, like spring,
fresh, as days we were young.
I’ll sing then—
I’ll sing maddened with the savor of spring, but no song
till then—I’ll send from out of me no sleep-mad songs,
no song to languish. I’ll send
No song. That’s why I must set out—set out today—
levelling the low fences that partition the field’s
edges—set out quickened with sharp pen
and cleaving knife, subduing the enemy
and highwaymen with orders to cease and desist
with hammer, and pen, and sickle, resolved
I shall wander here and there, armed I shall wander
everywhere with a sickle for every trial, with a hammer,
and pen, and sickle—with sweat wrung out from every pore
I will bathe this garden, our love, this fast friend from young days—
your childhood and mine—I will fill with splendor every ditch
and gorge pit, every chasm and path. I will not sing today.
I will set out today with hammer, and pen, and sickle and resolve:
Fear-free. I will set out. I will not lament.
Where We Dwell
Where we dwell, a flower
dried-tinder fire
of spring’s reclaimed youth:
the palpably bright swept-
clean look of air
above bowers
brash happiness
in new clothes.
Where we dwell,
the clasped lotus
opening in bloom; the comfort
and best part of flowers: love’s
mending; the falling upon
which is memory, of tears, of love.
Where we dwell, home of flowers, as
the face of a child in unbounded play,
when the red flush of joy rises up,
and floods the face:
the wet-green of joy; the vigor (blood-red,
warmed) in eager youth, first friends
and love when we were young.
Where we dwell: fire’s light in eyes,
the small square of cloth worn like a hand-
kerchief with the piece of wire to test
the purity of gold, gold one buys
for a daughter, nothing held closer
hope where it nears fulfillment
dawn in unweened infancy
joy in one who labors in fields of rice
at last given to see her adopted child:
lobe of her affections,
the heart-stuff, life’s best part:
the rough grace in a wildness of youth.
Ours, where we dwell, the artless village,
toil’s rest in the shade of tall Chinars
evening on Dal Lake
the first green almonds
looking out and finding from a distance your favorite uncle
home out of long absence, and him bearing presents,
the small apples, sweet, of September,
October,
mouthful of mother’s milk.
Ours, where we dwell, wool woven
in shawls (like water, made thread over single thread)
gardens in cloth, that grow into view
only when the finest needles are worked
by calloused fingers and by thimbled fingers
that know how;
the shade-cool comfort in silk
the fringes of finest weaves,
where the likeness of youth lives
grown from the dead wood of the walnut tree.
We are the watchmen,
guardians where we dwell
with Lal Ded’s voice,
with the heat and glow and the music of fire inside
the fire Habba Khātūn loving soothed,
fire cradled in song.
So here’s where
we’re now at,
with heaved voices
in spring wind, an air
of grace and conjecture
of style: the joy
in new measures for expectation.
Two Poems
Nādim
translated from the Kashmiri by Sonam Kachru
“I Will Not Sing” (circa 1950) is the first Kashmiri poem to use blank verse. It was an event that occurred during a time of awakening for a people and their language. Nādim himself said of this time that “the whole fabric of Kashmiri poetry had undergone a drastic change. We were surrounded with slogans. It was not easy to escape from these”—a sentiment that holds true for this poem. Nādim tried to make the slogans work for him. Whether or not he succeeded continues to be debated. I will say this. While “I Will Not Sing” is not my favorite poem to read, it is among the very finest poems to chant or to hear chanted in the original. The specific challenge for a translator is to capture this energy of the incanted line, its movement and force.
The poem may be read as an attempt to reproduce the valley as a poetic unity: first in terms of received figures of speech in classical Kashmiri poetry that the time we are in has made unavailable; then in terms of a verbal map plotting the spatial contours of the valley freed from the poetic clichés of Kashmir as an unspecific and featureless utopia, garden, or paradise. Once recovered, the valley may become the stage for new aspirations, couched in terms of a progressive, international idiom.
“Son Watan,” or “Where We Dwell,” revisits “I Will Not Sing” later in the poet’s career and is in a more meditative key. It is, I believe, the more successful poem when read on the page. For the most part, Nādim has left behind slogans. The movement of the poem is subtler. Kashmir enters into his verbal map in the guise of the language itself, with the help of difficult, ordinary words and the idioms and rhythms of colloquial Kashmiri.
The difficulties in translating such a poetic map are considerable. There is the difficulty in tracking down the exact nuance of expressions or words now fallen out of common use. There is the difficulty of how to suggest the savor of the intensely particular in another language for a nondescript reader who might live anywhere. Then there is a difficulty of another order. As revealed at the end, Nādim is not only thinking of Kashmir at the time. He is thinking of its history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry. But how does one translate a poem that self-consciously, however covertly, uses such a variability of styles, syntax, phrasing, and voicing from different eras of Kashmiri literature as to question what “being Kashmiri” might mean? He is counting on some of his audience being able to follow his verbal map by plotting themselves in space as well as time. He is thereby giving his audience an opportunity to think about, and work themselves into, a sense of belonging to a place. Naturally, I haven’t been able to fully convey that impression. Though I believe the failure to be no less instructive. It tells us something about the meaning of the wretched and complicated matter that is “belonging.”
The poem may be read as an attempt to reproduce the valley as a poetic unity: first in terms of received figures of speech in classical Kashmiri poetry that the time we are in has made unavailable; then in terms of a verbal map plotting the spatial contours of the valley freed from the poetic clichés of Kashmir as an unspecific and featureless utopia, garden, or paradise. Once recovered, the valley may become the stage for new aspirations, couched in terms of a progressive, international idiom.
“Son Watan,” or “Where We Dwell,” revisits “I Will Not Sing” later in the poet’s career and is in a more meditative key. It is, I believe, the more successful poem when read on the page. For the most part, Nādim has left behind slogans. The movement of the poem is subtler. Kashmir enters into his verbal map in the guise of the language itself, with the help of difficult, ordinary words and the idioms and rhythms of colloquial Kashmiri.
The difficulties in translating such a poetic map are considerable. There is the difficulty in tracking down the exact nuance of expressions or words now fallen out of common use. There is the difficulty of how to suggest the savor of the intensely particular in another language for a nondescript reader who might live anywhere. Then there is a difficulty of another order. As revealed at the end, Nādim is not only thinking of Kashmir at the time. He is thinking of its history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry. But how does one translate a poem that self-consciously, however covertly, uses such a variability of styles, syntax, phrasing, and voicing from different eras of Kashmiri literature as to question what “being Kashmiri” might mean? He is counting on some of his audience being able to follow his verbal map by plotting themselves in space as well as time. He is thereby giving his audience an opportunity to think about, and work themselves into, a sense of belonging to a place. Naturally, I haven’t been able to fully convey that impression. Though I believe the failure to be no less instructive. It tells us something about the meaning of the wretched and complicated matter that is “belonging.”
Nādim is the pen name adopted by Dina Nath Kaul (1916–1988), who is considered by many critics to be among the most innovative Kashmiri poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Beginning to compose the poems for which he would be remembered from the 1950s, he never ceased to generate new possibilities for Kashmiri poetry with the help of experiments with imagery, poetic forms, and registers of spoken Kashmiri. A collection of his poems, Shihil Kul, won the Sahitya Akademi award for literature in 1986, and the totality of his ouvre won the Soviet Land Nehru Award in 1971.
Sonam Kachru teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His translations of modern and medieval Kashmiri poetry have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Almost Island, Aufgabe, and Words Without Borders.
