Mir and the Broken Heart

Mir's sorrow is ordinary speech under pressure.

Mir Taqi Mir lived from about 1723 to 1810. Urdu readers turn to him when they want the broken heart said without ornament. Every couplet below is checked against rekhta.org.

Start with smoke.

دیکھ تو دل کہ جاں سے اٹھتا ہے یہ دھواں سا کہاں سے اٹھتا ہے

dekh to dil ki jaañ se uThtā hai ye dhuāñ sā kahāñ se uThtā hai

Look: is it from the heart, or from the soul, that it rises, this thing like smoke? Where is it rising from?

There is no hard word here. Dekh, look. Dil, heart. Jaañ, life, soul. Dhuāñ, smoke. Kahāñ, where. A child knows all of them.

The difficulty is not in the words. It is in the question. Something inside the speaker is burning, and he cannot tell which part of him is on fire.

One small mark matters. Rekhta prints کہ, "whether, or," and not کی, "of." With کی, the line would say "the soul of the heart," a phrase. With کہ, it offers two places, and the speaker cannot choose between them. He stands at the window of himself, watching smoke, asking.

The next couplet of the same ghazal:

گور کس دل جلے کی ہے یہ فلک شعلہ اک صبح یاں سے اٹھتا ہے

gor kis dil-jale kī hai ye falak sho'la ik sub.h yaañ se uThtā hai

Whose grave is this sky, what burnt-hearted man's? Each morning a flame rises from here.

Sunrise, seen as a fire lit on a grave. The whole sky is a tomb, and someone in it had a heart that burned. The vocabulary is still small. The image is the size of the sky.

A city#

Mir's Delhi was coming apart while he wrote. Nadir Shah sacked it in 1739. Afghan armies raided it again and again in the decades that followed. The Mughal court, which had fed poets, shrank to a shadow of a court. Mir left for Lucknow in the 1780s and died there.

He remembers the city like this:

دلی کے نہ تھے کوچے اوراق مصور تھے جو شکل نظر آئی تصویر نظر آئی

dillī ke na the kūche auraq-e-musavvar the jo shakl nazar aa.ī tasvīr nazar aa.ī

They were not Delhi's lanes; they were painted pages. Every face that came into view came into view as a picture.

The lanes were an illuminated book. Every passer-by was a miniature painting. It is a memory of beauty, and it is past tense: the, were.

And then the same city, afterwards:

دلی میں آج بھیک بھی ملتی نہیں انہیں تھا کل تلک دماغ جنہیں تاج و تخت کا

dillī meñ aaj bhīk bhī miltī nahīñ unheñ thā kal talak dimāġh jinheñ tāj-o-taḳht kā

In Delhi today they cannot get even alms, who until yesterday had the airs of crown and throne.

Aaj, today. Kal, yesterday. The whole of history fits between two short words. Dimāġh is the brain, and in this idiom it is pride, the high head of someone born to a throne. Now the head is lowered for a coin that does not come.

The words Mir uses for a ruined city, ujaṛnā, to be laid waste, ḳharāb, ruined, bastī, a settlement, are the words he uses for a ruined heart. Read every broken heart as Delhi and the poetry shrinks to a chronicle. Read none of them that way and it floats free of the ground it was written on. The truth is in between: one vocabulary, used for both, because for this poet they were never separate.

The plainest statement of it:

دل وہ نگر نہیں کہ پھر آباد ہو سکے پچھتاؤ گے سنو ہو یہ بستی اجاڑ کر

dil vo nagar nahīñ ki phir ābād ho sake pachhtāoge suno ho ye bastī ujāṛ kar

The heart is not a town that can be settled again. Listen: you will regret it, laying this place waste.

Nagar, town. Ābād, inhabited, alive with people. Bastī, a settlement, the small word for where people live. A city can be rebuilt; Delhi itself was, more than once. The heart, this couplet says, cannot.

And suno ho, "listen, you": a phrase with no poetry in it at all, the way someone calls after a person walking away in the street.

The cure#

الٹی ہو گئیں سب تدبیریں کچھ نہ دوا نے کام کیا دیکھا اس بیماری دل نے آخر کام تمام کیا

ulTī ho ga.iiñ sab tadbīreñ kuchh na davā ne kaam kiyā dekhā is bīmāri-e-dil ne āḳhir kaam tamām kiyā

Every remedy turned against itself; no medicine did any work. You see? This sickness of the heart finished the work in the end.

Kaam kiyā in the first line: it worked, as a medicine works. Kaam tamām kiyā in the second: it finished the job, an idiom for killing. The same two words close both lines. The medicine did no work. The disease did all of it.

The one Persian construction in the couplet, bīmāri-e-dil, "sickness of the heart," is the doctor's phrase. Mir reaches for it not to sound grand but because that is what the illness is called.

The long, swaying meter of this ghazal is Hindi in origin and loose in its syllables, and does not sit neatly in the Persian scheme; Scanning Urdu Meter takes up why that matters.

Two voices, read aloud#

Ghalib came two generations after Mir and admired him. Put one couplet of each in the mouth and say them.

Mir:

پتا پتا بوٹا بوٹا حال ہمارا جانے ہے جانے نہ جانے گل ہی نہ جانے باغ تو سارا جانے ہے

pattā pattā buuTā buuTā haal hamārā jaane hai jaane na jaane gul hī na jaane baaġh to saarā jaane hai

Every leaf, every bush knows the state I am in; the flower alone does not know, or will not. The whole garden knows.

Ghalib, the first couplet of his collected Urdu ghazals:

نقش فریادی ہے کس کی شوخیٔ تحریر کا کاغذی ہے پیرہن ہر پیکر تصویر کا

naqsh fariyādī hai kis kī shoḳhi-e-tahrīr kā kāġhzī hai pairahan har paikar-e-tasvīr kā

The image is a plaintiff: against whose playful pen? Every figure in the picture wears a robe of paper.

Mir's line runs off the tongue. Pattā pattā buuTā buuTā: doubled words, open vowels, a rocking rhythm like a song sung while working. Jaane comes back again and again, five times in two lines, the way a grieving person repeats the one thing. It could be said in a lane, to a neighbour, and it has been: the couplet has long since become proverb.

Ghalib's line makes the mouth slow down. Shoḳhi-e-tahrīr. Paikar-e-tasvīr. Each izafat, the Persian -e- that links two nouns, is a small hinge the voice has to turn. The words are long, Persian and Arabic, the vocabulary of a court and a library. The meaning arrives late. Rekhta's note on the page records Ghalib's own explanation: in Iran, a petitioner went before the ruler dressed in paper. Without that, the couplet is nearly closed. With it, every painted figure becomes a complainant, and the complaint is against the artist who made it.

Both poets are talking about pictures. Mir's Delhi faces were pictures because they were beautiful, and they are gone. Ghalib's pictures are plaintiffs, protesting that they were ever made. Mir grieves for what was. Ghalib argues with the fact of being.

Ghalib can be plain too. His hazāroñ ḳhvāhisheñ aisī reads almost like Mir. And Mir can be dense. The difference is not a rule; it is where each one lives. Ghalib's missing steps are ideas, and the reader supplies a premise. Mir's missing steps are feelings, and the reader supplies a grief.

That is why Mir is so hard to translate and so easy to understand. There is nothing to explain. There is only something to hear.

dil vo nagar nahīñ ki phir ābād ho sake.

The heart is not a town that fills again.