Hope Against Hope

As with Shakir Shujabaadi’s other poems, this deceptively simple lyric was far from easy to translate.

Gender is not marked in Siraiki and, in this poem, we decided to make the subject female rather than male, as in the literal version.

This is one in a long series of poems grouped by their forms, none of which has a title. Calling the poem ‘Stanza’ – the translation of ‘Qutah’ – seemed a bit bald, so we decided to add a title to the poem.

Very little contemporary poetry from Siraiki has been translated into English and we were very lucky that Nukhbah Langah brought these beautiful poems by Shakir Shujaabadi to our workshop.

This is one in a long series of poems grouped by their forms, none of which have titles. ‘Qutah’ means ‘stanza’.