Pride
How sweet the tales of battlefields.
How easy the cries of praise and bravo.
How pleasing to talk of fearless men
and share legends of their heroic lives.
How soothing the old songs are to the ear
and the names of the lion hearts sung by maidens.
How proudly pretty girls, like bunches of flowers,
flock eagerly to the shrines of martyrs.
But has anyone asked the martyr about his wounds?
Has anyone talked to the hero about his suffering?
Has anyone looked in his eyes on the threshold of death
and read their tale of thwarted hopes?
Has anyone seen the broken heart of the martyr’s mother?
Has anyone witnessed the ruined life of the young widow?
Has anyone stumbled on the rubble of a thousand dreams?
Has the poet who writes of chains and shackles
felt the chill of a dungeon at night?
Has he been thrown into a scorpion pit
to be stung to the bone again and again?
I can never forget what the wise man says:
‘The fires burns the land on which it ignites’.
How pleasant are the tales of battlefields?
How easy are the cheers of bravo and praise?
How sweet are the talks of the valour of fearless (men)
And the bazar (market) legends of the heads of heroes?
How soothing the old songs are to the ears
The names of the lion-hearts sung by cheerful dancing (young) girls?
How proudly the flocks of pretty girls like bunches of flower
Go to the shrine of the martyrs?
But, has anyone asked the martyr about his wounds?
Who has talked to the hero about his injuries/cuts?
Has someone looked into his eyes at the crossing of death?
Has someone seen the tale/lore of unmet hopes/unfulfilled desires in his eyes?
Has anyone seen/witnessed the burnt chest of the martyr’s mother?
Has anyone observed the ruined life of the pretty widow?
Has some seen the scorched house/castle of a thousand/countless desires/expectations?
Has the poet, who writes poems to chains and shackles,
Seen the cold dungeon nights?
Has he slept in scorpion dens/pits?
Have his bare bones tasted the ceaseless stings?
I can’t forget this saying of the wise (men),
“The fire burns the land on which it ignites.”
Abdul Bari Jahani is one of the most famous contemporary poets from Afghanistan writing in Pashto, and it was a real pleasure to be introduced to his work thanks to our translator, the award-winning BBC journalist, Dawood Azami.
This powerful poem directly addresses the fake propaganda promulgated about the glories of war, cleverly puncturing its grandiosity by focussing on the real effects of conflict in the poem’s second stanza. The poem’s apparent simplicity is belied by the urgency of its message.
The poem’s first line sounds as though it will be a conventional – and clichéd – celebration of conflict. You’ll see that in the first two lines we’ve removed the verb ‘are’ that occurs in the Pashto and in Dawood’s literal translation; this has the effect of making these lines sound archaic – rather like Shakespearian English – which signals that the opening of the poem is speaking in clichés. We also switched ‘pleasant’ (line 1 in Dawood’s literal) with ‘sweet’ (in line 3); the words are the same in Pashto but whereas ‘pleasant’ sounds rather bland in English, the notion of the tales of battlefields being ‘sweet’ ramps up the irony. And, in line 3, ‘pleasing’ is again more archaic than ‘pleasant’.
Line 6 in Dawood’s translation uses the term ‘lion-hearts’ which, for English readers, suggests the exploits of the English king, Richard I ‘the Lion Heart’. Dawood explained that ‘the word the poet used is lion/s while referring to brave men. I translated it as lion-heart as the word lion in Pashto means a brave man. There is another word sher dil which means lion-heart (sher means lion in Pashto, Urdu and Persian) and dil means heart in all these languages. It is used as a noun (name of a man) and as an adjective. But I am not sure if the word lion-heart has travelled from England or it existed before that. I suspect it has been there for a long time as lion has always been seen as a symbol of bravery and courage.’ In this line we changed Dawood’s ‘young girls’ to ‘maidens’, again because it sounds so old-fashioned (the word used in Pashto is ‘virgins’ but, of course, this isn’t gender-specific in English).
The second stanza of the poem completely upturns the clichés of the first, immediately demanding we confront the real horrors of war such as the wounds and suffering of those killed in battle. The poet’s anger and frustration is made plain by the imagery he uses – such as the haunting idea of looking into the hero’s eyes at the moment of death to see his ‘thwarted hopes’. What really angers Jabari, though, is that the poets who churn out these clichéd paeans to war have no experience whatever of the bitter experience of conflict – despite the fact they write about ‘chains and shackles’ they’ve never been in a dungeon, let alone thrown into a pit full of scorpions!
As you’ll see, we left the final, powerfully enigmatic, line of Dawood’s translation unaltered: ‘The fire burns the land on which it ignites’.
Sarah Maguire, Workshop Facilitator