THE BEST OF FAIZBy Faiz Ahmed Faiz, UBS, Rs 195 Mallarmé had pointed out that poetry is written with words, not with ideas. While still irrefutable, this view can be slightly extended and modified to say that poetry, in order to be effective and farreaching, must be written not with words alone, but with words punctuated with gulfs of silences. It is to this non-verbal part of the poetic language that poetry owes much of its evocative power. At the core of each poetic discourse, there is a mystic zone of silence, which, when framed by words and populated with images, constitutes the poetic landscape. Susan Sontag explores this zone in her essay, 'The Aesthetics of Silence', where she points out two different styles of manoeuvring this silence - 'loud' and 'soft'. The loud style, according to Sontag, 'is a function of the unstable antithesis of 'plenum' and 'void''. The soft style, Sontag maintains, is ''reticence' stepped up to the nth degree.' While 'soft' silence is more or less classical in approach and ironic in spirit, 'loud' silence loads its plenum with brimming energy and ecstasy, foreshadowing the disturbing notion of an abysmal void. In Sontag's words, 'It is also frequently apocalyptic and must endure the indignity of all apocalyptic thinking; namely to prophesy the end, to see the day come, to outlive it, and then to set a new date for the incineration of consciousness.' Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry is symptomatic of this loud style of silence. Faiz, arguably the greatest of the contemporary Urdu poets, weaves stark and vibrant images into the warp of his apocalyptic silence. For Faiz, the poetic process is not automatic but autotelic. It brilliantly blends the noetic with the oneiric. The Best of Faiz is a bilingual collection of 87 poems from eight books. The English translation is by Shiv K. Kumar, a poet in his own right. The book contains the poems in their original and their Roman transcripts. But the English translations and the originals are provided on two sides of the same leaf. Had the two been on facing pages - as is customary with most bilingual editions - it would have facilitated a pari passu reading. Faiz was committed to Marxism. But rather than a Marxist poet, he preferred to be known as a poet who happened to be a Marxist. Two recurrent motifs of his poetry are love and bondage. These two frequently intersecting motifs have one theme in common - loneliness. This serves as the transit point through which one motif flows into the other. And in most cases, Faiz's poetic discourses, multiversant as they are, gradually merge into private dialogues with his own self. This is the reason why quite a few of Faiz's poems conclude with self-address. Faiz's poetry is marked by the rupture of the traditional image-pattern by sudden unusual images. At times, he invests these images with new values and at others, posits them in different contexts in order to elicit fresh responses. As the collection progresses, Faiz's propensity to use closed, well-knit image-structures -extended metaphors rather - in place of loose, disjunct images becomes noti- ceable. The poem, 'Rendezvous', ill- ustrates this: 'This night is that pain's tree/ which towers higher than you or me/ higher it is, for in its boughs are lost/ the caravans of a hundred thousand torch-bearing stars'. These are some of the elements which define the contour of Faiz's poetic landscape. In other words, these are the accents of Faiz's 'loud' silence, its apocalypse consisting in the union for the lover and freedom for the prisoner. The translator has done a reasonably commendable job here, especially since his 'exacting task' entailed not only a job of transliteration, but also of transculturation. Yet, it is a pity that a substantial part of the ineffable musical quality of Faiz's poetry is lost in the English translation, despite the translator's earnest effort.