Through the Closed Doorway: A Collection of Nazms
By Shahryar
Rupa, $ 15.50

In Shahryar?s Nazms, translated into English by Rakhshanda Jalil, images crowd the imagination, evoking new and wondrous sensations. For example, the foreword to the book says:

?Tonight the night presented me with a new dilemma./ It emptied the basin of my eye/ Of all sleep/ And filled it with tears.?

Or in ?A black poem?:

?The smell of unripe guavas maddens me/ It makes my empty eyes brim with madness.?

Another powerful poem called ?An inchoate desire? says:

?Take this dagger/ And strike me/ Cut me in a hundred pieces/ Caress my battered body.?

The metaphor of sleep comes back again and again in these poems, as if opening the door to a world of dreams. The images rush and scatter through the pages, evoking the strangely dark, mysterious nature of the night.

Sleeplessness, and a desire to dream, inevitably points out the imperfections of existence ? ?bodies are bloodless, sand courses through them? ? and a longing for release. Release may come through dreams, in which one can see ?green moss on those mirage-laden lands?, or revolution, but ultimately reaches the final frontier, the void.

?Graveyard? shows us ?the reality of earth and sky, of the self, and of God?. Couched in modern idiom, the inner core of the poems seems to find a solution to the problems of life in the mystic longing for something beyond the worldly.

The boat, trees, green grass are some of the images that recur in these poems, reminding us of the link with the romantic tradition of the ghazal and the nazm, the shama-parwana and the bulbul. However, these themes are worked out in startlingly modern idiom but do not lapse into decadence.

The lyric is predominant in these poems, which highlight modern concerns:

?Beneath the ground/ The cow is restlessly stamping/ Waiting to change its horn.?

Reality and fantasy meet and blend beautifully in these poems.

The translator must be complimented on doing an excellent job of evoking the nuances and texture of the original Urdu in the translation. The poems are rooted in everyday existence, as the poet treads the middle path, which borders on romanticism.

Jalil says that it is difficult to ?frogmarch? the nazm into English. So she focuses instead on letting the images speak for themselves, rather than try to replicate the rhyme and rhythm as closely as possible.

This creates a more natural effect as the images bring to the reader a picture of the turmoil and internal churning within the poet?s mind.