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Review: The Story of Eve by Zehra Nigah

Jan 24, 2025 10:31 PM IST

This collection of Urdu poetry translated into English by Rakhshanda Jalil brings out the Pakistani poet’s sustained examination of the world around her

When poetry is translated, some, like Scottish novelist and historian James Buchan, wonder, “Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice”. The poetry in question here is Romanian-French poet Paul Celan’s works, perhaps the most difficult written in any language. On the other hand, there is the argument that translated poetry expands the sensory and intellectual horizons of the target audience.

MF Husain’s portrait of Zehra Nigah (Courtesy Rakshanda Jalil)
MF Husain’s portrait of Zehra Nigah (Courtesy Rakshanda Jalil)

Both these arguments can also be made about writing poetry in the first place. Much as we’d like to hail Shelley’s charged proclamation, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, the fact is, as Buchan stated in his review of Ian Fairley’s translation of Celan’s last collection of poetry before the latter committed suicide, “nothing so very dreadful will happen to you” if you didn’t understand poetry. Not understanding legislation, however, may have hazardous consequences.

240pp, ₹499; Speaking Tiger
240pp, ₹499; Speaking Tiger

Any translation of poetry, therefore, ought to be assessed with the understanding that it serves a limited utilitarian purpose. What is well served, however, is the Socratic pursuit of knowledge.

A lot has been said about women writing women, less so about women translating women. The latter is a unique act of love and solidarity. With this framework laid out, let us look at what Rakhshanda Jalil, literary historian and translator, aims to achieve with her latest book, The Story of Eve, a collection of Zehra Nigah’s select poetry translated into English from Urdu.

Why Jalil chose to translate Nigah has an obvious answer, one that is stated upfront in the first line of the introduction: “One of the first women to gain recognition and fame in the almost entirely male-dominated field of Urdu poetry, Zehra Nigah is today counted as among the greatest living Urdu poets”. A contemporary of Ada Jafri, the first female Urdu poet to be published, Nigah is the literary mother of the tribe of women poets who dared to recite their poetry in mushairas. (Nigah attended her first mushaira in 1952). Thus, the title of this collection.

As if writing and publishing poetry wasn’t radical enough, Nigah rubbed shoulders with the likes of Jaun Elia in poetic symposiums in Karachi. Jalil reminds us that Nigah was aware of her social ‘transgression’ as a woman in the testosterone-filled public space and wore a velvet glove to deal her blow to social conservatism. Nigah practised demureness decades before the “very demure, very mindful” meme took the world by storm.

This demureness, however, was only in terms of her social demeanour. Jalil presents this not only through her comprehensive introduction but also through her selection of poems that ranges from Nigah’s lamentation on the mass rapes of Bengali women in East Pakistan in 1971 to the truth of mother-child relations in advanced years that are hidden behind social graces and phrases.

Nigah has never hesitated to shine a spotlight on Pakistan’s societal ills and its establishment’s heavy-handedness in dealing with dissent. She often takes recourse to religious symbolism and imagery to critique excesses carried out in the name of God. Jalil’s competent translation brings to the fore Nigah’s sustained examination of the world around her. The latter’s moments of despair in the past are carried to the present moment and imbued with a renewed relevance like in this last stanza from Dream of the Highest Paradise.

O God, O Omnipotent OneKeep the honour of my country safe. Look, how jihad is being waged. Look how the zeal for martyrdom is being disgraced.

No poet exists in a vacuum. Even iconoclasts like Majaz and Jaun Elia had their tribe of fellow poets in the literary circuits of Karachi and other parts of Pakistan. Nigah is a part of South Asian literati but she is also conscious of her global tribe. Her verses on and for poets and writers in the West exemplify her oneness with global contemporaries. Jalil has included her lyrical tributes to Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir in the collection to underscore a well-established continuum of poetry and feminism.

Author and translator Rakshanda Jalil (Courtesy the subject)
Author and translator Rakshanda Jalil (Courtesy the subject)

75 poems have been included in The Story of Eve. Despite this, the collection offers only a glimpse of the poetic sensibility that astonished Faiz Ahmad Faiz, her older contemporary, with its radical departure from the classical norms of Urdu poetry both in form and content. Given her self-acknowledged frugality in terms of publishing her verses, Nigah’s stature far outsizes her four collections available in print.

Nishtha Gautam is an author, academic and journalist. The views expressed are personal.

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