To Beloved’s lovers
It’s a translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s renowned poem “Rakeeb se”. Faiz was one of the most influential contemporary poet of Pakistan, who also lived couple of years in Moscow during the СССП days, and even won the Lenin peace prize. We grew up listening to his beautiful and sublime poetry. I am sure he must have fall in love while in Moscow. It’s funny how beautifully he is transforming in this poem a usually complicated relation associated with jealousy into such a romantic, optimistic, and perspective-taking way of seeing and appreciating love. This is to all your beloved’s lovers Enjoy!
To my beloved’s lover (part I)
Come & meet me my dear
For memories are associated with you of that beauty
who has turned this heart of ours into a fairy-house.
In who’s love, we had forgotten this world
In who’s love, we turned our realities into a wonderland
Familiar with your steps, are those paths on which
Her breath-taking youth has bestowed her steps
Caravans of her smiling charms have passed on those paths
Those charms which our eyes have worshiped together unconditionally
With you have also played those lovely breezes in which
the faded scents of her body still lingers
On you too, have rained the lights from that moon
from which the anxiety of those bygone nights still kindles
You have seen that forehead, those cheeks, those lips
In the yearning of those, we both have forgotten our lives
On you also have been raised,
those lost-in-thoughts, magician eyes
Only you can know why we smilingly gave away our lives.
Common to us are the great blessings of love’s sadness
So many blessings! that if we were to count them, we will fail
What I have lost in this love, what I have gained & learned
If I were to explain to anyone, except you, I will never be able to explain…
(Faiz Ahmed Faiz)
P.S Most of Faiz’s poems looks like blunt romantic verses but they also carry a second meaning of focusing on higher abstracts just like this one which seems a good romantic poem written to glorify his love but is also his tribute to his love of different socialist movements of his time and his experience of living those golden days of socialism. Just imagine those nights of 60’s, the smoke filled cafes of Moscow full of intellectuals and poets and fellow comrades, and Faiz himself singing his poems while starring in the dark with cigar in his hand burning with hope…..
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