Youth

Youth

By Ghulam Ahmed Mahjoor



(Adapted from the poem Lokchaar in Kashmiri by Sonam Kachru, June-August, 2011; this adaptation has been accepted for publication by Kashmir Dispatch. My thanks to Majid Maqbool for finding a home for this effort).



               Speak, Spring,
Time I was young--what brief spell was this,
Between vision, our hazard of staged parts
And remembered scenes, and seeing you,
Magician, stake all, and steal away?
My youth was high midsummer, a face unveiled
To tempt the world; there were flowers
That lived through their day. Spring, I’d say
My green days were like the wild cedar on the water’s edge, 
Tasting new grass; but you are grim, Woodsman—
I beg of you, forego your axe.
              It was a time for life
On fire, burning like lit pines, a time to spark
Quick mouths and tongues of flame—Spring,
That life is spent, the fires out. My youth was a dream
Sweet to savor; and if I have had to feed on regret
On waking, I want, Spring, Time I was young,
Just once, to see it again: my young days,
The garden’s creaturely soul, a bird in the garden
Lifting its gladdening voice, the thrill of accord
The graceful burden of its balm of song—it sings
Sweetly to ensoul me, softly stalked by the King
Of Hunters, time and again among men.
            For a time there was time
For gardens on fire; there were flowers
Of the pomegranate to flame—too early splendor
For such abuse, petals too soon among the torn
Ruins in autumn, fragile spoils of fall’s winds.

            I speak, Spring, of time I was young,
Of my days like water in an impatient stream
Swelling with rain, of the flood past forlorn bends 
And on the bank, of hot thirst of clutched grass
Drying on the water’s edge.



(This version is incomplete, omitting two verses that conclude the poem. If the poem seems sufficiently interesting, please see the forthcoming post on this blog for an essay in which I offer some reflections on translating Mahjoor and a reading of this poem in particular; the essay restores the concluding verses, and offers my reasons for not including them in this version of the poem. Briefly, I may say that  translating Mahjoor's final gesture, his attempt at restoring life in a land desiccated by time, folding death into the image of an absent lover, involved me in his last attempt at exorcising the companion spirit of Rasul Mir, perhaps the Kashmiri poet most resistant to translation. I found it easier to rest in my translation where I have above, with Mahjoor in the company of the ghost of Eliot in the long shadow of Whitman).