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An equally relevant question is: why does a scholar rooted in the traditions of Urdu choose to translate into English? Is he, through the act of translation claiming the agency to represent himself and all that that self is constituted of? Or, is he acting as a self-appointed cultural ambassador of the language community he belongs to and has the competence and confidence to reach out to a non-Urdu audience wherever it may be? Or, is he a collaborator in the neo-colonial designs of the Anglo-American cultural industry?

The concern of the present paper is, however, not the politics or poetics of translation but the translation of a poetics. Altaf Husain Hali's Muqaddama Shir-o Shairi (first published in 1890 as a long prose introduction to his divan or collection of ghazals, and then brought out as a book in its own right in 1893) is the first, and perhaps, the only major theoretical treatise on poetry in Urdu. It is also credited with laying the foundation of modern Urdu poetry. Surprisingly, such an important text has not been translated despite Hali being a favourite quarry of the English translators of literary and cultural texts in Urdu. The only attempt to introduce it to the English language readership was made by Laurel Steele, who published a translated summary of the text in the inaugural issue of the journal Annual of Urdu Studies (1981). This significant omission made me choose the Muqaddama for English rendition.

While the literary and cultural importance of the text is obvious, for a student of Translation Studies the importance may also lie elsewhere. The new poetics that Hali tried to formulate in his book is based on his encounters with the English literary tradition solely through translation. As mentioned earlier Hali knew no English. He relied on Urdu translations of English texts that came to him for correction during his employment in Lahore in the 1870's. The other significant aspect is how Hali transplanted the Western literary precepts and practices in an alien but receptive milieu. This is also translation in a wider sense.

Muqaddama is a product of the later phase of Hali's life, a phase in which Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98) and his Aligarh Movement had become the shaping influence on him. The amelioration of the Muslim community, defeated and persecuted in the aftermath of the failed uprising of 1857 (Hali had first hand experience of the chaos and misery that followed the suppression of the uprising) had become the mission of Sayyid Ahmad and Hali joined him as a committed soldier. Hali took up the mission at the literary front. Giving up the traditional poetic form of ghazal, which he had cultivated in the company of his patron Mustafa Khan Shefta (1806-69) and through occasional consultations with Mirza Ghalib (whose biography Yadgar-e Ghalib he wrote in 1897), Hali started working towards the creation of a new poetic attitude and a new idiom. In place of eroticism and formal eulogy which were the major preoccupations of ghazal, qasida and masnavi - the traditional forms of Urdu poetry, Hali focussed on social issues touching the life of his community. Aesthetic pleasure became subservient to social concerns. Like his mentor Hali also moved closer to the English, especially to English literature.

The first concrete manifestations of Hali's poetic attitude was his Musaddas (1879), a long poem on the existing miserable state of the Muslims and their former glory, written at the behest of Sayyid Ahmed Khan.2 The book was enthusiastically received and Hali's new mentor commented in his congratulatory letter to the poet:

It would be entirely correct to say that with this Musaddas begins the modern age of [Urdu] poetry.

(Qtd. in Shackle and Majeed 1997: 35)

Buoyed by the success of Musaddas Hali took upon himself the task of ridding Urdu poetry of its perceived ills, the excessive artifice employed by the poets in the ghazal form being his main concern. In a letter of 1882 he writes:

I want to write a long essay on the poetry of the Muslims from the days of Jahiliya to the present keeping Urdu poetry in mind. The purpose is to describe ways to reform Urdu poetry, which has become very poor and harmful. It will also be shown that if poetry is based on good principles how beneficial it would be for the nation and the art.

(Qtd. in Qureshi 1954: 56, my translation)

This promised long essay came out as Muqaddama Shir-o Shairi (Preface to Poetry and Poetics). The Muqaddama shows Hali's preoccupation with what he calls 'natural poetry'. It is poetry which in words and thought, is in accordance with nature or habit. By words in accordance with nature it is meant that words and their arrangement should be, as far as possible, in keeping with the ordinary everyday speech of the language concerned. This is because the language of ordinary speech is nature or second nature for the people speaking the language . . . . By thought in accordance with nature it is meant that poetry should deal with those matters which always happen or should happen in the world (Hali 1893: 158-59, my translation).

The passage, as is obvious, echoes Wordsworth's idea of poetic language in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: '… the language of such poetry as is here recommended is, as far as is possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men' (Wordsworth 1800: 170).

The quest for natural poetry takes Hali to Milton and Coleridge's normative spin to Milton's obiter dictum. In his tract Of Education Milton, while comparing rhetoric with poetry, described poetry as "simple, sensuous and passionate" (Milton 1644: 444). Coleridge in his Lectures and Notes of 1818 enthusiastically accepted and amplified Milton's "three incidental words" (Coleridge 1818: 226). Hali, relying on a mistranslation, quoted Milton as saying: "Good poetry should be simple, passionate and based on truth" (Hali 1893: 127, my translation). Hali seems to be relying on Coleridge's Lectures but having no idea of the European scholar's (this is how Hali refers to his source and Coleridge remains anonymous in the Muqaddama) intellectual roots in Neoplatonism and German idealism, either misunderstands or partially understands the import of Coleridge's representation of Milton. The consequences are predictable. By the time Milton's words reach Hali, mediated through Coleridge, they acquire a significance which neither the original author nor the mediator had intended.

Besides the authorities referred to earlier, Hali also draws upon Goldsmith (? 1730-1774) and Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859), the latter being a particular favourite, for the formulation of his new poetic creed. And by the time his long essay comes to an end, we see the Perso-Arabic literary tradition, which had been the basis of Urdu poetry since its inception, lying in an uneasy but utilitarian embrace of the Western literary tradition. Hali, of course, greatly benefits from the contradictions which such a situation gives rise to. While he employs his English scalpel to remove the 'unnatural' growth in the body poetic of Urdu, he manages to retain enough space within his new poetics to accommodate the richness of traditional Urdu poetry. His poetics, without jettisoning Mir (1722-1810) and Ghalib (1797-1869), paved the way for the emergence of Iqbal (1878-1938).

Judging the contemporary relevance of Hali's Muqaddama is not an easy task. It involves piecing together what he approved of as natural and what he had rejected as unnatural. It also involves a close examination of what he had borrowed and what he had made out of those borrowings. It has often been seen that Hali is at his original best when he misunderstands what he borrows and relies on his native genius to represent his misunderstood borrowings. Not that the process has not begun. Shamsur Rahman Faruqui's article Saadgi, asliyat aur josh on Hali's use of Milton and Coleridge is the best example of such a reconstruction (Faruqui 1990: 233-44). But only a beginning has been made in what will prove to be a long and painstaking exercise.

NOTES

1. There is some controversy as to the actual date of the book's publication. Jatindra Mohan Mohanty's checklist Indian Literature in English Translation has two entries on Qissa-i Chahar Darvish and they carry two different dates, viz. 1841 and 1845.

2. Christopher Shackle and Javed Majeed translated the poem into English as Hali's Musaddas, the Flow and Ebb of Islam in 1997.

REFERENCES

Coleridge, S. T. (1818) Lectures and Notes of 1818 in Kathleen Raine (ed.). (1957) Coleridge Harmondsworth: Penguin Books

Faruqui, Shamsur Rahman (1990) Saadgi, Asliyat Aur Josh, Auraq December, 1990

Hali, Khwaja Altaf Husain. (1893) Muqaddama Shir-o Shairi, Vahid Qureshi (ed.) (1954,reissued 1996).Muqaddama Shir-o Shairi, Aligarh: Education Book House

Milton, John. (1644) Of Education reprinted in David Novarr (ed.) (1967) Seventeenth-Century English Prose New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Mohanty, J. M. (1984) Indian Literature in English Translation: A Bibliography Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages

Sadiq, Muhammad (1984) A History of Urdu Literature Delhi: Oxford University Press

Shackle, C. and Majeed J. (1997) Hali's Musaddas, The Flow and Ebb of Islam Delhi: Oxford University Press

Wordsworth, William. (1800) in D. J. Enright and Ernst De Chickera (ed.) (1962). Preface to Lyrical Ballads in English Critical Texts Delhi: Oxford University Press

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