Chaand Tanha
The moon is lonesome
The sky lonesome
Wandering from place to place
The heart too is forever forlorn
Desire turns to ashes
A star sinks out of sight
Only a lonesome smoke spirals up
To touch an empty night
Is this what they call life then?
Lonesome bodies, lonesome souls
And if at all you find a partner
Two lonesome people walk side by side
Beyond this flickering light
There is a dwelling place in sight
I shall leave this lonesome world
And bereft the centuries will gaze on
Ever, forever forlorn
Note on the Trans-creation: While the original poem is in a two line stanza format, here I have used four. Also the urdu word tanha is the only one used in the original to convey myriad states of loneliness, but to capture it in English I have used a few additional ones (empty, bereft, forlorn) in addition to lonesome, which I have repeated often to create for the English reader a sense of the original’s rhythm.
The actress Meena Kumari’s only outing into the world as a poetess while she lived is contained in an album titled “I write, I recite” released in 1965. The pieces are in her own voice against a musical score composed by the composer Khayyam. Her voice, with its flawless Urdu diction and its mesmerizing depths and sheer range, does great justice to the poetry in these renditions. Her poetry has been transcreated here in English by Manjul Bajaj.
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