The Search For Meaning.

Prelude: This is a literary translation of an Urdu song/ghazal. I know you are tempted not to read it but give me a moment to convince you. It's a beautiful song and language shouldn't be a barrier to getting across its depths to as many people as possible. This is not a literal translation at all and my goal in translating this song was to capture way more of the sentiment, the linguistic and poetic devices of the language and nuance of metaphor than to convert one language to the other. It is an expansion of the words of the song, but an expansion that is informed by a study of the work of the artist(s) in question, an exploration of the sentiment, and the conceits of Urdu poetry of the time. It does, definitely, contain my voice as well, because I strongly feel translation falls flat when you have to suspend the writer within. Translation, as a form of writing, is a contract between artists to extend our voices to honour the voices of each other, by circumventing the limitations of language, and filling the gaps in our two languages, by using our own voices to create the illusion of the missing pieces that have been left behind. This is really the first translation I have ever written in my life. The song is called Dhoondo Gay (You Can Search, but I would translate the title to A Search For Meaning), it is sung by Abida Parveen, but it was written around the year 1900 by a poet named Shaad Azeemabadi. I'll leave a link to the song at the bottom of the post.

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Dhoondo Gay: A Literary Translation.

If you search for me, all over the world, you may find the world is almost bereft of my kind. I am of a species under threat of extinction, but my rarity may not be a function of how precious I am, I may only be special, because I am dying out. The sentiment is akin to being an animal that has never encountered another one of its own kind, and while this usually only happens to animals kept in captivity, I have travelled the world to find my kind, and you may go looking as well, but I worry, we shall both return empty-handed. The feature that is my defining quality, not in terms of personality but in interpretation of who I am, is my relentless desire for pain and sadness. To hold it in my heart long enough to study and explore it, to lose myself in it, and to wear it as  a performance that informs and decorates the world in the horrifying hues of human splendor. I exist to be a trenchant elucidation of the pain of the human condition. I am a metaphor for humanity. My people, all of us who exist as a collective by virtue of the fact that we breathe together, I implore you to bear witness to the dream I embody. The dream of a creature who contains such willingness to carry the burden of despair and suffering, so as to turn it into art and meaning for you.

To pain, you who is the primary recipient of and responder to my communications and the most vital supplier of my life's purpose, the purpose of giving myself to creation, and through it to god, I ask you then to settle an issue that has plagued my consciousness for eons. Is it me? Am I the bearer of a heart that is inherently restless? Is this my authenticity, was the peripatetic lifestyle of my soul assigned to me at my inception? Is this just who my heart is? Or is it you — not *you* pain, directly, but those entities that I explore, the ones that take me to you, like life, love, devotion and surrender — that combine with the elements of who I am to make me so restless of heart? Am I myself or am I my response to you? Is it I who is driven to locate the madness (of love) or is it you who is driving me to it?

As a person plagued by the affliction of constant wonderment and the unyielding desire for discovery, I stand silently at the shore. The water compels my contemplation to quietude, it demands, as love does, a form of surrender that cannot exist without an internal silence. The depths of love are daunting, they threaten to drown out the noise, and as a person composed entirely of noise, I worry I shall sink in them. The depths threaten to consume me. The ocean of love, as I see it, beckons to me, its treacherous and thrashing waves seem to disappear as it tells me not to fear its depths for it is nothing but a shallow, fordable pond. It doesn't mean shallowness as we understand it today, it is not shallow for being lacking in intensity or meaning, it is shallow because it is easy. Love is easy and giving oneself to it once we arrive at the destination, within ourselves, where it is found, is free from danger.

Thousands of flaneurs journey towards this destination of love. This journey is not a walk, it's not a mountain to climb, it is the deconstruction of self that allows you to reach an agreement with life where you are as grateful for and accepting of its vicissitudes as you are of its joys. It is only at the place where pain is as much part of your coterie of confidants as is joy that you reach this destination of fearless love. Thousands walk to it, a mere few actually arrive at this destination. To my contemporaries, the ones who are connected to me because we live with a shared awareness of the three generations that have come before us and in anticipation of the three that will follow, I ask that you validate my accomplishment by noticing it. For even if I am not a creature that is rare or elusive, I definitely am one who has succeeded in arriving at the doorstep of love, I am here like a beggar who will take treasures in the form of alms, and accept love even in the form of suffering.

At this destination of love, I have a message for human beings from flowers. To the decaying flesh that is the birdcage of our mortal, fearful existence, the flowers have sent a hopeful invitation even as they wept at the cruelty of our inescapable condition. They ask that we come to them if we want, they cannot transform us into what they are, they cannot alter the fact that to be human is to be open and subject to pain, but they can show us the resplendence of life that makes its cruelties feel like a negligible price to pay for our consciousness. In the bloom of flowers, we may find, that the festering flesh within which we are housed, doesn't have to contain us. One must only look for meaning to find it everywhere.  

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This is the song.