Ghazals Of Ghalib

The Almighty Of Rekhta

Mirza Asadullah Khan (Ghalib)-27-12-1797(Agra) To 15-02-1869 (Delhi)

OTHER LINKS

Indian Classical Music
 

Interpretation-Ghazal-65

 




1.
If there would be no nakedness, the madness remains without status,
I ripped the collar and became naked, thus the kindness of ripping the collar is on my neck.
(If the lover is not naked, then his madness cannot be established. Since the ripping of the collar has made me naked and thus assisted my madness, for this reason I am indebted to it.)
(Divine love is not possible without cutting off relationships with the world. Accordingly, as I keep abandoning relationships, I become indebted to nakedness.)

2.
Just as star-like gleams begin to appear in a burned paper,
In the same way the conjurer restlessness has tied a thousand mirrors onto the wings of my heart.
(With a single agitation a thousand of points of light become visible.)
(In the way that fir-stricken paper writhes, in the same way my restlessness, like a conjurer, has tied a thousand writhing hearts onto the wing of every agitation, and is showing off the spectacle of its restlessness.)
(This verse is so difficult that it is even hard to be sure that I have translated correctly.)
3.

After being free of care, when people become needy, they always consider themselves oppressed and tyrannized and struck down by the sky,
And to their last breath they retain the hope that sometime or other they will certainly receive justice and their star of fortune will rise again.
(When with the revolving of the heavens the time of pleasure goes, it is futile to hope for it to return.)
(He has already looted it, why would he give it back.)
(If we have any claims against the sky for vanished pleasure.)
4.

You can guess what I experience in loving her and what difficulties I am in, she is so suspicious, so uselessly grieved,
When rays of sunlight come through a crevice, then she says the crevice is staring at me.
(When she sees a ray of sunlight that comes through a chink in the wall, my beloved quarrels with me,,,,,,,, you stared at me through the crevice in the wall, that was not a ray of sunlight, but your glance.)
(She is utterly unreasonable, she is blaming an indisputably innocent, passive party (The Crevice) for behavior by another probably innocent, passive party (The Sun), behavior over which in any case the crevice-work has no control.)
(An enemy who becomes angry without reason and holds grief dear.)
5.
If you want to recognize yourself, then become obliterated in God,
Except for this, there is no way to reality through your senses, if you erase yourself, then you would become merged in the essence of the God.
(One ought to achieve oblivion in God and obtain the final culmination of mystical knowledge. Just as when dried grass is used as fuel for an oven, it becomes flame and glows, in the same way the truth of mystical knowledge is made manifest through attainment of oblivion in God.)
(One should prefer one's own inferior insights or talents, rather than becoming indebted to those of others and living with a merely derivative sense of self.)
6.
One feels surprised at the situation of "Asad", he is a wounded one of such style that one cannot understand him,
He himself says to the murderer, keep on practicing----- coquetry in this very way, and let people go on getting slain, the blood of two worlds will be upon my head, you will not be held to account for it.
(It is beyond the bounds of possibility to give sufficient praise to this verse.)
(Coquetry is Doomsday. The verse is irresistible.)
(It is passion, because he wants more of what has already wounded him.)

------x------