Scan of Zain Baweja’s notebook.

In our series Making of a Poem, we ask poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Zain Baweja’s “Gloss,” which appears in our Summer issue, no. 256, plays with the  etymological lineage and various translations of the word gul, or “rose,” across Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and English, among others. Our editorial intern James Langan, who pored over many archaic dictionaries to fact-check Baweja’s poem, spoke with him for this installment.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

I don’t know when my fascination with the word gul began. I kept encountering novel uses of it in my readings of Urdu and Persian literature. In the Indo-Persian epic Dastan-e-amir hamza, for instance, there is a passage that uses the phrase gul khana (“to eat roses”) as the term for scarring oneself. It turns out, according to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, that it was once a custom for lovers to burn themselves with a hot iron to prove their intense passion; it was also customary to treat “madness” with cauterization. 

A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (1884) by John T. Platts. Scan of page 911, via Internet Archive.

These archaic uses led me to bilingual dictionaries, like John Thompson Platts’s A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English and Francis Joseph Steingass’s A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. In both texts, each entry is formatted as one dense and continuous paragraph. Multiscript headwords, definitions, idioms, and compound phrases are all crammed together into a single block of text, separated only by semicolons and em dashes. I felt a peculiar shock when reading these entries, which gather usages that traverse centuries and geographical regions and place them side by side. It is the sort of temporal compression found in a poem, and it attuned me to the mutability of words I thought I knew. 

I started collecting all the definitions of the word gul I could find. I wrote down entries from Platts and Steingass as well as colloquial uses from my own memory. My notes began to look like a glossary for some absent text. I decided to retain that indexical structure as a poetic form. 

I was drawn to the template of translation (or faux translation) that this form enables. Some of the entries in my poem are literal translations, which makes the original word or phrase feel foreign in English. Others are my own exaggerations or inventions. 

Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote this poem? 

I was thinking of a couplet by the eighteenth-century Urdu poet Siraj Aurangabadi:

khun-e-dil ansuon men sarf hua
gir gai yih bhari gulabi sab

the heart’s blood was spent in tears
this full gulabi was spilled entirely

Siraj’s couplet hinges on the word gulabi. Its most immediate sense is “pink” or “rose-colored,” but he uses it here to also mean “wine vessel” or “red-colored wine,” both of which are now obsolete definitions.

This ambiguity, called iham, is a key feature of classical Urdu poetry. It is used to initially misdirect the listener toward a surface-level meaning, and then to prompt a host of other interpretations. Consider the following couplet by the eighteenth-century poet Mir Taqi Mir: 

kya kahiye kali sa wo dahan hai
is mein bhi jo sochiye sukhan hai

what can one say–that mouth is like a bud
in this, too, there is sukhan

The word sukhan primarily refers to speech, discourse, words, or poetry. But in the eighteenth-century Persian dictionary Bahar-e-ajam, Faruqi finds a niche, secondary meaning—doubt. Several interpretations of the couplet then arise. One reading is that even though the beloved’s mouth is as tiny as a bud, it is in fact capable of speech. Another (latent) reading is that there is doubt or debate about whether the beloved’s bud-like mouth exists at all. There are more possibilities depending on what meaning of sukhan you apply.  

After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, pressure from colonial and reformist officials helped subdue the stylized quality of Urdu poetry. They saw its wordplay, punning, and ambiguity as signs of decadence, and were hostile to the recurring metaphors of Persianized Urdu—the rose (gul), the nightingale (bulbul), the desert (dasht), et cetera. The Aurangabadi couplet quoted above displays many of these suppressed devices, which spoke to my own aesthetic proclivities. I wanted to write a poem that is nonrepresentational and steeped in the formalized topoi of the ghazal. 

Do you write primarily in English or Urdu? Do you ever write in a hybrid of the two?

What does it mean to write in a hybrid of the two languages? Does it mean to plug English words into Urdu forms? Or to include a smattering of words and phrases from Urdu, thereby “chutneyifying” English? 

Scan of Zain Baweja’s notebook.

I am increasingly dissatisfied with the postcolonial notion of “hybrid” identity, by which the poem is a composite of two things at once—native and foreign, colonized and colonizer, Urdu and English. It suggests that languages and poetic traditions are closed systems, each with their sovereign territories, which the writer merely mixes.

The word gul entered Urdu through Persian. It also spread to a myriad of other languages, including Turkish and Pashto. It is reductive, then, to see this poem as neatly divided into Urdu and English parts, each with its distinct roots, as the organicist metaphor of “hybridity” implies. There are moments in “Gloss” where these stock binaries blur. The lexical item gul kis, for example, recalls the English word kiss. In another instance, the word gulabi defies English translation—“gulabi girana / to spill one’s gulabi.” The nineteenth-century lexicographer James Murray would say the “foreign” Urdu word has become “naturalized” in English, which—as with “hybridity”—envisions a legible multiculturalism. I think this is a nationalist fiction. 

Such frameworks treat languages as known and given quantities, instead of open-ended regions that can be endlessly extended. I am trying to write poems in which linguistic flux is itself an entry point, and it becomes unclear what belongs to whom. 

Do you ever autotranslate? Do you translate other poets or writers?

Most recently I’ve translated a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto and a poem by Baudelaire. After several reworkings, both translations strayed so far from the source text that they became works in their own right. The Baudelaire translation became a poem about loitering in Karachi, and the Manto translation turned into a short film I made from still photographs. My notebooks are also full of fragmented translations of Mir Taqi Mir, whose voice, I suspect, is an underlying presence in “Gloss.” He has written a gulabi couplet, too, which possibly builds on Aurangabadi’s. 

umr bhar hum rahe sharabi se
dil-e-pur-khun ki ek gulabi se

for a lifetime I remained drunk
from the singular gulabi of a blood-filled heart

A literary tradition is not simply inherited but rather actively constructed through acts of reading—a kind of archaeological excavation. The works of Mir are one such site, and translation is one of my tools for digging. 

Zain Baweja’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Literary Activism, Diode, and the Oxford Review of Books, among other publications.