Abstract
The present study is an attempt to undertake a comparative analysis of two modern “love” poems, namely, Pablo Neruda’s “Tonight I Can Write” and Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Do Not Ask From Me, My Beloved, Love Like That Former One.” Originally composed in Spanish and Urdu respectively, the poems reflect the changing perceptions of the poets towards love and the beloved in the times of social and political crisis. Both of them engage with the dialectic between the individual and collective concerns of the poet-persona, and the manner in which the “lover” reconfigures the priorities of his life vis-à-vis his personal commitment to the beloved and the call of social–political responsibilities. Along with the critical–textual examination of the poems through these perspectives, the study also attempts to locate them within the wider contexts of the poets’ engagement with the ideas of individual and social progress as well as their lifelong struggle against social–political and economic exploitation of the working class under capitalist interventions in the Third World nations. Love, therefore, in the context of this study, transcends the barriers of individual aspirations and represents the collective desire of a community, a nation, or a continent for freedom and liberty.
Keywords: Pablo Neruda, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, poetry, love, comparative literature
Introduction
The emotion of love is perhaps the most common yet the most challenging as a subject of poetry across space and time. It could also be seen as an “open-ended signifier” that has accrued every possible meaning to itself. Love is seen as both sacred and profane—it has been considered as a medium/justification to attain something/someone or even been perceived as an end in itself. With the advent of modernism in literature and art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, among other things, the premises and assumptions constituting the subject-matter of love poetry were also brought into question. Moving on from the Dantean and Petrarchan visions of the beloved and through the Romantic aspirations for/towards imagining her at one with nature, the Modernist interpretations of love and the beloved centred on the less universalised and more quotidian and demystified aspects of their existence. This altered understanding was part of a larger vision that saw literature not as a cloistered aesthetic practice but as one that carried wide-ranging implications vis-à-vis individual–social dynamics in a rapidly changing society.
Also, following the post-War period of the 1920s, poets and men of letters across Europe and America were trying to come to terms with the pessimism and disenchantment resulting from the breakdown of the moral and civilisational order in the society and world at large. There was a growing disbelief in the efficacy and sustainability of the pre-war European world order based on institutional authority of the church and the state. The rise of modernism as a movement in the twentieth century was by itself indicative of a rupture with the stable structures of beliefs and ideologies towards a relatively irregular and discontinuous conception of the post-war reality, made evident by a number of art and literary movements that emerged during the period (Williams; Auerbach; Eagleton). Therefore, in the context of these movements and also the thought-processes that propelled them, the medieval and early modern visualisations of love and longing too were beginning to be seen through markedly different perspectives, even though certain symbolisms and figurative expressions of the past ages did continue to persevere within the new interpretive paradigms of literature and art that came into being during the modern period.
For countries in the Third World (Asia, Africa, and Latin America), the situation was about grappling with the allure of the First World (the Europe and the United States), while at the same time, preserving and projecting their own indigenous cultures as markers of regional/national/continental identities. The political turbulence of the First World was also evident in many of these countries (from the Third World), often resulting in civil wars, dictatorial regimes, and political coups. Literature became a primary yet forceful medium for articulating the passions and aspirations of the masses deceived and disgruntled with the systems of power and administration. The present study is an attempt to undertake a comparative analysis of two poets-cum-public personalities of the twentieth century, namely Pablo Neruda and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, vis-à-vis two poems (one each) composed by them at an early stage of their life and which testify to the changing perceptions towards love and the beloved in the times of social and political crisis. The study shall also address the manner in which the poets, in their unique ways, refashioned their literary–romantic sensibilities in sync with their more immediate identities as “detached” individuals scrutinising their “past” emotions of love and the “sometime” possession of their beloved.
Pablo Neruda: “Tonight I Can Write”
Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto or Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), born in Chile, is considered among the most popular and widely quoted poets writing in Spanish and representing the polyphonic voices from Latin America. A Nobel Prize winner for literature in the year 1971, Neruda was not connected with any of the art and literary-cultural movements, namely, Creacionismo, Ultraismo, Estridentrismo and the like that collectively came under the term Vanguardia (“Avant Garde”) and that emerged in Latin America roughly between 1916 and 1935. However, at a young age, he was a keen observer of the specific features and techniques popularised by these movements, and the publication of his most popular and widely translated book of poetry called Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) in 1924, when he was just twenty, was a sure indication of the arrival of a new poetic voice in Latin America. The hallmark of this new poetic talent was, however, the never-ending endeavour to discover newer ways of articulating thoughts and experiences. As stated by one contributor writing in the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature:
Responding to new stimuli for change was Neruda's fundamental creative propensity; he could be intensely intimate or militantly political; he was able to express the simplicity of elemental things or the complexity of metaphysical despair, to be a chronicler of history, an epic voice of the New World or a conversational anti-poet—in short, to be always in the vanguard of innovation. (Verani 134)
Among the poems collected in the above-mentioned anthology, the most popular has been the one entitled “Tonight I Can Write,” the twentieth poem in the sequence. Originally composed in Spanish as “Puedo escribir,” this poem was translated into English by W.S. Merwin and has since been the most frequently chosen poem of Neruda for anthologies and literature syllabuses. The popularity of the poem lies not only in its being a fond remembrance of the narrator’s love for an unnamed woman in the past, but for also carrying out a self-reflexive critique of the poet’s ability to translate his past emotions into words of poetry in the present. On the one hand, we may see the poem as articulating a deeply felt sentiment of love personally experienced by the poet/narrator, and the poem then becomes a medium or an outlet for him to express and externalise his sense of melancholy through an appeal to the beauty of nature set against the pleasure of her company that he had once relished. On the other hand, the poem can also be seen as an effort on the part of the poet to project the image of the beloved, realised throughout the poem in a fragmented manner, onto the onerous task of penning down the “saddest lines,” the emphasis being more on the actual act of writing down in a manner befitting the emotion rather than letting the words come to him naturally.
The contingent and tentative nature of this poetic enterprise is made evident by the second and third lines of the poem: “Write, for example, ‘The night is starry / and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’” Further, we also need to note the frequent use of “night” both as signifying the time of writing the poem and as an “objective correlative” to sensitise the readers towards its causal connection with the “sadness” of the poet. The reference to the “night wind” further emphasises the intensity of the poet’s longing for his beloved, and the movements in the natural world symbolise the constant churning of memories within him. The narrative, however, soon moves into the past and exposes the fluctuating dynamics of their relationship alternating between a sense of finality and tentativeness on the part of both, as evident from the two lines, one closely following the other: “I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too” (line 6) and “She loved me, sometimes I loved her too” (line 9). This constant changeability of their love in the past is punctuated by two intervening lines of heightened passion of the two lovers amidst the world of nature that stood witness to their union: “Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. / I kissed her again and again under the endless sky” (lines 7–8). The dual action of embracing and kissing suggests respectively a prolonged continuity (night after night) and a repetitive/endless action (like the endless sky). The poet also suggests the inevitability on his part of falling in love with “her great still eyes” (“still” here may refer to being constant as well as being indifferent).
The action soon moves back to the present time as the poet again contemplates writing the “saddest lines” with the memory of her absence, “to think,” “to feel,” “to hear,” thus commanding all his sensory faculties to recreate her presence from the “traces” of her existence still remaining in the poet’s memory. And, as the product of this retrospection, the verses that are generated fall like dew droplets upon the pasture of his mind-scape, against the backdrop of the night that has gained in immensity owing to her absence. Neruda here is trying to fashion an image of his beloved through his fragmentary remembrances of her sometime presence in his life. This facility with fragmented imageries, honed and perfected so early in his life, remained one of the hallmark features of his poetry. It is not that he is trying to piece together these fragments to conceive an imagination of the whole. Instead, he seems to relish the imperfect abilities of his sensory experiences to approximate the persona of his beloved through associative memories of her. The two crucial lines that follow further affirm the gulf that has opened up between the past and present: “We, of that time, are no longer the same. / I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her” (lines 22–23). The constant back-and-forth movement between past and present and the obsessive engagement of the poet-narrator with the certainty of his past commitment coupled with a self-contradictory state of mind in the present (“I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her” [line 27]) expose the time warp within which the poet is entrapped.
The key line towards the end of the poem convincingly sums up the predicament of the poet as he admits: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long” (line 28). The act of writing here, in a way, assumes a kind of therapeutic importance as far as the poet is concerned. He invokes her memory, the image of her past self against the backdrop of their meetings at night, through writing the poem at exactly the same time, as if he is reliving those times, and then, at a gradual pace, he comes to terms with her absence in the present. As the poem progresses with frequent repetition/alteration of lines, the poet attempts to purge himself of her memory, of the pain that she made him suffer, and the poem itself would be the last one he would write for her. However, as we can see, this whole process is somewhat ironical, since by actually trying to efface the memory of the pain caused by her, the poet only ends up immortalising through verse the unfinished story of his love for his unnamed beloved.
Being a poem on love and forgetting, “Tonight I Can Write” reveals a deep philosophical engagement of the poet Neruda with the changing perceptions about love in the context of modernism. As Yee Hang Tam explores in his study on modernism in love, instead of paving the way towards “self-discovery,” the experience of love in the early twentieth century actually symbolises an “encounter with the limits of self-understanding” and “shatters the coherence of the text as a quest for personal and historical meaning” (iii). Reading the poem, one could feel the disjuncture within the poet’s mind as he attempts to relive the memories of the past with his beloved. Such a state of mind is conveyed within the poem through the suggestions of her absence made directly evident in the lines like: “The night is starry and she is not with me” (line 16), “My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her” (line 18), and “My heart looks for her, and she is not with me” (line 20). The poet’s endeavour to refashion the disconnected memories of his beloved into a coherent poetic narrative here signifies an attitude of critical nostalgia vis-à-vis his personal experience of being in love. The aestheticisation/externalisation of this personal experience into a poem, therefore, also involves a radical separation between the sensibility of the lover and that of the poet, the latter emerging triumphant at the end by not only effacing/immortalising the memory of the beloved (as noted above), but also at the same time emphasising his firm resolve never again to write another verse for her. Her memory has been painful for him, and, together with these last verses, he wishes to bury those memories as well. Even though composed at the age of only twenty, the poem “Tonight I Can Write” provides an early view of Neruda’s belief in the power of poetry to transform one’s vision of life. In another poem called “Poetry”, composed by him forty years later (in 1964), he recalls his first attempt at writing poetry: “I wrote the first faint line, / faint, without substance, pure / nonsense, / pure wisdom / of someone who knows nothing” (lines 23–27). Between “nonsense” and “pure wisdom,” Neruda thus forged a lifelong relationship with poetry as an aesthetic as well as a social–ideological pursuit and also the most powerful medium to articulate his response to the contemporary events, with most of which he was directly involved.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz: “Do Not Ask From Me, My Beloved, Love Like That Former One”
Born in the year 1911, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (d. 1984) is one of the greatest Urdu poets of the twentieth century, and a major voice among the progressive writers in both India and Pakistan from about the 1930s till the 1970s. However, his uniqueness among his peers consisted in his ability to carry forth the classical tradition of Urdu poetry into the modern period, keeping the flavours and nuances of the former intact in spite of them being reconfigured to articulate the anxieties and disillusionment of his own times. Writing in the poetic tradition of Ghalib and Iqbal, Faiz combined the metaphorical and suggestive poetic quality inherited from the first with a more practical engagement with society, religiosity, and humanity derived from the second to create an expansive poetic realm for himself. Added to that, his belief in socialism inspired him to conceptualise his poetry as speaking on behalf of the masses in unison; in other words, as Kiernan noted, he strongly believed that “poetry ought to be the servant of a cause, a beacon to ‘poor humanity’s afflicted will’, not a mere display of ornamental skill” (37). However, he also articulated a deeper and pervasive sense of the “individual” (Farooqi), and this sensibility is markedly visible in a number of “love poems” that he composed, including the one chosen for analysis in this study.
Published in 1943 in his first poetry collection entitled Naqsh-e Fariyaadi (Remonstrance), the poem “Mujh-se Pehli-Si Muhabbat, Meri Mehboob Na Maang” (“Do Not Ask From Me, My Beloved, Love Like That Former One”) has attained iconic status as one of his most widely sung and translated poems till the present time. For the purpose of the present study, the translation of the poem by V.G. Kiernan has been considered. Composed in the style of the poet addressing his “sometime” beloved in tones of alternating endearment/detachment, the poem has inspired as well as intrigued critics and connoisseurs alike for its complex juxtaposition of the poet’s personal aspirations for the beloved and the willing sacrifice of the same for the greater and more urgent concerns of the society. The poem could be seen in two parts—the first part is suffused with natural imagery employed to emphasise the poet’s past yet seemingly eternal love for his beloved, much in the line of classical tradition of Sufi love poetry reminiscent of Shams Tabrizi, Rumi, Hafiz, and also of Ghalib to a certain extent. The second part brings the focus back to the hard and repulsive realities of the present—the position from where the poet could have been speaking in the first place—where he is seen as greatly agitated by the dwindling value and sanctity of human life, and thereby the urgent need for the immediate redressal of the inequities and injuries suffered by the downtrodden at the hands of those in the positions of power.
The poem begins with the poet’s emphatic declaration to his beloved—she should not expect him to return the same love he once had for her. And then the action moves into the past, to the times when the beloved meant the “world” for the poet—her presence was the sole reason his life was worth living for. The change between the past and the present is emphasised in the first two lines itself, which establishes a sort of temporal dichotomy that lasts for the whole duration of the poem. The pervasive impact of the beloved upon the psyche of the poet is succinctly stated in the third line, when he says, “There is anguish over you, so what wrangle is there over the sorrow of the age?” Here, we find the image of the pining lover, much in the style of Ghalib (cf. “Dil-e-Nadaan Tujhe Hua Kya Hain”), for whom the high-handed and inconsistent responses of the beloved towards his protestations of love provided enough reasons for grief and anxiety. However, on a more positive note, the poet-lover in Faiz credits his lady-love for her agency in perpetuating the glory of springtime through the warmth of her beauty so much so that there is apparently nothing worthwhile in this world except for her radiant eyes. Interestingly, the poet’s love for his beloved seems evenly proportionate to his appreciation of the external world. Even though the poet’s focus rests singularly upon the object of his love, yet his terms of comparison show his keen awareness of the bounties of nature which in fact draw sustenance from her persona. However, she has not yet requited his love, as evident from the line where the poet asserts, “If you were to become mine, fate would be humbled” (line 6). Such a thing was never to be, as he qualifies in the very next line, yet his wishful imagination hopes it would materialise at some point in the future.
The poet then introduces a couplet that reappears at the end as well, a highly resonant one that captures the core essence of the poem. It would be fitting to reproduce the lines in the original Urdu (in English transliteration): “Aur bhi dukh hain zamane mein muhabbat ke siwa, / Rahatein aur bhi hain vasl ki rahat ke siwa” (“There are other sufferings of the time (world) besides love, / There are other pleasures besides the pleasures of union”) (lines 8–9). One may choose to read these lines, in the context of the poem, as the poet’s abrupt break from a reverie that had transported him to those bygone days of carefree romance. It is as if he is reminded of the irrevocable predicaments of the present that preclude any possibility of his ever going back to revive those days of the past. From another perspective, these lines could also reflect a gradual transition happening with Faiz’s life in the early 1940s, the time when this poem was published. He was a member of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA) and, acknowledging the role played by the association in helping him “cultivate his mind,” he had noted, “as [a man’s] field of vision broadens, he realizes that man’s self is an insignificant thing and not worth writing about. What should be looked at is the experience of an individual belonging to humanity or belonging to a nation” (quoted in Hashmi 104–105). The poem, therefore, also signifies a pivotal moment in Faiz’s self-appraisal as a poet representing the voice/conscience of the individual aspiring to rise above his personal predilections to heed the call of the teeming millions and, at the same time, derive a new kind of satisfaction out of his social-political commitment.
The second part of the poem that follows is loaded with graphic imageries of blatant indignities to which the human body has been subjected across “countless centuries” of dark and bestial exploitation deceitfully camouflaged with draperies woven with “silk and satin and brocade” (line 11). Faiz exposes the insensitive and unlawful commodification of human bodies—soiled with dust and soaked in blood—in the open market of greed and desire. The depiction escalates to the point of being too gruesome, as the poet visualises diseased and putrefied bodies: “Jism nikale hue amraz ke tannuron se, / Pip bahti hui galte hue nasuron se” (“Bodies that have emerged from the ovens of diseases, / Pus flowing from rotten ulcers”) (lines 14–15). It is not surprising that these two lines were expunged from the musical rendition of the song, first sung and popularised by malika-e-tarannum Noor Jehan, the famous Pakistani playback singer, in the 1950s. The poet’s attention is constantly drawn to these revolting images, which are contrasted with the charming, alluring beauty of the beloved—it is as if these are two parallel worlds commanding the poet to enter and inhabit. His priorities, as it is clearly evident, lie with the world of the people outside, and there is nothing, not even the charm of his lady-love, that can distract him from his avowed intentions, further emphasised by the reiteration of the couplet about “other sufferings” and “other pleasures” beside that of love and union. The poem ends with the declaration that the poet made at the beginning of the poem: “Do not ask from me, my beloved, love like that former one” (line 20). The whole poem seems like a justification on the part of the poet to his beloved in support of this statement, and he makes a journey across the times past and present, the world of his beloved and that of the masses, and puts his dual commitments to his heart and his conscience to test before reaffirming his final decision.
In the poem “Do Not Ask From Me, My Beloved, Love Like That Former One,” Faiz manages to juxtapose two crucial areas of engagement of modernist Urdu poetry during the 1930s and early 1940s, namely, social realism (as represented by the poets and writers connected with the Progressive Writers’ Movement [Taraqqi Pasand Tehreek]) and stylistic innovation (represented by poets within the Circle of Connoisseurs [Halqa-i-Arbab-e Zauq]) (Rahman). Elaborating upon the respective positions adopted by these two schools, Rahman further notes:
[W]hile one disengaged with the stereotypes of attitudes, the other resisted traditional poetics. As one contextualized life in the given time and site, the other discovered a language and a form to do so in a manner that was hitherto unknown in earlier phases of Urdu literary history.
In the poem by Faiz under discussion here, the traditional image of the pining lover of the past abruptly transforms into a fiery revolutionary with the passage of time. The second part of the poem gains momentum from the conflictual dualities confronted by the poet-lover. Interestingly, for Faiz, the presentation of this predicament on the part of his protagonist reflected his own struggle and eventual success in keeping alive the connections with the precolonial romantic idealism, epitomised by Mirza Ghalib and Mir Taqi Mir, and, at the same time, articulating the discordant visions and voices of the contemporary times. Even though he aligned with the progressive band of poets and never shied away from expressing his dissent against antiquated establishments trapped within a feudal mindset, he was still attentive towards the preservation of the forms and styles inherited from the poets of the bygone era, for example, the genres of the ghazal and the nazm were revived and refashioned within his poetic practice. In fact, Faiz was highly vocal regarding his own poetic endeavour towards that end, as evident from what he remarked in this regard:
To me the old and the new, the traditional and the contemporary fall in their proper places in the larger composite tradition of literature. The great advantage—or miracle—of the ghazal form, for example, is that you can use it to render themes in traditional diction and still be in tune with contemporary reality. (Quoted in Rahman)
Therefore, seen from the above perspective, the poem “Do Not Ask From Me, My Beloved, Love Like That Former One” retains the spirit of romantic love, while shunning its existence/relevance within the very texture of the poem. The process involving the poet’s reaffirmation of his resolve to choose the ailing masses over his beloved, however, is not straightforward, as we have already seen. The line 17 of the poem: “Your beauty is still charming, but what is to be done?” conveys his state of still being in love with her, even though this confession is followed by an emphasis on the irrevocability of his decision to move on. While very subtly capturing the dilemma of the modern poet vis-à-vis a sense of alienation that pervades the sensibility, Faiz also attempts to provide a vision for the future—a roadmap for the poets of the world to follow. In this regard, Rahman correctly states, that, “he was the last romantic who appropriated the best elements of the romantic tradition in Urdu poetry to configure and represent the vicissitudes of history, politics, and personal dilemmas” (n.pag). One can argue that the poem signifies his transition from a romantic to a modern poet—in his refusal/inability to recreate the aura of his past love, he also denounces the sense of idealism that propelled its articulation in the first place. The second part of the poem talks about a different past altogether, and the poet has to emancipate himself from his personal longings in order to experience the anguish of the past lodged in public memory across centuries.
Implications and Further Analysis
As evident from the foregoing discussion, with special reference to the two poems, there are marked similarities in orientation and aspirations of poets writing within the large cultural geography of the Third World, each of them responding in their respective ways towards various factors like modernism, hybrid identities, opportunities to break with tradition, individual and social responsibilities, etc. The poem of Pablo Neruda discussed here could in fact be seen as the poet’s endeavour to distance himself from his own predilections of the past in order to construct a new vision for the future. In another book of over three hundred poems (divided into fifteen sections) called the Canto General, published in 1950, the poet Neruda embarked on a celebration of Latin America as a new world, a new ideological space with a history of its own, and with new possibilities for the future. Among the poems compiled therein, one may refer to “Amor America” (“America, My Love”, published in the first section entitled “The Lamp on Earth”), and “Alturas de Machu Picchu” (“The Heights of Machu Picchu,” the second section) as strong representative instances underlining Neruda’s position as the quintessential Latin American poet.
The poem “Amor America” traces the history of the land back to the time, prior to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, when man was “earth, clay-pot eyelid of quivering mud, form of clay,” still “tender and bloody” but “in the hilt of [whose] weapon of wet crystal, the initials of the earth were written” (quoted in Costa 109–110). In a style highly resonant of the Biblical myth of creation, the poet takes it upon himself to narrate the actual story of the native American people whose history was subsumed (and thereby erased) under the Spanish colonial enterprise. The twelve-poem-sequence “Alturas de Machu Picchu,” first published in 1946 and later included in the Canto General, makes a vivid representation of the poet’s journey to the Inca ruins along the Andean ranges in Peru. He transforms this individual experience into an epic saga of the Latin American culture beginning with the pre-Columbian times and moving onto the present. He exhorts the “ruins of the dead city” to “speak to me [the poet] through this long night, as though I were anchored down with you” (quoted in ibid. 116). The poet thus becomes the medium through which the past and present of the Latin American consciousness converge and converse, thereby inspiring his fellow inhabitants of the continent to partake in his sheer excitement and amazement at rediscovering the glorious heritage of their shared civilisation. In giving his “voice” to the people, he undertakes the onerous task of representing their centuries-old suppressed agonies and anxieties; while, at the same time, he integrates his own persona with that of the teeming millions and becomes at one with them.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, on the other hand, continued to evaluate and examine the place of individual emotions like love and desire within the larger scheme of social responsibilities. His subsequent collections of poetry, including Dast-e-Saba (Fingers of the Wind, 1952), Zindan-Nama (Prison Thoughts, 1956), and Dast-e-Tah-e-Sang (Duress, 1965), interrogate and integrate the multiple facets of individual identity in the context of changes taking place nationally/internationally (viz. the Second World War, Partition, birth of Pakistan). While a poem like “Bol” (“Speak”), published in Naqsh-e-Fariyadi, stresses upon the freedom of individual agency to speak the truth and considers it imperative on his part to champion the right to speech till the last breath, another poem “Subh-e-Azadi” (“Freedom’s Dawn” [August 1947]), published in Dast-e-Saba, reflects the collective disenchantment with the “long-looked-for break of day” in the expectation of which the poet and his comrades had set out in the first place.
Acknowledging this expansive range of Faiz’s poetry, Sajjad Zaheer once remarked:
There is no doubt that Faiz’s poetry espouses the ideals of revolution, and that it talks of a life fraught with dangers. On a personal and also societal level, his poems evoke the threat of exploitation, both social and economic, the rule of a power-hungry tyranny, the elimination and destruction of the weak and innocent at the hands of the forces of tyranny/capitalism. (Quoted in Farooqi)
His poem “A-Jao Aifriqa!” (“Come, Africa!”), published in Zindan-Nama, evidently epitomises his longing for a free and powerful Third World—this is conveyed through his exhortation to Africa to fight its way out of bondage and slavery. Again, the individual and the collective converge in his personification of Africa as a resurgent rebel-like figure drawn into ecstasy by the rhythmic African drumbeats (“tere dhol ki tarang” [line 1]). It inspires him to gather himself from the dust, to remove the scales of sorrow from his eyes, and, by forcing his way out of misery and helplessness, to transform the iron-collar around his neck into a shield. This aspect of internationalism became a prominent feature of his later poetry, much likely because of his many stints abroad, particularly in the once-colonised countries of Asia and Africa, in various capacities, including being the editor-in-chief of Lotus, a literary journal published by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA) from its central headquarters located in Beirut, Lebanon. In recognition of his accomplishments as a poet and a public intellectual who always championed the cause of the workers and labourers in their struggle against fascism and dictatorial tyranny through his writings, Faiz was honoured with the International Lenin Peace Prize in the year 1962. And it was during his visit to the Soviet Union that he met Pablo Neruda (a previous recipient of the prize in 1953), and the two immediately bonded over their common concerns regarding truthful representation of the people’s history of colonised and once-colonised nations of the world.
Conclusion
Poets like Neruda, belonging as they do to the other “America,” are a “far cry” from the “American Dream” of Walt Whitman based on his enthusiastic and optimistic statement of the promise of an American Utopia, a new Promised Land of regenerated man liberated from the perversities of a decadent civilisation. The Latin American poets instead constantly grapple with and, at times, actually celebrate the identities they are born with. Their own “American Dream” is characterised by multiple and often discordant voices as well as overlapping and superimposed imageries. And despite often being relegated to the domains of “non-history” and “non-civilisation,” they are in fact, we can argue, the inheritors of histories that are polyphonic and present a collage of cultures that speaks to/for everyone. The poem “Tonight I Can Write” thus becomes not only a contextual examination of the universal emotion of love within the changing dynamics of space and time, but also an effort to break new grounds in poetry through skilful juxtaposition of images and metaphors to convey an entirely new array of meanings.
In the case of Faiz too, the poem “Do Not Ask From Me, My Beloved, Love Like That Former One” involves a radical reworking of the classical tradition of Urdu love poetry, and demystifies not only the aura surrounding the figure of the beloved, but also the range of stock behavioural responses expected from a lover. Though it remains essentially a love poem, it nevertheless questions the efficacy of delimiting the emotion as focussed only towards the goal of individualistic fulfilment and instead diversifies the emotion to encompass the larger questions of collective happiness and liberation of the teeming millions inhabiting the Third World. Like Neruda, Faiz too dreamt of a future society free from the evils of tyranny and exploitation, in whatever form they might appear. And it is an optimistic vision that is shared by multitudes of conscious citizens across the Third World—a vision that is yet to be realised, but nevertheless the hope sustains itself on the back of not only the love that people have for poets like Neruda and Faiz, but also the faith they repose on the ideals championed by them. These poets were distinctly “modern” in orientation and philosophical outlook; yet their respective views on modernity did not suggest a break with/from the past, but rather assimilated the spirit of the past with a more revolutionary vision for the future.
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