Life's transience in an unfurling bud

Anisur Rahman's The Essential Mir, which presents Mir Taqi Mir's work in three languages alongside a commentary, makes his poetry accessible to the Anglophone reader

- Shafey Kidwai

Since time immemorial, suffering, denoting lived anguish of colossal loss, has been the dominant metaphor and emotional register of poetry.

Intriguingly, its stand-in expression in the Hindustani dard sets forth an intricate and endless process of splitting, upending, and fulfilment that simultaneously negotiates rejection, self-contempt, resignation, sensual longings, and assimilation. It articulates a complex, unarticulated, and tantalising nagging that lives within. Its cultural, emotional, and aesthetic dimensions, with semantic liberties, are sparklingly showcased by Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1830), often referred to as Khuda-e Sukhan (God of Poetry). His creative negotiations with the world conjure a lingering sense of cultivated incoherence and poignantly portray the elemental human predicament.

Mistakenly labelled the poet of 72 nashters or lancets — a reference to his couplets of which he wrote more than 13,000 — Mir's deep truths, cloaked in casual levity, refuse consolation. His heart-wrenching shers create a self-inflicted metaphysics that upends and encompasses anguish, sorrow, disgust, grief, heartache, and spiritual elevation. His indomitable idiom, showcasing a vanishing world, resists commonplace English equivalents. No wonder then that despite the inventive efforts of Ralph Russell and Khurshid ul Islam (1968), Ahmad Ali (1973), SR Farouqi (2002), Vikram Seth (2004), Gopi Chand Narang (2018), and Ranjit Hoskote (2024) to make Mir accessible in English, he, unlike Ghalib and Iqbal, remains less known to the Anglophone world.