qafas meñ mujh se rūdād-e chaman kahte nah dar hamdam
girī hai jis pah kal bijlī vuh merā āshiyāñ kyūñ ho
قفس میں مجھ سے رودادِ چمن کہتے نہ ڈر ہمدم
گری ہے جس پہ کل بجلی وہ میرا آشیاں کیوں ہو
क़फ़स में मुझ से रूदाद-ए चमन कहते न डर हमदम
गिरी है जिस पह कल बिजली वह मेरा आशियां कयूं हो
1) in the cage, telling me the events of the garden, don't be afraid, friend
2) the one on which lightning has fallen yesterday-- why would it be my nest?
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Did this whet your appetite for some more Ghalib? For more Ghalib, head over to A Desertful of Roses: The Urdu Ghazals of Mirza Asadullah Khan "Ghalib", a site created by Frances W. Pritchett, Columbia University. Enjoy!
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Addendum
This post generated a fair amount of interest on my Facebook page. To help explicate the couplet here is what one commentator has to say about this couplet:
"This verse is so sharp and bleak and deadly-- who can encounter it without a wave of dread? It captures that first cold moment when someone is confronted with irreparable loss, when the knife is just being withdrawn. (And that someone could always be us, can always be any of us at any moment.) The fatal slash has already been made, so swiftly and deeply that the doomed person doesn't quite realize his doom. In a moment the blood will gush out, in a moment the victim will give a terrible, hopeless cry. That moment is not quite yet, it's still half a second away-- but how unbearably deep down it makes itself felt, how frantically the victim is fighting it off! The victim both does and doesn't realize his doom. He's desperately (and vainly) refusing to realize it-- and thus beginning the long and agonizing process of realizing it.
All this complexity of dread, denial, and acceptance is conveyed in two small lines. The lines aren't even informative speech, but (of course) are Ghalib's favorite inshaiyah performances. The first line consists of a command, the second of a question. And yet, ... the amount of background information conveyed by phrases like 'in the cage', and by the particular framing of the utterances is simply astonishing. It makes us realize afresh the value of a stylized poetic universe, full of images, tools, and devices that can make two tiny lines go on forever and contain the cosmos.
Like a mushairah verse, this one remains uninterpretable until the very end, so that the last unbearable question hits you all at once with the whole weight of the verse behind it. But whereas a classic mushairah verse is experienced and relished fully in that moment, this one lingers and lingers; in fact it's unforgettable. Its depths of anguish are all the more potent for being merely implied; they are even actively rejected by the apparent sense of the verse, which makes them all the more deadly.
The second line always seems to me also like an arrow aimed right at God. It's a fierce, unanswered, maybe unanswerable question. Maybe one deadly blow of fate is random, like my capture and imprisonment. But why another, why the lightning on-- out of all the nests in the garden-- my nest? We know, too, that God is not going to answer."
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