1. My every hair’s a tongue standing to order.
In verse I now describe a certain barber.
2. Off royal pomp he knocked the crown, and booed.
Beneath his hand lay every head subdued.
By it he was the sun’s equal in scope.
Took for his blade a lancing ray to hand.
In honor does the vein give up its place.
6. A hair’s worth won’t he yield to sorrow’s vein.
His blade is lighter than a hair–it’s plain.
7. By shearing heads now he’s the head honcho.
His laws like water over people’s heads do flow.
8. He never moistens heads. It’s all the same.
Seeing his waist, do hairs all melt in shame.
Of idols’ eyes and brows are you reminded.
They’re competition for the eyebrow.
It cups the rose to bleed the nightingale.
A figure incomparable at work.
From envy did the flowering branch turn red.
That flowering branches readily shed their flowers?
That he knocks back goblets to the mirror?
Each night he drinks umpteen cups of water.
Contrives to burnish mirrors bright as noon.
And yet he tests his scalpel on my hair.
Stands always, I see, with gourd in hand.
20. By him was I immersed in seas of blood.
How strange! Look–I drown by a buoying gourd.
The pauper from the steam-bath comes, hoping.
On heads, like wine, tubfuls of water.
They stand before him like cups of water and weep.
24. O come, world-warming sun, come here, I say!
Our night without you turns to blackest day.
But only when I fell into a swoon.
So that on nothing could my hands stay clenched.
27. That radiant sun then raised me from below.
You might say he’d shorn me of all shadow.
May I walk safeguarded under his shade unfurled.
Mullā Tāhir Ghanī Kashmīrī (d. 1668-69) was the most famous Persian-language poet of the region of Kashmir in South Asia. He practiced the “Speaking Anew” (tāza-guyi) stylistics of the ghazal that had arisen across the Persian world in the early 1500s. In its intricate deployment of kinds of syllepsis, paronomasia, oronym and amphiboly–collectively termed ihām–whose non-salient (baʿīd) meaning or meanings the poet privileged over their salient (qarīb) ones, his poetry constitutes a highpoint of the polysemy and semantic density characteristic of Speaking Anew.
Prashant Keshavmurthy is Assistant Professor of Persian-Iranian Studies in the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. His interests include pre-colonial Persian-Urdu literary culture and South Asian intellectual histories.
English translation copyright (c) Prashant Keshavmurthy, 2014.