Bulleh Shah 1680-1757 is undoubtedly the Punjab’s rebellious poet beyond measure. He defies to be categorized as a traditional Sufi mystic or esoteric spiritualist with arcane mantras. Surprisingly but not without reasons, he is the creative genius who transcends the linguistic frontiers of Punjab with seamless ease.

From the shores of the Arabian Sea in Sindh to the ever moving waters of the Bengal, and from the turbulent waves of mighty Indus in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the placid flow of the river Yamuna, he is sung and celebrated by the people who unmistakably find their voice in his verses taut with emotions that challenge all the givens and evoke dormant but provocative potential which ordinary mortals carry in the skein of their undiscovered being.

He has the good luck, which eluded him in his life, in the sense that the best vocalists, classical and folk, of each generation since 18th century have been singing his verses with an overflow of passion and genuine devotion in their private and public performances.

In our times Bulleh Shah has attracted some of the finest translators who rendered his Kafis a lyrical genre employed by the classical poets who are misleadingly called Sufi in generic terms into English language. Taufiq Raffat late, the finest Pakistani poet of English language, and Muzzafar Ghaffar, a poet, writer, cultural activist and man of letters, are on the top of the list of translators who have made Bulleh Shah’s poetry accessible to English readers.

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The secret of Bulleh Shah’s popularity is not difficult to decipher: he questions the sacred and doubts the accepted, refuses to take sufferings as human fate and loss of human dignity as natural, debunks the myth of unavoidable hierarchy and declares the human identity based on colour, creed, caste and class unacceptable.

Muzzafar Ghaffar’s “Bulleh Shah within reach” is a monumental work in two volumes published by Ferozsons, Lahore. The book is more than mere renderings as has been indicated in the title that it carries” Text in Nastaliq; Gurmukhi; Roman; Extensive glossary; poetic translation; line-by-line discourse”.

One can imagine the years of sheer hard work that must have gone into the making of this literary work. The book can help the initiated and uninitiated in equal measure to understand Bulleh Shah’s oeuvre.

The translator makes every effort to offer his readers a faithful rendering of the original text while not losing sight of nuances and suggestiveness. The cliché that what is lost in translation is poetry is a half-truth as we all know that the best poetry of the world inevitably comes to us through translation.

Poetry that comes as non-poetry in translation suffers from some intrinsic deficiency. Muzzafar Ghaffar’s translations show us vividly a glimpse of Bulleh Shah’s poetic world.

“Bullah who am I, what do I know?/Neither in mosques an orthodox acolyte/Nor in any blaspheming rite/Nor pure amongst the defiled, recondite/Neither Moses am I, nor Pharaoh/Bullah who am, what do I know? /I am not in any Vedic tome/Nor in heady drinks a foam/Nor in tipplers who legless roam/Neither in wakefulness, nor in slumber a glow — “. The read of translations is highly rewarding. The book must be in your library which certainly has a long shelf life.

Samina Asma is a poet who unlike most of her contemporaries is not desperate to be in the limelight. She keeps a low profile in an age in which poets and writers crave for public relations, self-promotion, state patronage and media attention at the cost of their artistic dignity as if such things can make or unmake them.

“Koi Lat Nimani” A Wan Beam is her second book of verses published by Sanjh Publications, Lahore. It will hopefully be received well by poetry lovers who in any case are dwindling fast in a modern society that puts low premium on any creative endeavor that is not commercially driven.

A good thing about her poetry that we find in this book is that she generally shows no inclination to be sentimental as a large number of poets, especially women poets tend to do.

Composing saccharine songs is not her forte. She focuses on things ordinary and prosaic. She feels concerned with everyday mundane experience. Ordinariness and mundaneness relived at the level of imagination turns into poetic stuff.

And Samina’s poetic stuff is not typically poetic because she employs a language that is not unnecessarily emotionally charged and thus is close to natural speech which can be considered an artistic achievement.

She is no feminist, it seems, though she is deeply concerned with sufferings of woman which has become her fate in a patriarchy ridden society like ours.

While dealing with woman’s experience in a world dominated by men, she doesn’t lose sight of its political dimension which usually remains buried under the debris of impotent sighs.

Her poetry shows us maturity of creative expression. Her selection of themes, treatment of experience and use of language carry a mark of a conscious artist who is never afraid of taking sides in social life replete with conflicts and contradictions.

One of her recurrent themes is reflections on the realizable potential that remains unrealized due to iniquitous structure of human society. “O, you year passing by, what you carry protected in your fold: unrealized wishes, unmet needs, shattered dreams, baited breaths, tears, loneliness/Sweep everything clean/Get out of the fold quickly/And let your broom drop a little smile that I kept hidden somewhere in a corner”. — soofi01@hotmail.com