Noorul Hasan took 20 years to translate 50 poems penned by Meena Kumari. He tells Karan Bhardwaj that the legendary actress escaped the tragedy of her life through her compositions
No one could have described the ‘tragedy’ or labyrinth of thoughts in Meena Kumari’s mind than the actor herself. Her poetry, which reflected her personality to an extent, was widely reverred by her fans especially after her untimely death. One such fan was a Shillong-based professor, Noorul Hasan, who stumbled upon those verses at a local stand. The poems just grew over him day by day which he started translating in English.
“I began the translations 20 years back. After retirement, I fully concentrated on them,” he says. Some 50 poems have been compiled in a book Meena Kumari The Poet: A life Beyond Cinema (Roli Books). They reflect Kumari’s personality, her trauma, her take on popular culture and her attempt to escape all of them.
“Condemned in her work as an actress to go along with the industry’s crude stereotypes of female virtue, Kumari strove in her poetry to evoke the multi-layered realities of what she regarded as her authentic self. But in no sense did the poems disavow their author’s status as a cinematic icon. One of their main themes is the difficulty of living an elevated, spiritual and intellectually curious life in a society dominated by the culture industry. Unable to insulate herself from the anarchic energies of commercial culture, she continually seeks to anatomise them in verse as a means of holding their influence at bay,” observes Daisy Hasan in her introductory chapter in the book.
The Empty Shop shows her declining faith in the showbiz and heroes. Why has Time spread out its wares before meIJ/Where are the things/I used to buyIJ/These spurious toys of pleasure/Paper flowers of fame/These wax dolls of wealth/locked in glass cases (That can melt at anyone’s touch)/These are not the things I wish to buy.
The poem hints at Kumari’s spiritual aspirations and the culture industry’s shallow materialism. Another poem that reflects the pros and cons of her celebrated life is Past and Present. It reads: Each happiness/Is a devastated grief/Each grief/A devastated happiness/And each darkness is a raped light/And each light a raped darkness/likewise/Each present/Is an annihilated past/And each past/An annihilated present.
The book presents both Urdu and English versions. Noorul, who holds equal command in both the languages, has maintained the fluidity and essence of the original writing.
“I was less bothered about the poetess in the beginning but got mesmerised by the sentiments these poems conveyed. I tried to strike a balance in my translations and be sensitive to the cadence and rhythm of the original. I think it has recaptured in the target language,” says Noorul. Kumari portrayed characters whose intense romantic longings swelled to almost demonic proportions and brought nothing but suffering in their wake. “Irritated by the sense that the Indian public saw her simply as a ‘Tragedy Queen’, the actress began to write poetry in Urdu in an effort to evoke the subtler elements of her sensitive and questing sensibility. She was the only prominent actress of her time whose gifts extended to literature as well as film. If the main goal of her writings was to register the ebbs and flows of her own inner life, many of her poems also focussed on those aspects of commercial entertainment which corrupt our understanding of human personality,” says Daisy.