Khwaja Mir Dard’s ghazal “Jag mein koi na tuk hansa hoga”

A ghazal by Khwaja Mir Dard.

Ghazal

Nobody in the world will have laughed a littleWithout weeping in the midst of the laughter

Even on purpose, she will not have heard my lamentIf she heard it at all, she will have heard it

Let us see, this time from grief my lifeWill not survive, or if it survives, what then

A heart safe from the hands of the worldThere will be one, if any is left

The state of me, the grief-stricken, whoeverHeard it, will have wept

The heart’s wounds turn fresh againSomewhere a bud will have bloomed

Suddenly she rose and took my nameWhat will have come into her mind

At my laments, in the world, someoneWill hardly have stayed without sighing

But on her, God knows, the effectWill not have come, or will have come

That she held back from killing meSome ill-wisher will have said so

The heart too, O Dard, was a drop of bloodIt will have fallen somewhere among the tears

Difficult words

• Jag: the world
• Tuk: a little, slightly
• Qasdan: on purpose
• Nale: laments
• Saalim: safe and sound
• Gham-zada: grief-stricken
• Jis tis ne: whoever
• Ghuncha: bud
• Yak-ba-yak: suddenly
• Asar: effect
• Bad-khwah: ill-wisher
• Qatra-e-khoon: a drop of blood

Background

The refrain of this ghazal of 11 couplets is “hoga” (will be): each couplet is a guess, not a certainty. The opening couplet, “Nobody in the world will have laughed a littleWithout weeping in the midst of the laughter”, speaks of joy and grief walking together. In the closing couplet, the heart is called a drop of blood that may have fallen somewhere among the tears. The Rekhta introduction quotes Mir as saying that Dard is a “powerful” poet of Rekhta and a “fresh-blooming garden of poetry”².

Source of the text: The text published on Rekhta, word for word¹.