At a time when English writing from Pakistan is all the rage, it's worth remembering that Zulfikar Ghose was writing English prose and poetry long before Pakistan was designated a literary hotbed of the 'post-9/11' world. Born in Sialkot on March 13, 1935, Ghose's early life was marked by frequent transitions: the family moved to Bombay, India, then to England, where Ghose attended secondary school and college. He graduated from Keele University where he became known as a poet and editor of a national anthology of student poems, Universities' Poetry. From 1959, he juggled a teaching career in London with freelance journalism and was part of a group of young poets and writers, many of whom became acclaimed poets, novelists and playwrights.

In 1969 Ghose moved to Texas and worked at the University of Texas in Austin, where he has written the majority of his novels. In the 1970s, Ghose gained international repute with his trilogy The Incredible Brazilian. American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux called the work "a considerable feat of imagination."

Since 2009, Oxford University Press has published three slim volumes of his: 50 Poems: 30 Selected 20 New, and two collections of essays, Beckett's Company and In the Ring of Pure Light.

For Ghose, what matters in writing is expression, how a writer uses language. His collection of essays on writing, In the Ring of Pure Light, should be required reading for all aspiring writers. Over the last two years he has traveled to Pakistan, lecturing and conducting poetry readings at the Karachi Literature Festival and at local schools and colleges.

AH: Do you like Urdu poetry?

ZG: I don't read Urdu unfortunately. I was born in British India and although I can speak a bit of Urdu my Urdu and Punjabi vocabulary has vanished, but I have a feeling for it in my soul perhaps, I am touched by the nuances of the language, the music in a language which only a native can appreciate. I felt that the other night, listening to Tina Sani singing the poetry of Faiz, that was a very moving experience but the problem with the Urdu language is that it does not translate well into English. The Urdu language is very formal. Also it tends to be fond of very large abstract words. English is very concrete. In English poetry, beginning with Chaucer right down to the present there is an appeal to the material world beyond which is a spiritual world. Urdu poetry seems to go directly into the spiritual world.\

AH: Why is that do you think?

ZG: It is the nature of the Urdu language. The way our language develops is the way we see the world. In your essay ['Three poems of Allama Iqbal' available at http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/25/11Hashmi.pdf] you refer to a child's prayer, I quote, 'let me be the voice of the poor and a lover of the old and the infirm and those in pain'; this is Iqbal and I am sure in Urdu these are very moving but in the English language it comes across as a cliche. I have a tape of Ghalib being recited in Urdu, let me quote it: ' roen ge ham hazar bar koi hamain satai kyun' (from Mirza Ghalib's 'Dil hi to hai, na sang o khisht'). It's beautiful and I tried to translate the first line into English and it came out as rubbish, and in Urdu it is so moving. Being familiar with the poetry of the language you are translating into helps. Poets can be good translators; the better a poet is in his native language the better translator he will be. Arabian Nights has been translated by several people but the one that caught my attention was one done by a man born in Lebanon who moved to America, so he knew Arabic and English as a native and his translation is very good.

AH: What would be a good place to start a study of English poetry?

ZG: The post-Elizabethan poets. After Shakespeare, John Donne would be a good point to start, a truly great poet. He has great variety. His love poems from the early years are magnificent: ''for god's sake hold thy tongue and let me love''. This is post-Elizabethan England (after the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603)) when England is beginning to conquer the world, when people like (Sir Francis) Drake are going out. There is a line in Donne's poem "O my America my new found land". He is talking to a lady and calling her America my new found land. The lovers are like a compass, they are far away but joined together, that is metaphysical poetry. And late in his life when he is dying he is terrified that he might go to hell, and he produces a series of sonnets called the terrible sonnets and they are glorious.

AH: How does one keep on writing knowing that you might never reach the level of the great writers?

ZG: You hope that your next work will take you to a level slightly higher. Faulkner says in one of his interviews ''If you were satisfied with what you wrote, there is nothing more to do than cut your throat and quit''. Shakespeare, Donne etc existed so that I may learn from them and attempt to be better. And you have to have the ambition. There is a letter where Keats says 'what is the point of doing anything unless you are the very best' and he very nearly was. Hart Crane the American poet of the early 20th century, says at the age of 22 that ''nine tenths of anything you can think of writing has already been done much better than you ever will do'' so it's no use simply repeating those same old things unless you can find a style in which you can do it in a way it has never been done before.

AH: You live in a different culture [America], how did that impact your thinking and writing?

ZG: I left this country when I was 7. My world has been very English. From here we moved to Bombay and after partition to London. I wrote a book a long time ago called 'Confessions of a native alien' which is supposedly an autobiography. I coined the phrase 'native alien' and described the experience of being exiled, displaced, uprooted.

AH: How did you deal with that feeling?

ZG: When I went to school I was the only brown boy in the 'pink' school and one of the first things people do is to marginalize the outsider by mocking his use of the language ''ha, ha, he can't talk properly'. That resulted in a desire to excel in the use of the language and before 2 years were out I had won the English prize, I was writing poems, and I was getting the prize of the best poem etc. The finest image is that in the 2nd year I was the cricket captain and as you know the captain leads the team into the field and the image of a brown boy leading ten 'pink' boys was somewhat symbolic, defining the fall of the empire.

AH: What should one's intended writing audience be?

ZG: If you write for an audience you are a journalist (not a writer). There has to be an internal compulsion or some overriding ambition like my school experience. The desire to write also comes from reading great writers. People who say they are writing for a certain kind of audience are only creating a product to market. If you aim for that then you are going to restrict your potential. You have Thomas Hardy, for example, writing the traditional novel and then you have James Joyce throwing away the traditional novel and doing something unique and very different. My second novel called 'The Murder of Aziz Khan' is set in Punjab and it has a lot of sociological stuff, traditional, old-fashioned. My next novel ("The Incredible Brazilian") is completely different; the form of it is very experimental and modernist. Striving for the widest possible audience would produce an inferior work because you have to fulfill people's wishes or affirm what they already believe.

AH: Do writers have a social responsibility beyond writing? The whole Progressive Writers' ideas debate?

ZG: I don't buy that. People often demand that writing teach something or make people's lives better. Of the greatest writers of Russian literature Tolstoy is one and Anna Karenina is his greatest work. Chekhov says "not a single problem is solved by Anna Karenina'' and it's a great novel. And yet, again and again there are critics saying that we should be appealing to a larger audience and creating works which address social problems. It's always political action, not writing, that does that kind of thing. In August 2010 when 1/5 of Pakistan was under water, nearly 2000 people had drowned and several millions were displaced and threatened by hunger and disease, were I to write the greatest poem ever written about human suffering it would alleviate no one's misery as much as one small bottle of drinkable water would.

A writer's only responsibility is to write as best as you can and hope that somebody somewhere will be enchanted or made happier by it.

AH: How do your poems come to you?

ZG: Let me give you an example. I was in Karachi and I was being driven to the airport and I saw an image and I wrote a poem called '' An image in Karachi''.

On a mosque, just below the minaret:

silhouetted against the declining sun,

perched on a loudspeaker that broadcast

a call to prayer, absorbed in looking down

at what it could consume next:

a vulture.

There is no formula, no generalization. It is mainly a question of habit, of doing it. You can't wait for your so-called inspiration, like Faulkner said "I have heard about inspiration but never seen it''.


AH: Do prose writers mature a little later than poets?

ZG: If you look at literary history some poets of yesteryears like Keats and Shelley and Byron, they all died early. In prose, for example James Joyce, 'Ulysses' is his greatest novel and it was written in his early 30's and his short stories were done by the time he was 28. I believe maturity is at its best at ages 30 to 35. Virginia Woolf was the same, Samuel Beckett gets better as he gets older but some of his greatest work was in early 30's. However, my friend, Christopher Middleton, in my opinion is the finest writer from England in the 20th century and he recently published his collected poems. He is now 82 and he is producing wonderful new poems every week or so, he is so prolific.

AH: Are you still writing?

ZG: Yes I am. The only physical change is that I have a nap in the afternoon. You have to remember that the brain has a fertility in one's middle years that one does not have in much younger or later years. I always feel like 'the best is yet to come'.

Ali Madeeh Hashmi is a Psychiatrist practicing in Lahore. He can be reached at ahashmi39@gmail.com

Comments (1 comments)

this is a good one

Posted: Sunday, August 05, 2012 by ashishjaitlya from delhi