Συνίστωρ λύχνος, Suratapradīpa: “Transcontexting” Ghālib

Urdū dīwān 39.11

Satyanārāyaṇa Hegḍé

Abstract: Based on the translation strategy of Mīr al-Sayyid Ghulām ‘Alī “Āzād” Bilgrāmī, I detach
Ghālib Urdu dīwān 39.1 from its default Islamicate-Ṣūfīc context and graft it in the Sanskritic-
Brahminic nāyikābheda context in an act of “transcontexting.”

Keywords:Hans-Georg Gadamer ۰ Umberto Eco ۰ Āzād

Bilgrāmī ۰ Translation ۰ Interpretation ۰ Transcontexting ۰ Hermeneutics ۰ Overtranslation ۰

Translation and Interpretation

Umberto Eco2 echoes Charles Sanders Peirce “that meaning, in its primary sense, is a
‘translation of a sign into another system of signs.’” 3 Peirce, says Eco, “uses translation in a
figurative sense: not like a metaphor, but pars pro toto (in the sense that he assumes
‘translation’ as a synecdoche for ‘interpretation’).” 4 A translation, says Eco “…is an actual
and manifested interpretation” 5 and “a species of the genus interpretation, governed by
certain principles proper to translation.”6 However, pertaining to interpretation as a form of
translation, Eco says:

“If in order to translate one must make a series of hypotheses about the deep sense
and the purposes of a text, then translation is certainly a form of interpretation-at
least as insofar as it depends on a series of previous interpretations. However, to say
that translation is a form of interpretation does not imply that interpretation is a
form of translation. No logically educated mind would say so.7

And also:

Since, as we shall see, the category rewording covers an immense variety of types
of interpretation, at this point it would be easy to succumb to the temptation to
identify the totality of semiosis with a continuous process of translation- in other
words, to assert that every interpretation is a form of translation .

Such an idea has been at times supported by various hermeneutical philosophers.

Heidegger, during a university course of Heraclitus in 1943, proclaimed the identity
between translation and interpretation […] Gadamer states that every translator is
an interpreter, and I agree, but this does not mean that every interpreter is a
translator. In another place he says that the task of the translator is not qualitatively
different from the one of an interpreter, but differes only in the degree of intensity.
Such a difference in degrees of intensity seem to me fundamental… 8

Eco doesn’t quote Gadamer, but I think he has in mind these passages from Truth and
Method on the point of Gadamer holding every translator to be an interpreter:

Let us again start by considering the extreme case of translation from a foreign
language. Here no one can doubt that the translation of a text, however much the
translator may have dwelt with and empathized with his author, cannot be simply a
re-awakening of the original process in the writer's mind; rather, it is necessarily a
re-creation of the text guided by the way the translator understands what it says. No
one can doubt that what we are dealing with here is interpretation, and not simply
reproduction. A new light falls on the text from the other language and for the
reader of it. The requirement that a translation be faithful cannot remove the
fundamental gulf between the two languages. However faithful we try to be, we
have to make difficult decisions. In our translation if we want to emphasize a feature
of the original that is important to us, then we can do so only by playing down or
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entirely suppressing other features. But this is precisely the activity that we call
interpretation. Translation, like all interpretation, is a highlighting. 9
And further:

Only that translator can truly re-create who brings into language the subject matter
that the text points to; but this means finding a language that is not only his but is
also proportionate to the original. The situation of the translator and that of the
interpreter are fundamentally the same.

In bridging the gulf between languages, the translator clearly exemplifies the
reciprocal relationship that exists between interpreter and text, and that corresponds
to the reciprocity involved in reaching an understanding in conversation. For every
translator is an interpreter. The fact that a foreign language is being translated
means that this is simply an extreme case of hermeneutical difficulty-i.e., of
alienness and its conquest. In fact all the “objects” with which traditional
hermeneutics is concerned are alien in the same unequivocally defined sense. The
translator's task of re-creation differs only in degree, not in kind, from the general
hermeneutical task that any text presents.10

The ancient Graeco-Roman authors used interpres11 (“interpreter”) for “translator” (Horace
Ars poetica 133-3412; Cicero De finibus 3.4.15;13 St. Jerome, Preface to Eusebius;14
Augustine De civitate dei 14.1715). But interpreter (interpres) is “An agent between two
parties, a broker, factor, negotiator;” “An explainer, expounder, translator, interpreter”
(Cicero, De optimo genere oratorum 5.14;16 Jerome Epistula 57, Ad Pammachium Optimo
genere interpretandi17). For the ancients, to interpret was to act as an agent between two
languages, two parties, two texts, two cultures; to be a broker, a negotiator, explainer,
expounder- a translator. Gadamer, however, does equate interpretation with translation.
Here’s Gadamer in “Classical and Philosophical Hermeneutics”:

Certainly the ineradicable [unaufhebbare] and necessary distance between time

periods, cultures, classes, races, or even between persons, constitutes a more than
subjective [übersubjektives] moment that imparts life and tension to each
understanding. One can describe this as follows: the interpreter and the text each
possess his or her and its own horizon, and each moment of understanding
represents a fusion of these horizons. Thus, in New Testament scholarship (above all
in Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling) as well as in literary criticism, and also in the
further development of the Heideggerian approach, the definition of the
hermeneutical problem has been fundamentally pushed away from a subjective and
psychological basis and moved in the direction of an objective meaning [a meaning
coming from the object] mediated by effective history [ in die Richtung des
objektiven, wirkungsgeschichtlich vermittelten Sinns].

The seminal “given” that resides in the mediating of such distances is the language
in which the interpreter (or translator!) brings what he or she has understood newly
to language.18

And also in “Text and Interpretation”:

In light of all this, one can understand the increasing importance of the concept of
interpretation. “Interpretation” is a word that originally arose in reference to the
mediating relationship, the function of the intermediary between speakers of
different languages; that is, it originally concerned the translator and was then used
to refer to the deciphering of texts that are difficult to understand. 19

And more explicitly further in the same essay:

The ultimate goal in everything I have discussed so far has been to show that the
relation between text and interpretation is fundamentally changed when one deals
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with what is called the “literary text.” In all the cases we have discussed so far, we
have seen the motivation for interpretation come to light; something in the
communicative process was constituted as a text, yes, but the interpretation, like the
“text itself,” was subordinated and ordered to a certain process of reaching
agreement in understanding [das Geschehen der Verständigung ]. This corresponds
perfectly, of course, to the literal meaning of the term interpres, which refers to
someone who stands between and therefore has first of all the primordial function of
the interpreter of languages, someone who stands between speakers of various
languages and through intermediary speaking brings the separated persons
together. In the same way as an interpreter overcomes the barrier of a foreign
language, so also within one’s own language, when disturbances of agreement in
understanding arise, something like this translation procedure is required, whereby
the identity of what is being asserted is found by going back to the communicative
event, and this means by dealing with it as a text. 20

In Sanskrit literary theory vyākhyāna (“commentary”) is tatsamānārthakapadāntareṇa

vistareṇa tadarthakathanam21-stating the meaning by paraphrasing with synonymous
words; i.e., “translating”; ṭīkā, (“interpretation”) is tatkartur abhipretasya śabdāntareṇa
vivarṇam22-explaining the purport by equivalent words; i.e., “translating.” Indeed
padārthokti, “stating the meaning of the words of the text” is one of the five defining
features of vyākhyāna, “interpretation”. I’ll therefore posit interpretation as a form of
translation,23 viz. “translating” the topos of the text being commented/interpreted. Eco
himself24 characterises Borges’ “Averroës” 25 as “One of the most blatant examples of
cultural misunderstanding,” charging Averroës with “cultural stupidity.” 26 Averroës’
interpretative/commentatorial failure, however, is directly attributable to his reliance on
Abū-Biśr Mattā bin Yūnus al-Qunnā’ī’s Arabic mistranslation of Aristotle’s Poetics.27 I’ll
invoke here Schliermacher’s (1813) philosophical distinction between domesticating and
foreignizing translation strategies.28 “Averroës” misinterpretation is due to his mistranslation
on account of his domesticating translation strategy, which is, by its very nature, “always
ideological,” “fundamentally ethnocentric”29 and topophagic,30 whereas the foreignizing
strategy’s xenocentric and topoemic.31 The poet, critic, lexicographer, literary theorist and
novelist Shamsur Rahman Faruqi presents a view similar to that of Gadamer and Iser:

Translation too is a type of interpretation and a part thereof and isn’t limited merely
to translation from an unknown or other language. We keep translating even from
our own language in order to understand a text. Translation failure leads to wrong
commentary or interpretation in any language. And if the text’s ironical or satirical,
it’s possible that a translation error might occur even in one’s own language. Lack of
familiarity with textual conventions, or ignorance of a text’s latent potentialities also
cause failure of translation from one’s own language. Sometimes a text’s in the form
of a code [koḍ] and must be decoded 32 in order to be understood. If a wrong
method is used to decode, it’s akin to translating wrongly and is a failure of
interpretation.33

I’ll be discussing couplet 39.1 (hereafter “39.1”) of the Urdu dīwān of the famous Mughal
Persian-Urdu poet Mirzā Asadullah Bêg Khān “Ghālib” (1797-1869 CE, hereafter “Ghalib”):34

At night
when the beloved
was illumining the asembly
of privacy’s seclusion
Every candle’s wick
was a thorn
in the lantern’s robe35

The “Agitated Candle” and the Radiant Beloved

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The majority of the commentators 36 implement a semantic disclosure 37 by “blowing up”

“assembly-illuminer” (majlis faroz). They thus abduct,38 presumably as a result of taking an
“inferential walk,”39 this text’s pre-supposed aboutness,40 its textual topic41 as Radiance. Its
isotopy,42 the Radiant Beloved (jalwah-e meḥbūb) is of considerable antiquity in Persian-
Urdu poetics, from the ideologically overcoded 43 intertextual frame44 of Moses at TTūr,45 the
Ṣūfī topos of Hierophany46 (tajallī).47 The phrase khār-e kiswat is a borrowing of the Persian
phrase, khār-e pīrāhan, “What afflicts, pains, is hurtful”48 and khār dar pīrāhan rekhtan (dar
jaib afgandan), “To afflict.”49 Dihkhudā50 glosses khār-e pīrāhan with kināyah az mukhill-o
mū’zī ast, “allusion to a disturber and troubler.” The Commentators interpret this couplet to
mean that the candle, envious of the Radiant Beloved is “pricking” the lantern-cover in
jealous agitation.

This reading, however, is problematic. khalwat in Arabic (khalwah) is “privacy, solitude;

seclusion, isolation, retirement; place of retirement or seclusion, retreat, recess; secluded
room etc.”51 The majority of the commentators gloss khalwat as “to be empty, secluded.”
The most salient meaning of jalwah is the sense of manifest visibility, the very antithesis of
khalwat. jalwat: khalwat kī żid.52 nāmūs (Arabic), from the Greek νόμος, (nomos) is
“Reputation, fame, renown, esteem, honour; dignity;” “disgrace, reproach, shame;
bashfulness, modesty, chastity.”53 The majority of the commentators gloss nāmūs as ‘iṣmat,
“chastity”, the social connotation being feminine sexual chastity, modesty and seclusion.
The topic of Radiance and the isotopy of the Radiant Beloved presuppose a manifest
“public” Beloved and are thus irreconciliably “impertinent.” 54 with this text’s intensely
“private” cloistered beloved, described as khalwat-e nāmūs. khalwat-e nāmūs is therefore
blatantly contrary to the syntagmatic majlis,“assembly, congregation, company, party,
meeting; convivial meeting; convention, congress, council, conference” 55 as well as the
paradigmatic Tajallī/Jalwah of the Radiant Beloved. If this is so, then there’s no
explanation for the “agitated” candle and this interpretation fails.

Retranslating the Lexemes of 39.1

Can the lexemes of 39.1 be retranslated? Retranslation here’s deciding which semantic
property of a lexeme to blow up and which to narcotize, 56 necessitating an inference based
on abductive reasoning. Retranslation’s thus resignification. I’ll start with majlis faroz. Wājid
Daknī (One of the traditional commentators) metaphorically glosses majlis faroz as “one
who brightens a gathering, that is, one who’s present” and states that this “is used as a
term of respect to indicate presence” ( y‘aney majlis kā rawshan karnewālā y‘aney ḥāżir-o
mawjūd. majlis faroz ḥāżir-o mawjūd ko t‘aẓīman kehtey haiñ).57 There’s bisemy (īhām)58 in
Khalwat. “Solitude, seclusion” is its most salient meaning, 59 but its non-salient meaning60 is
“copulation” (mujāme‘at kardan),61 “sexual intercourse.”62 khalwat-e ṣaḥīḥ/ṣaḥīḥā is “to be
alone” (tanhā honā), “a husband and wife’s meeting for lovemaking at a place devoid of
others” (khāwind jorū kā hambistarī key liye aisī jagah ikaṭṭhā honā. jahān koī awr nah ho ).
khalwat karnā is “to make love, connected to marital lovemaking” ( hum soḥbat honā.
khalwat-e ṣaḥīḥā karney se murād hotī hai ).63 nāmūs is “to keep secret”, “hide”, “conceal
some thing”; “to confide a secret to someone”; “confide in someone, let some one on a
secret, make someone one’s confidant;” “to confide a secret.” 64 Nafīsī65 inter alia glosses
nāmūs as ṣāḥib-e rāz, “confidant” and āgāh bar bātT in,“one who knows a secret” as well as
kasay kih makhṣūs bāśad bar āgāh būdan bar rāz,“one especially chosen to be entrusted
with a secret” and very interestingly, as mard-e sukhan cīñ wa nammām, “a tale-bearer and
calumniator/whisperer.” Mo‘īn 66 inter alia glosses nāmūs as “sirr, rāz.” Mo‘īn then gives the
idiom nāmūs shakistah shudan and glosses it as āshkār shudan-e rāz (“revealing a secret”).
fānūs too is bisemic. The salient meaning of fānūs is “lantern,” but its non-salient meaning
is “a whisperer, a tale-bearer, a pickthank,” 67 “tell-tale, slanderer,”68 “calumniator and tale-
bearer” (nammām-o sukhan chīñ),69 “tell-tale, tattler” (sukhan chīñ, lutrā),70 “slanderer”
(sukhan chīñ).71 The GhiyāsT al- Lughāt glosses fānūs thus:

The original meaning is tale-bearer ( sukhan chīñ). A lantern draped over a candle is
so called since it emits/spreads light.72
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Since fānūs can be disclosed as “tattler,” I’ll “translate” it (i.e., abductively infer it) as
signifying73 a candle.74 The “tattler” candle is a popular topos in Persian poetry:

The candle wanted

to tattle
our lovemaking’s secrets
Thank god
its heart’s secret
seized its tongue!
(Ḥāfiẓ, dīwān 87.2)75

All those who’re busy

tattling secrets
like a candle,
At night
scissor-blades
will seize their tongue
(Ḥāfiẓ, Qaṣīdah dar madaḥ-e Shāh Shaikh Abū Isḥāq 3.17)76

If the candle itself’s your rival,

hide your secrets from it
For this brazen babbler
can’t hold its tongue
(Ḥāfiẓ, dīwān 122*)77

Since fānūs can be translated as “tattler” and “tattler” further translated as “candle,”
kiswat-e fānūs can be semiotically resignified as “candle’s robe.” I’ll further translate
“candle’s robe” as the candle’s own wax body:

Antipater presents Piso

a wax-robed candle,
Cronos’ rush-lamp,
bound by a strip of thin bark.
If he lights me and prays,
I’ll burn with a light
signifying that the god hears
(Antipater of Thessalonica, Anthologia Palatina 6.249)78

Thus, the hemistich rishtah-e har sham‘a khār-e kiswat-e fānūs thā can be resignified to
mean “every candle’s wick was pricking the candle itself like a thorn.” After resignifying
39.1’s key lexemes, I’ll retranslate it:

At night
when the beloved
made love bashfully
Every candle’s wick
pricked it
like a thorn

“Translating” Cross-Cultural Contexts

The lexemes of a text can be translated, but what about a text’s context? Though texts are
linked to definite contexts,79 context’s indefinite80 and “is not a fixed given, but something
that can be just as variable as the word at issue” 81 and “we do not have an agreed
normative principle for deciding what a context is.”82 I’ll posit context as polysemic,
heterogenous, and fluid.83 Translatio is, inter alia “a carrying or removing from one place to
another, a transporting, transferring;” (of plants) “a transplanting, ingrafting;” “a pouring
out into another vessel.” Translating a text’s context is recontextualizing it by “translating”
(i.e., “moving)” it into another context, a procedure I’ll dub “transcontexting.”
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“Transcontexting” a text involves a paradigmatic macro-abduction,84 i.e., inferring which

literary-socio-cultural context to blow up/narcotize for a given text, just like translating
lexemes involves a syntagmatic micro-abduction,85 i.e., inferring which semantic property of
a polysemic lexeme to blow up/narcotize.
I’ll posit, vide an abductive inferential walk86 the “translated” context (the genus, the whole,
the type, i.e., other similar texts) 87 of this text (the species, the part, the token) as the
nāyikābhedā genre of Sanskrit amatory poetry (śṛṅgāra kāvya), its sub-context poems
about love-in-union (sambhoga śṛṅgāra) and its sub-sub context the topos of the ingénue
embarrassed about lovemaking (lajjāprāyarati mugdhā). nāyaka-nāyikābheda is an ancient
taxonomical typological genre of Sanskritic literary Heroes, Heroines and go-betweens, the
earliest exemplum of which is the Treatise on Dramaturgy (Nāṭyaśāstra, first century?)
attributed to the sage Bharata. Heroines are classified in Sanskrit texts on dramaturgy,
erotics, rhetorics and poetics based on physiognomy, age, marital status, sexual maturity,
emotional temperament, love-states, fidelity etc.88 The Forehead-Anointment of the Erotic
(Śṛṅgāratilaka) ascribed to Rudraṭa (mid-ninth century?) is the first Sanskrit text exclusively
on nāyikābheda. Bhānudatta Miśra’s (fifteenth century) Boquet of Aestheticized Emotion
(Rasamañjarī) is another famous Sanskrit text exclusively on the topic of nāyikābheda.89
The original meaning of mugdha is “confused,” later coming to mean “foolish,” “silly,”
“young,” “charming,” “charmingly innocent” etc. 90 mugdhatā/maugdhya (naïveté), one of
the sixteen “affected actions born from love” ( hāvās, Nāṭyaśāstra 13.31-32) became a
typological designation in the nāyikābheda taxonomy for the “naïve” ingénue Heroine, the
mugdhā nāyikā. The mugdhā’s defined as she who’s “transformed by the arrival of first
love, averse to lovemaking, soft-spoken, slow to anger and extremely bashful”
(prathamāvatīrṇayauvanamadanavikārā ratau vāmā kathitā mṛduśca māne
samadhikalajjāvatī, Viśvanātha, Mirror of Literature [Sāhityadarpaṇa] 3.58). One of the
91

sub-types of the mugdhā is the “ingénue coy about lovemaking” (lajjāprāyaratiḥ), who
douts the lamp because she’s embarrassed being ogled at nude and hence prefers
lovemaking in the dark. Kālidāsa indites this topos in the Meghadūta:

Where
lovers’ impassioned fingers
pry open silken robes
loosened by undoing the
waist-knot
of embarrassed ruby-lipped women
whose flustered fistfuls of hastily-flung rouge
reach the tall, dazzling jewel-lamps,
but in vain
(Kālidāsa [fourth century], Uttaramegha 70)92

Even now
I remember
her bashfulness
when we first made love:
my hands gently grazing
her waist-knot-
her blowing on the lamp
and quenching its quivering flame
with her ear-lotus
(Bilhaṇa [eleventh century], Caurapañcāśikā Western-southern recension no. 41)93

I pulled off her upper robe,

she hid her breasts under her arms,
I pulled off the lower,
she bent, pressing her thighs together.
When my gaze fell on her pubes
eyes downcast, embarrassed,
she blew on the lamp-
its flame quivered
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but didn’t extinguish;

so she flung her ear-lotus at the lamp,
quenching it
(Saduktikarṇāmrata [thirteenth century] 2.130.1)94
In transcontexting 39.1, I’ve detached it from its Islamicate-Ṣūfī context and grafted it in
the Sanskritic-Brahminic nāyikābheda context. My precedent for this aberrant
transcontexting95 is “Ḥassān al-Hind” Mīr al-Sayyid Ghulām ‘Alī “Āzād” Bilgrāmī’s (AH
1116/1704 CE-AH 1200/1786 CE, hereafter “Āzād”) Indian Gazelles (Ghizlān-al Hind, 1764-
65 CE). The Ghizlān’s a Persian translation of the third and fourth part of Āzād’s own Arabic
text The Coral Rosary of Indian Traditions (Subḥat al-Marjāñ fī Āthār Hindustān, 1763-64
CE). The nāyikābheda section (dar bayān-e nāykābhed)96 where Āzād uses verses from
Persian poets as well as his own compositions as exempla to illustrate the theoretical tenets
of nāyikābheda97 is a translation of the fourth part of the Subḥat. Āzād’s strategy is a poetic
of defamiliarization,98 “foreignizing” the domestic rather than “domesticating” the foreign.
Āzād transforms the experience-near into the experience-distant 99 by detaching100 Persian
ghazal-texts from their Islamicate context and grafting 101 them in the frame102 of the
Sanskritic-Brahminic nāyikābheda context (ash‘ār-e fārsī kih dar nāykābhed āwardah mī
shawad).103 Āzād’s transcontexting strategy, a métissage of Sanskrit, Braj and Persianate
literary cultures is a paradigmatic leap,104 an aberrant, disseminative decoding of these
texts’ dominant primary code,105 a “surgical” opening of closed texts.106

“Voyeur” Lamps

The mugdhā douts the lamp because the lamp too ogles her:

Nearly extinguished,
but curious to see
what the young couple will do
at the height of lovemaking,
the aesthete love-lamp107
ganders its neck
at night to ogle
(Saduktikarṇāṃrata 2.148.2)108

A lamp ogling a lovemaking couple is an ancient Graeco-Roman topos:109

We’ll reveal all, rightly, to you alone,

who stand near us in our bedroom
when our bodies tangle and twist
in Aphrodite’s love-knots;
none ever shut out your watching eye.
(Aristophanes [448-380 BCE], Ekklesiazousai 5-10)110

Philaenis, flood with oily dew the lamp,

silent witness of acts which mustn’t be spoken of,
and then leave.
For Love alone dislikes a living witness.
And, Philaenis, close the door tightly.
And you, dear Xantho,-
But now, o bed, lovers’ friend,
learn what Aphrodite’s left behind
(Philodemus [110-40 BCE], Anthologia Palatina 5.4)111

Antigonē and I:
chest to chest
breast to breast
lips to lips
skin to skin.
I’m silent about other things
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which the lamp witnesses

(Marcus Argentarius [60 BCE], Anthologia Palatina 5.128)112

Bedroom lamp
I, a lamp,
confidante of the sweet bed
will keep silent,
do
whatever you want
(Martial [born between 38-41 CE], Epigrammata 14.39)113

Pseudohypotextual Palimpsests, Urdu nāyikābheda

I’ll posit the synistor lychnos/ratipradīpa and lajjāprāyarati mugdhā texts as fictional
hypotexts or pseudohypotexts114 upon which I’ll palimpsest 39.1 (along with a few
hypotexts). The candle-wicks are agitated because of the lajjāprāyarati mugdhā. I’ve
abducted, inter alia, the following narrative contexts for the wicks to prick the candle
(semantically disclosing fānus as “tattler candle” as well as “lantern”):

1) The candle’s taken in the sight ( synistor lychnos/ratipradīpa) and vigorous

sounds of the lovemaking couple (Vajjālagga 320, 322) and is
“excited/agitated” and can’t wait to “slander” what it’s seen and heard since
it’s the nāyaka’s love-rival/raqīb (Ḥāfiẓ). Hemacandra at Deśīnāmamālā 8.74.1
glosses halhala as “tumult caused due to curiosity” ( tumulammi kouäy
halhalaṃ).115 Dhanapāla’s Prakrit lexicon, the Pāialacchīṇāmamālā 827 glosses
halhala as “haste” (halhaö tarā).116 The Pāiasaddamahaṇṇavo117 glosses
halhala/halhalaä inter alia as “haste” (tvarā), “agitation” (haḍbaḍi), “tumult”
(halphal), “haste” (śīghratā), “eagerness” (autsukya), “longing” (utkaṇṭhā).

2) The candle’s struck dumb in the presence of the au naturel beloved:

At night
face-to face
with the beloved
I was speechless
like
the candle’s tongue
(Mīr “Dard”)118

Like a candle
I’m
all tongue, head to foot
But I haven’t the courage
to speak up
(Mīr “Dard”)119

It’s therefore agitated/restless/uncomfortable since it’s unable to tattle what

it’s seen and heard.

3) The candle’s agitated at the sight of the mugdhā, since she’s going to quench
it (the lajjāprāyarati mugdhā texts) and hence pricks the lantern in a
desperate bid to try to break out and escape the mugdhā.

4) The candle can’t ogle the lovemaking couple (the ratipradīpa texts) since the
lantern obstructs/veils the candle’s Male Gaze and hence the agitated candle
pricks the lantern in irritation.
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5) The candle’s agitated at the sight of the mugdhā, since she’s going to quench
it and hence it pricks the lantern/covering to desperately urge it to do its job
and protect it from being quenched.

4.4. Transcontexting, Overtranslation, Reading Anew

The Ṣūfī-anagogic is the dominant default context for Ghalib’s ghazal-texts.120 The “always-
already interpellated”121 addressee of the “always-already-read”122 Ghalibean text’s
prejudiced123 by the “local knowledge”124 and the “small world”125 of the Islamicate-Ṣūfīc
cultural encyclopaedia. This addressee participates 126 in a community127 that indulges in
“language-games”128 following implicit rules not by choice, but “blindly” 129 and risks
elimination from the language game130 upon deviating from this community. Isn’t the
dominant Persianate ghazal-poetic an abject,131 “counter-poetic”132 to the Sanskritic-
Brahminic kāvya “ethos and worldview,”133 its carnivalesque inversus mundus, its
“semiotically incommensurable,”134 grotesque “Other”? In “heretically” 135 transcontexting the
patently Ṣūfī-anagogic 39.1 in the context of the Sanskritic-Brahminic erotic nāyikābhedā
genre, haven’t I “ovetranslated” 136 and violated the “privileged intersubjective cultural
community meaning”137 and the “responsible and consensual judgement of a community of
readers-or of a culture”?138 Haven’t I repudiated the “cultural encyclopedia comprehending a
given language and the series of the previous interpretations of the same text” 139 built up
by a tradition of over a century and two decades of sustained commentary on Ghalib’s
Urdu dīwān? Isn’t my transcontexting strategy, located at the periphery 140 of the Ghalibean
semiosphere141 a private language (private Sprache)?142 Haven’t I indulged in hermeneutic
nihilism143 and violated the habitus and literary field 144 of Ghalib studies by aberrantly
transcontexting 39.1 in the frame of nāyikābheda?

I submit mea non est culpa to these charges. The polyphonic 145 nāyikābheda’s “Sanskritic-
Brahminic” as well as Mughal. 39.1’s thus culturally bisemic, feinting towards the Ṣūfī-
anagogic code, but amenable to being decoded by the nāyikābheda code. Despite the fact
that an entire community of Model Readers has decoded this text using the Islamicate/Ṣūfī
code for a century and two decades, this code here is tantamount to a paranoiac 146
“Averroësian” overinterpretation.147 Transcontexting 39.1148 isn’t anything new, but is rather
an old thing spoken anew,149 a hybrid translation strategy to polysemically read afresh a
century and two decades-old interpretative tradition and interpret anew a Hellenic-Indic
stranger in the Persian-Urdu city:

If there’s an interpreter here,

fetch him
There’s a stranger in the city
who has
much to say
(Ghalib, Fārsī dīwān)150

Appendix
(Texts of the Quoted Poems)

shab kih woh majlis faroz-e khalwat-e nāmūs thā

rishtah-e har sham‘a khār-e kiswat-e fānūs thā
(Ghalib Urdū dīwān 39.1)

ifshā-e rāz-e khalwat-e mā khwāst kard sham‘a

shukr-e khudā kih sirr-e dilash dar zabān girift
(Ḥāfiẓ)
chū sham‘a har kih bah ifshā-e rāz shud mashghūl
shabash zabānah-e miqrāż dar zabān gīrad
(Ḥāfiẓ)
gar khwud raqīb sham‘ast asrār azū bapôshāñ
kāīñ shôkh-e sar burīdah bañd-e zabān nadārad
 10

(Ḥāfiẓ)
lampáda kērochitōna, Kronou typhērea lychnon
schoinōi kai leptēi sphiggomenēn papyrōi,
Antipatros Peisōni pherei géras. en dé m’ anapsas
euxētai lampsō pheggos akousitheon
(Anthologia Palatina 6.249)

nīvībandhochhvasitaśithilaṃ
m yatra bimbādharāṇāṃ kśaumaṃ rāgādanibhratakareṣvākśiptsu
priyeṣu
arcistuṅgānabhimukhamapi prāpya ratnapradīpāñ hrīmūḍhānām bhavati viphalaprerṇā
cūrṇamuṣṭiḥ
(Uttaramegha 70)

samākṛṣmṭam vāsaḥ kathamapi haṭhātpaśyati mayi kramādūrudvandvaṃ jaraṭhaśaragauraṃ

mṛgadṛśaḥ
adyāpi tāṃ prathamasaṃgamajātalajjāṃ nīvyāṃ prahiṇvati karaṃ mayi mandamandam
phūtkārakampitaśikhātaralapradīpaṃ karṇotpalena nijighāṃsum ahaṃ smarāmi
(Caurapañcāśikā no. 41)

aṃsākṛṣṭadukūlayā sarabhasaṃ gūḍhau bhujābhyām stanāv āḳrṣṭe jaghanāṃśuke

kṛtamadhaḥsaṃsaktamūrudvayaṃ
nābhīmulanibaddhacakśuṣi tayā vrīḍānatāñgayā priye dīpaḥ phūtkṛtivātavepitaśikhaḥ
karṇotpalenāhataḥ
(Saduktikarṇāmrata, 2.130.1)

nirvāṇagocaragatopi muhurniśāyāṃ kiṃ ceṣtịtaṃ taruṇayoh suratāvasāne

ityevamākalayituṃ sakalaṃ kalāviduddgrīvikāmiva dadāti ratipradīpaḥ
(Saduktikarṇāṃrata 2.148.2)
soi gar monōi dēloumen eikotōs, epei
kan toisi dōmatioisin Aphroditēs tropōn
peirōmenaisi plēsion parastateis,
lordoumenōn te sōmatōn epistatēn
ophthalmon oudeis ton son exeirgei domon
(Ekklesiazousai 5-10)
Ton sigōnta, Philaini, synistora tōn alalētōn
lychnon elaiērēs ekmethysasa drosou,
exithi. martyrēin gar Erōs monos ouk ephilēsen
empnoun. kai pēktēn kleīe, Philaini, thyrēn.
kai sy, philē Xanthō, me.sy d’ ō philerastria koitē,
ēdē tēs Paphiēs isthi ta leipomena
(Anthologia Palatina 5.4)
sterna peri sternois, mastōi d’ epi maston ereisas,
cheilea te glykeroīs cheilesi sympiesas
Antigonēs, kai chrōta labōn pros chrōta, ta loipa
sigō, martys eph’ oīs lychnos epegrapheto
(Anthologia Palatina 5.128)
Lucerna cubcularis
dulcis conscia lectuli lucerna
quidquid vis facias licet, tacebo
(Martial 14.39)
rāt jab pohoñcā maiñ us key rū ba-rū
jūñ zabāñ-e sham‘a gum thā mudd‘ā
(Mīr “Dard”)
sar tā qadam zabāñ haiñ chūñ sham‘a go kih hum
par yeh kahān majāl jo kuchh guftagū kareñ
(Mīr “Dard”)

biyā warīd gar īnjā buwad zabāndāney

gharīb-e shahar sukhan-hā-e guftanī dārad
(Ghalib Fārsī dīwān 162.8)
Notes
1. Paper presented at the International Symposium Literary Translation: Challenges and Perspectives
organized by the Department of French-University of Mumbai and Istituto Italiano di Cultura-Mumbai
held at Mumbai University, Kalina on 11 th March 2015. I thank Dr. Vidya Vencatesan, Associate
Professor and Head of Department of French for inviting me to present this paper at the Symposium.
All translations from Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and Urdu are mine unless otherwise noted.

2. Eco 2001,69.

3. Peirce, CP 4.127.

4. Eco 2001,69.

5. Eco 1984:35, my ellipsis.

6. Eco 2001’80. cf. Eco 2001,65-129 on “Translation and Interpretation” and Eco 2003,123-74.

7. Eco 2003,123, my emphasis.

8. Eco 2003,124-5, my emphasis and ellipse.

9. Gadamer 2004,387-88, my emphasis.

10. Gadamer 2004,389, my emphases.

11. inter-prĕs: An agent between two parties, a broker, factor, negotiator; An explainer, expounder,
translator, interpreter; ; an astronomer; a soothsayer; interprĕtātĭo: an explanation, exposition,
interpretation; a translation, version ;Signification, meaning; an explanation of one expression by
another (The source of discussion for all Latin lexis here is Lewis & Short 1879).

12. Nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fidus/ Interpres : nor must you be so faithful a translator, as to
take the pains of rendering [the original] word for word; nor by imitating throw yourself into straits,
whence either shame or the rules of your work may forbid you to retreat (for the whole passage, see
Horace, Ars poetica 128-134). Horace in the Ars poetica (20 BCE) advises authors/poets against
translating with hyper-fidelity. A Carolingian commentary attributed to Heiric of Auxerre (Remigius’
predecessor at the monastic school) gives the following commentary of Nec verbo verbum- Quasi
haec faceres tunc non poeta sed interpres, idest glossator et singularum vocum expositor esses - As if
to say, if you’d be doing these things, you wouldn’t be a poet but an interpres, that is a glossator and
an expositor of individual words. This reading is repeated in another commentary: Nam dico nec
curabis reddere verbum alicuis auctoris exponendo illud tuo verbo; quoniam sic non vocaberis poeta
set tamen interpres, idest translator et expositor verborum - I now say that you shouldn’t render aome
author’s word by expounding it with your own word; because then you won’t be called a poet but
rather an interpres, that is, a “translator” and expositor of words.

13. In De finibus 3.4.15, Cicero is discussing Stoic doctrine with Cato. Cato says: “Experiamur igitur,”
inquit: “etsi habet haec Stoicorum ratio difficilius quiddam et obscurius. nam cum in Graeco sermone
haec ipsa quondam rerum nomina novarum… non videbantur, quae nunc consuetudo diuturna trivit;
quid censes in Latino fore?” (Rackham 1931:230) To which Cicero replies: Facillimum id quidem est,
inquam. si enim Zenoni licuit, cum rem aliquam invenisset inusitatam, inauditum quoque ei rei nomen
inponere, cur non liceat Catoni? nec tamen exprimi verbum e verbo necesse erit, ut interpretes
indiserti solent, cum sit verbum, quod idem declaret, magis usitatum. equidem soleo etiam quod uno
Graeci, si aliter non possum, idem pluribus verbis exponere. et tamen puto concedi nobis oportere ut
Graeco verbo utamur, si quando minus occurret Latinum, ne hoc ephippiis et acratophoris potius
quam proegmenis et apoproegmenis concedatur; (Rackham 1931:230-2): Cato: “Lt’s try then” he
said, “however difficult and obscure Stoic doctrine might be.” Once the terms they used for their new
ideas were unacceptable even in Greek, long usage made it familiar, but what do you suppose will
happen in Latin’s case?” Cicero: “There’s no problem whatsoever” I said. “If Zeno can invent a new
term to match a new unfamiliar idea, why can’t Cato? Nonetheless, there’s no need to copy word-for-
word when there’s already a familiar word conveying the same meaning, which is the mark of an
unskilled translator. When there’s no alternative word available, I usually express a Greek word by
several Latin ones.”
14
. difficile est enim, alienas lineas insequentem non alicubi excidere; arduum, ut quae in alia lingua
bene dicta sunt, eundem decorem in translatione conservent. Significatum est aliquid unius verbi
proprietate: non habeo meum quod id efferam, et dum quaero implere sententiam, longo ambitu
vix brevis viae spatia consumo. Accedunt hyperbatorum anfractus,dissimilitudines casuum,
varietates figurarum; ipsum postremo suum, et, ut ita dicam, vernaculum linguae genus. Si ad
verbum interpretor, absurde resonat; si ob necessitatem aliquid in ordine, [vel] in sermone
mutavero, ab interpretis videbor officio recessisse. (Jerome, Interpratatio Chronicæ Eusibii
Pamphilii Præfatio Hieronymi, Patrologia Latina 27 col. 34-35): It’s extremely difficult to follow
another man’s lines and uniformly stick to the original line-length. It’s hard to preserve in
translation the elegance of what’s been so well expressed in another language. Every word has
it’s own meaning; I’ve no word to convey the meaning and while I try to satisfy the sense, I
might take a long detour and cover but a small distance of my journey. We’ve to also account for
the intricacies of transposition, variations in cases, the diversity of rhetorical figures, and, finally,
a language’s peculiar native idiom. A literal translation sounds absurd and if I’m forced to change
the word-order, I seemingly fail my duty as a translator…
15
. Proinde confusi inoboedientia carnis suae, tamquam teste poena inoboedientiae suae, consuerunt
folia fici et fecerunt sibi campestria, id est succinctoria genitalium. Nam quidam interpretes
“succinctoria” posuerunt. Porro autem “campestria” Latinum quidem uerbum est, sed ex eo dictum,
quod iuuenes, qui nudi exercebantur in campo, pudenda operiebant; unde qui ita succincti sunt,
campestratos uulgus appellat (Augustine, De Civitate Dei 14.17): And therefore, being ashamed of
their own flesh’s disobedience, witness to their disobedience while it punished it, “they sewed fig
leaves together, and made themselves aprons,” that is, cinctures for their loins; for some translators
have rendered the word by succinctoria.
16
. Cicero in De optimo genere oratorum 5.14 (“The Best kind of Orator”) introduces his own
translations of the speeches of the Attic orators Aeschines and Demosthenes: Converti enim ex Atticis
duorum eloquentissimorum nobilissimas orationes inter seque contrarias, Aeschines et Demostheni;
nec converti ut interpres, sed ut orator, sententiis isdem et earum formis tamquam figuris, verbis ad
nostram consuetudinem aptis. In quibus non verbum pro verbo necesse habui reddere, sed genus
omne verborum vimque servavi. Non enim ea me adnumerare lectori putavi oportere, sed tamquam
adpendere (Beieri 1830:448-9)- “That is to say I translated the most famous orations of the two most
eloquent Attic orators, Aeschines and Demosthenes, orations which they delivered against each other.
And I did not translate them as an interpreter (translator), but as an orator, keeping the same ideas
and the forms, or as one might say, the “figures” of thought, but in language which conforms to our
usage.
17
. Ego enim non solum fateor, sed libera voce profiteor, me in interpretatione Graecorum, absque
Scripturis sanctis, ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est, non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere
de sensu: For I not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek (except in the
case of the holy scriptures where even the word-order’s a mystery) I render sense for sense and not
word for word (St. Jerome, § 5, Epistula 57, “On the best kind of translating,” Ad Pammachium
Optimo genere interpretandi, a letter (Epistle 57) addressed to the Senator Pammachius ( ad
Pammachius) in 395 CE. Patrologia Latina 22 col. 568.

18. Gadamer 2007,62, my emphasis.

19. Ibid., 167.

20. Ibid.,179.

21. apratipatyādinivāraṇaprayojanakam tatsamānārthakapadāntareṇa vistareṇa tadarthakathanam

[…] padacchedaḥ padārthoktir vigraho vākyayojanā. ākśepeṣu samādhānaṃ vyākhyānaṃ
paṅcalakśaṇam. ākśepotha samādhānam vyākhyānaṃ ṣaḍvidham matam ityanyatra
pāṭhāntaram.sarvatra vyākhyāne bījam tu apratipattiḥ vipratipattiḥ anyathāpratipattiśca
ityanusandheyam (Nyāyakośa’s gloss on vyākhyāna, Jhalkikara-Abhyankar 2011,828, my ellipsis):
Stating the meaning of the root text, using different words which have the same meaning as those in
the root text, with the aim of preventing lack of understanding, wrong understanding, or false
understanding…. “Commenting has five characteristic features: word-division, stating the meaning of
the words, analyzing grammatical compounds, construing the sentences, resolving objections.” A
divergent lectio has it that there are six aspects of commenting, with solutions and objections kept
distinct. In every commentary, however, the foundation should be thought of as preventing confused,
contradictory, and contrary opinions.

22. mūlagrañthasya apratipattivipratipattyañyathāpratipattinivāraṇena tatkarturabhipretasya

śabdāñtareṇa vivarṇam ṭīkā (Nyāyakośa’s gloss on ṭīkā, Jhalkikara-Abhyankar 2011:306): ṭīkā is
glossing the import of the root-text with other words having a similar meaning to prevent lack of
understanding, wrong understanding or false understanding.

23. Data maxima venia to Eco 2003,123. See Iser 2000,5-12 (“Interpretation as Transalatibility”) for a
position contra to Eco.

24. Eco 2003,85.

25. In Jorge Luis Borges’ celebrated short story, “Averroës’ search” (Borges 1974,1:582-88), Averroës,
working on his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics is stumped by two inconmprehensible words
tragoedia (“tragedy”) and comoedia (“comedy”). Two clues to the solution of his problem occur, but
he’s unable to recognize them. The first clue is when he sees some urchins playing in the street,
playing the parts of the muezzin, the minaret and a crowd of faithful worshipers. The second clue
occurs at the Qur‘ānist Farach’s place where the merchant Abulcasim, returned from remote countries
narrates a strange story about something he has seen in Sin Kalan (Canton), which is an account of a
dramatic performance. The gathering misreads the narrative. Averroës could have used these two
episodes as “cues” to “translate” the way Aristotle employs those strange words, “tragedy” and
“comedy.” However, the Arab philosopher fails in taking advantage of them and decides that Aristotle
gives the name “tragedy” to panegyrics and the name “comedy” to satires and anathemas and
reflects that there are many admirable tragedies and comedies in the Qur’an and the mu‘allaqāt of the
mosque.

26. Eco 2006,127. Eco’s comments are, alas, completely misplaced. Butterworth 1986 has the Arabic
text as well as an English annotated translation of Averroës’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics .
In the introduction he remarks that:
 For too long non-Arabic readers have been dependent on Hermannus Alemannus’ Latin
translation of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics and on O.B. Hardinson’s
English translation of the Latin. They incorrectly render Averroes’ various arguments and make
his beautiful citations read like doggerel. Moreover, they provide inaccurate and incomplete
information about the sources of those citations and thereby portray Averroes’ text as a
curious compilation of relics from some exotic but not very learned horde. Consequently,
Ernest Renan’s contemptuous dismissal of Averroes for his ignorance of Greek poetry and Luis
Borgès’ facetious tale of Averroes’ futile efforts to understand what Aristotle meant by tragedy
and commedy remain virtually uncontested. Not even the publication of the Arabic original of
Averroes’ commentary on four separate occasions during the last 115 years has remedied this
deplorable situation.

27. Abū-al Walīd Muḥammad Ibn Aḥmad Ibn Ruśd al-Qurṭūbī, i.e., the Latinized Averroës (1126-1198
and thus a contemporary of Maimonedes and Abelard), an Arabic-Hispanic scholar wrote Short, Long
and Middle commentaries on the whole Aristotlian corpus, except the Politics. Averroës, however,
knew neither Greek nor too much Syriac and presumably read Aristotle’s Poetics (Peri Poiētikēs) in
Abū-Bishr Mattā bin Yūnus al-Qunnā’ī’s tenth-century (before 932) Arabic translation of (perhaps) the
ninth-century Syriac translation of the Nestorian monk Isḥāq bin ḥunayn (now lost) of the Greek
original (Mattā’s Kitāb Aristūtālīs fi al-Sh‘ir is extant; see Tkatsch 1928-32,220-283, ‘Ayyād
1967,29-157. This translation is ad verbum, extremely literal, the translation by Mattā’s student,
Yahyā Ibn ‘Ādī being considered more reliable. In Mattā’s translation “tragedy” and “comedy” are
already mistranslated as panegyric and satire. Averroës wasn’t required to translate them. Yet
Borges’s story is ambiguous, reading as if Averroës encountered the two terms in the original and was
faced with the challenge of translating them, which of course he wasn’t, since he was composing a
“middle” commentary on the Poetics and not translating it (The Talkhīṣ Kitāb al-Ś‘ir, being a “middle”
commentary gives typically only the initial few words of each paragraph’s text, followed by a
paraphrase of the content of Aristotle’s thought). Averroës includes excerpts from the Poetics in his
Middle Commentary, but though these seem to be influenced by Mattā’s translation, they aren’t
identical and seem to be from another translation or are perhaps Averroës’ own reinterpretations or
paraphrases. Averroës agrees with Mattā in translating rather than transliterating the terms “tragedy”
and “comedy”; the translation for tragedy is “praise” and for comedy is “vituperation”. Averroës seems
to have understood “tragedy” to mean a panegyric and “comedy” as invective; tragedy for Averroës is
the praise of virtue and comedy the dispraise of vice. Averroës was probably influenced by Aristotle’s
statement in the second chapter of the Poetics that tragedy deals with the spudean ( spoudaion) and
comedy with the phaulic (phaulon); comedy tends to naturally imitate men worse ( cheirous) than
average and tragedy to imitate men better ( beltious) than average. Hermannus Alemannus (Herman
the German, bishop of Astorga, d. 1272) in his thirteenth-century Latin translation of Averroës’ Middle
Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (1256, it’s editio princeps, Venice 1481, was, in fact, the first
printing of the Poetics in any form), holds Aristotle as saying that “every poem and poetic statement is
either satire or panegyric/euology” (“ Dicit Aristotelis: ‘Omne itaque poema et omnis oratio poetica aut
est vituperatio aut est laudatio’”;1.54-5); Aristotle of course said no such thing, Herman translated
Averroës’ transmission of Mattā’s mistranslation. It was through Herman’s translation of the exempla
used by Averroës to illustrate points in his Middle Commentary that the Latinized west caught the first
glimpse of the Arabic literary tradition. For over 200 years, Herman’s translation was the major source
of Aristotelian poetic doctrine in the West. It was only in 1278 that the Flemish Dominican scholar
William of Moerbeke, eventually Archbishop of Corinth (1215-1286) translated into Latin ( inter alia)
the Poetics from the Greek original (he probably knew and used Herman’s translation), at the behest
of his friend Thomas Aquinas, who, however did not live to see the translation.

28. The former refers to “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural
values, bring the author back home,” while the latter is “an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to
register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad” (Venuti
1995,20; 1998,242, invoking Schliermacher).

29. Venuti 2000,485.

30. After anthropophagic, Lévi-Strauss 1961,386. I’ll dub this the “Averroës Effect,” after Borges
1974,1:582-88.

31. I’ll dub this the “Menard Effect,” after Borges 1974,1:444-50.

32. English “Decode” in the Urdu original.

33. lihāzā tarjumah bhī t‘abīr kā ek ṭarīqah awr t‘abīrī kārguzārī hai awr yeh sirf ghair zabān yā kisī
awr zabān meñ tarjumah karney par meḥdūd nahīñ. hum Khwud apnī zabān se har waqt tarjumah
karte rehtey haiñ tākih matn ko samajh sakeñ. kisī bhī zabān se tarjumey kī nākāmi ghalat taśrīḥ yā
t‘abīr ko rāh detī hai awr agar matn ṭanziyah yā mizāḥiyah ho to Khwud apnī zabān meñ bhī tarjumey
kī nākāmī waq‘e ho saktī hai.yā agar matn kī rasūmiyāt se waqfiyat nah ho, yā matn ke muzmirāt kī
ṭaraf se caśm pośī ho jāey to bhī apnī zabān se tarjumah nākām ho saktā hai. yā kabhī kabhī matn kī
ṣūrat koḍ Code jaisī hotī hai awr use Decode kiye baghair us ke mafhūm tak rasāī nahīñ ho saktī. agar
koḍ śiknī kā ghalat ṭarīqah akhtiyār kareñ to goyā yeh tarjume kī ghalatī awr t‘abīr kī nākamī hai
(Faruqi 2004,268).

34. The numbering of the Urdu ghazals follows the sequence given in Dr. Frances Pritchett’s wonderful
website, A Desertful of Roses: The Urdu Ghazals of Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib .”
(http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ghalib/index.html?#index).

35. Riżā 1995,160. This couplet’s metre is beḥr-e ramal-e musamman-e mahzūf, the “apocopated
eightfold running metre” (fā‘ilātun fā‘ilātun fā‘ilātun fā‘ilun, — ˘ — — / — ˘ — — / — ˘ — — / — ˘
—, where — represents long syllables and ˘ represents short syllables. The transliterated texts of all
poems quoted in the paper are given in the appendix.

36. Commentatorial literature on Ghalib’s Urdu dīwān is a century and two decades-long genre in
Ghalib studies and Ghalib’s slim Urdu dīwān is probably the most commented text in the Urdu
comemntatorial tradition, with commentaries being written to this day.
37
. Should every virtual property be taken into account in the further course of the text, the reader
would be obliged to outline, as in a sort of vivid mental picture, the whole network of interrelated
properties that the encyclopedia assigns to the corresponding sememe. Nevertheless (and
fortunately), we do not proceed like that, except in rare cases of eidetic imagination. All these
properties are not to be actually present to the mind of the reader. They are virtually present in the
encyclopedia, that is, they are socially stored, and the reader picks them up from the semantic store
only when required by the text. In doing so the reader implements semantic disclosures or, in other
words, actualizes nonmanifested properties (as well as merely suggested sememes). Semantic
disclosures have a double role: they blow up certain properties (making them textually relevant or
pertinent) and narcotize some others […] However, to remain narcotized does not mean to be
abolished. Virtual properties can always be actualized by the course of the text. In any case they
remain perhaps unessential, but by no means obliterated (Eco 1984, 23, my ellipsis. Italics in the
original. See also ibid.:228, 258, 260).

38. Abductive reasoning or abduction (Peirce CP 2,287, 5.144-145, 181, 188-189, 6.455, 458-61,469;
Fann 1970, Eco 1990, 1992) is connected to “Inference to the Best Explanation” (Harman 1965) or
perhaps Inference to the most Beautiful Explanation (Lipton 2004. Cf. Davis [2010,170] discussing
Eco [1992,77] on an interpretation being “interesting” and “rewarding”). Abduction has the logical
form of an Inverse Modus Ponens (modus ponendo ponens “the way that affirms by affirming”; also
called affirming the antecedent) and is inferring backward from consequent to antecedent. Therefore,
abduction’s also termed as “retroductive reasoning” or retroduction. Peirce states that abduction is
logical inference because it can be represented in “a perfect definite logical form”:

The surprising fact, C, is observed;

But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

Thus, A cannot be abductively inferred, or if you prefer the expression, cannot

be abductively conjectured until its entire content is already present in the premiss, “If A were true, C
would be a matter of course.” (Charles Peirce, “Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism”, CP 5.188-189,
1903). The literature on abduction is immense. For a detailed examination of Peirce’s theory of
abduction, see Fann (1970). Eco (1986,42) says that there’s

an undercoded abduction when the rule must be selected among a series of equiprobable
alternatives.…The decision as to whether certain properties (belonging to the meaning of a
term) must be blown up or narcotized represents a good case of undercoded abduction.
Thagard calls this type of reasoning an abduction stricto sensu: the rule selected can be, in a
certain co-text, the most plausible one, but it is not certain whether it is the most correct or
the only correct one. Thus the explanation is entertained, waiting for further tests… (my
ellipse). The structure of abduction is analogous to translation.

39. The whole universe of intertextuality, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare and further on, is ready to
offer us a lot of hints as to satisfactory inferential walks […] An inferential walk has much to do with a
rhetorical entymeme. As such, it starts from a probable premise picked up in the repertory of common
opinions, or endoxa, as Aristotle said. The endoxa represent the store of intertextual information, and
some of them are already mutually correlated in possible general schemas of entymematic chains.
Aristotelian topoi are nothing but this: overcoded, ready-made paths for inferential walks […]
Inferential walks are possible when they are verisimilar: according to Poetics (1451b) what has
previously happened is more verisimilar than what happens for the first time, since the fact that it
happened proves that it was possible. Inferential walks are supported by the repertory of similar
events recorded by the intertextual encyclopedia (Eco 1984:215-216, my ellipses).

40. When we find an ambiguous sentence or a small textual portion isolated from any co-text or
circumstance of utterance, we cannot disambiguate it without resorting to a presupposed ‘aboutness’
of the co-text, usually labeled as the textual topic…It is usually detected by formulating a question
(Eco 1984, 24, my ellipsis, italics in the original).

41. Ibid.,26-27.

42. From ισoς “the same” and τοπος “place”, a term Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917-1992) borrowed
from nuclear physics to describe the coherence and homogeneity of texts. Greimas and Courtés
1982,163 state that “[a]s an operational concept, isotopy at first designated iterativity along a
syntagmatic chain of classemes which assure the homogeneity of the utterance-discourse.” Isotopy is
linked to Katz & Fodor’s (1964) theory of semantic disambiguation and the minimal condition of
discoursive isotopy is a syntagm of two contextual semes. Depending upon the levels of
interpretation, discourses can exhibit simple isotopy, bi-isotopy or pluri-isotopy (Cf. Arrivé 1973. See
also Eco 1986,189-201). Curtius (1953,70) characterizes topoi as “storehouses of trains of thought”
(“argumentorum sedes”), invoking Quintillian IO 5.10.20. Quintillian, however, speaks of the “secret
places” (in quibus latent ) where “arguments reside” (argumentorum locos), from where they must be
“drawn forth” (ex quibus sunt petenda) (Butler 1920,2:213). Cicero (Topica 2.7-8) defines “place”
(locos) as “the location of an argument”, (argumenti sedem) (Reinhardt 2003,118). Topos also means
“burial place” (Liddel-Scott 1968,1565). On the relation between topic and isotopy, Eco states that
“the topic directs the right amalgamations and the organization of a single level of sense, or isotopy….
There is a strong relation between topic and isotopy (as denounced by the same etymological root);
nevertheless, there is a difference between the two concepts for at least two reasons. The topic as
question governs the semantic disclosures, that is, the selection of the semantic properties that can or
must be taken into account during the reading of a given text; as such, topics are means to produce
isotopies. Since the relevant semantic categories (upon which to establish an isotopy) are not
necessarily manifested, the topic as question is an abductive schema that helps the reader to decide
which semantic properties have to be actualized, whereas isotopies are the actual textual verification
of that tentative hypothesis. Thus the abduction of the textual topic helps the reader to select the
right frames, to reduce them to a manageable format, to blow up and to narcotize given semantic
properties of the lexemes to be amalgamated, and to establish the isotopy according to which he
decides to interpret the linear text manifestation so as to actualize the discoursive structure of a text”
(Eco 1984:26-27, my ellipses).

43. Eco 1984,22.

44. Ibid.,21.

45. In Sūrah al-‘Arāf (Qur‘ān 7:143), Moses requests Allah for a vision [ rabbi arinī anẓur] and Allah
answers lan tarānī-No you may not! He continues: “but look at the mountain: if it stays firmly in its
place, then you will see Me.” When Allah manifests Himself to the mountain, it shatters and Moses is
stunned unconscious.
46
. Eliade 1987,11.

47. Both tajallī and jalwah are from the same triliteral Arabic root JA-LA-WA. jalwah is a Qur’ānic
lexeme, occurring four times in the Qur’ān in three forms-59:3 ( aljalā); 91:3 (jallāhā); 92:2 and 7:143
(tajallā). From the same root is also jalā, “to become clear, evident, manifest;” “to reveal itself, be
revealed; to appear, show, come to light, come out, manifest itself;” “to be manifested, be expressed,
find expression” (Wehr 1980,132). Jilwah, from the same root, is unveiling of the bride [ ibid.) and in
Persian, “Presenting a bride to her husband adorned and unveiled; the meeting of the bride and
bridegroom; the nuptial bed; the bridal ornaments; splendour; luster; effulgence” (Steingass
1996,369); “Manifestation, publicity, conspicuousness; splendour, lustre, effulgence” (Platts
1930,387).

48. Steingass 1996,437.

49. Ibid.

50. Dihkhudā 1970,8:22.

51. Wehr 1980,260.

52. Naiyyar 1998,2:396. cf. the Urdu phrase khalwat-o jalwat meñ, which signifies “in private and
public.”
53. Steingass 1996,1380, my ellipsis.

54. Todorov 1982, 28.

55. Platts 1930,1003.

56. Cf. Katan (1999,140) on translation as “skilful manipulation” and as “distortion” which “functions
like a zoom lens allowing the reader to focus on certain aspects, leaving other aspects in the
background” (ibid.,38).

57. Wājid 1902,116.

58. See Faruqi 2006, 39-128 for an excellent discussion of īhām and cognate devices.

59. The “im-mediate” meaning, the m’anī-e qarīb, cf. the Graded Salience Hypothesis, Giora 1997,
2003. Salience is a function of a lexeme’s frequency, familiarity, conventionality and stereotypicality
(Ibid., 2003,15).

60. The “mediate” meaning, the m’anī-e gharīb.

61. Dihkhudā 1970,8:804.

62. Haq 1996,298.

63. Naiyyar 1998,2:613.

64. Wehr 1980,1000.

65. Nafīsī 1924,5:3607.

66. Mo‘īn 1992,4:4629.

67. Steingass 1996,905.

68. Ibid. 1997,772.

69. Nafīsī 1924,4:2012.

70. Riżwī 2003,525.

71
. Naiyyar 1998,3:608.

72. dar aṣl bam‘anī sukhan chīñ ast. fānūs-e sham‘a rā az īñ jihat goyand kih rawshnī beirūn mīdihad (
Rāmpūrī 1363/1826,634). Dihkhudā 1966,4:39 quotes from memory a similar etymology of fānūs
from the Muntahā-al arab.
73
. Following Eco 1986,14-45, I posit a sign not merely as “something stands for something else”
(aliquid stat pro aliquot) or “something serves in place of something else” ( supponit aliquid pro
aliquot), but as an interpretative, reader-response schema involving cognitively-relevant abductive
inference.
74. Faruqi 1999,2 was the first to suggest that Ghalib’s use of metaphor is semiotic.

75. Khānlarī 1980,1:190. There’s a “non-semantic” congruence (ri‘āyat) between rāz (inter alia “A
secret, a mystery”, Steingass 1996,561) and khalwat (in the sense of “fornication”). rāz is a Persian
tadbhava of the Sanskrit rahas (ibid.), which in addition to meaning “solitude, privacy, loneliness,
retirement, secrecy” also means “copulation, coition” (Apte 1998,1333). There’s hence another ri‘āyat
between rāz, khalwat and sirr (in the sense of “pudenda; coition; fornication,” Steingass 1996,667).
ri‘āyat is a species of the genus īhām being its mirror-image. See Faruqi 2006,21, 22.

76. Sattārzādah 1983,2:1451. Ḥāfiẓ’s Ottoman Turkish commentator Aḥmad Sūdī (Sūdī-e
Busnawī/Aḥmad-e Busnawī, d. 1106/1598 CE.) prefers this lectio (ibid.,1452) stating that some
manuscripts have a variant second distich, namely basash zamānah chū miqrāż dar zabān gīrad
(Khānlarī 1980,2:1035).

77. Khānlarī 1980,1:261. Khānlarī (ibid., 260) omits this bait and gives only eight baits in this ghazal
and mentions (ibid.,261) that this distich’s the fifth bait in two manuscripts and the eighth in one
manuscript with ḥarīf sham‘ast and asrār-e khwud as variant lectiones in the first hemistich (ibid.) in
two manuscripts. zabān-band is “Fascination, as tying up the tongue” (Steingass 1996,609) and
zabān-bandī is “Deposition of a witness” (ibid).

78. Gow-Page 1968,1:38.

79. Cf. Eco 1990,20-21.

80. Cf. Culler 1987,123-124;1988, ix and 2009, 91-92. Culler 1987, 110-134 discusses the debate on
context.

81. Hirsch 1967, 201.

82. Davis 2010,182. Cf. White 1987.

83. A “nomadic,” “deterritorialized” “smooth space” (Deluze and Guattari 1987).

84
. Cf. Eco 1983,207 on meta-abduction and creative abduction.

85. Eco 1986,42.

86. Ibid. 1984,215-216.

87. Cf. ibid. 1999,181.

88. Permutations and combinations of these various subdivisions yielded a typology of 1,152 types of
nāyikās (Rasamañjarī 81).

89.Sanskrit kāvya was a robust, this-worldly “laukika” poetic (Pollock 2007, 13) and these texts indite
topoi of profane, erotic love rather than anagogic, “mystical” love. Some commentators have
nevertheless theologized the profane nāyikābheda, like Trivikrama Miśra (eighteenth century), who, in
the Rasāmoda commentary gives an “Aestheticized Emotion of Dispassion” ( Śāntarasa) reading of
many of the erotic exempla of the Rasamañjarī. This reading practice has precedents in the tradition.
The Gauḍīya Vaiṣnava theorists (fifteenth century) theologize nāyikābheda, whereas Jayadeva (Gīta
Goviṅda, twelfth century), Vidyāpati Ṭhākura ( Padāvalī, fourteenth century?) and Keśavadāsa Miśra
(Rasikapriyā, sixteenth century) divinize the nāyikā and nāyaka into the archetypal Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa pair.

90. Ingalls 1962,95.

91. Śāstri 2000,72

92. Karmarkar 2001,42.

93. Miller 1971,74.

94. Tripathi 2007,318.

95. After Eco’s “aberrant decoding” (Eco 1998,138-140; 2004,238-9; 1979,150n27; 1984,8,22,40. Also
cf. Todorov 1982,89). Aberrant decoding’s linked to the concept of open and closed texts (Eco
1984,8) and the interpretative strategies used by their projected Model Readers. An open text
produces a Model Reader whose inferences are constrained by the text’s closed narrative structure,
whereas a closed text produces a Model Reader whose inferences are unconstrained by the text’s
open narrative structure. See Eco 1984,33-34; Genosko 2012,100. I use “aberrant transcontexting” in
the sense of a ccontext different from the dominant traditional intersubjective consensual
conventional context shared by a community of readers.

96. Bilgrāmī 2003,115-144.

97. See Sharma 2009 and Ernst 2013. The Ghizlān’s an obscure, “homeless text” (Tavkoli-Targhi
2001,x and passim).

98. Cf. Shklovsky 1969,14 on “make things strange” ( ostranenie veshchej) and Kristeva 1991,182-195
on “uncanny strangeness”, das unheimliche.

99. An experience-near concept “is, roughly, one that someone-a patient, subject, in our case an
informant-might himself naturally and effortlessly use to define what he or his fellows see, feel, think,
imagine, and so on, and which he would readily understand when similarly applied to others” (Geertz
1983,57). An experience-distant concept, in contrast, “is one that specialists of one sort or another-an
analyst, an experimenter, an ethnographer, even a priest or an ideologist-employ to forward their
scientific, philosophical, or practical aims” (ibid.) Geertz says that “To grasp concepts that, for another
people, are experience-near, and to do so well enough to place them in illuminating connection with
experience-distant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture the general features of social life, is
clearly a task as delicate, if a bit less magical, as putting oneself into someone else’s skin” (Ibid.,58.
Geertz probably borrowed the term “experience-near” from the psychologist Heinz Kohut)

100. Cf. Derrida (1988,9): “At the same time, a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its
context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription. This
breaking force [force de rupture] is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of the written
text. In the case of a so-called “real” context, what I have just asserted is all too evident. This
allegedly real context includes a certain “present” of the inscription, the presence of the writer to what
he has written, the entire environment and the horizon of his experience, and above all the intention,
the wanting-to-say-what-he-means, which animates his inscription at a given moment. But the sign
possess the characteristic of being readable, even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost
and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment
he wrote it; i.e. abandoned it to its essential drift. As far as the internal semiotic context is concerned,
the force of the rupture is no less important: by virtue of its essential iterability; a written syntagma
can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all
possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of “communicating” precisely. One can perhaps come to
recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains. No context can
entirely enclose it. Nor any code, the code here being both the possibility and impossibility of writing,
of its essential iterability (repetition/alterity).” Also cf. Derrida 1988,12 and especially Žižek 2008, 130.

101. Culler 1987,134-135, 1988,ix, 2009,91-2.

102. Culler 1988,ix.

103. Bilgrāmī 2003,117.

104. Ekegren 1998,169.

105. Riffaterre 1983,120.

106. Eco 1984,22. This is analogous to the older Ṣūfī code-switching semiotic strategy of imposing an
aberrant anagogical code on amatory-bacchic texts. See Ernst 2000,153, 157, 161. ‘Abd al-Wāḥid
Bilgrāmī’s (1509-1608 CE) Indian Verities (Ḥaqāiq-e Hindī, 1566 CE) is an apt exemplum. This short
Persian treatise, a Ṣūfī interpretation of the vocabulary and imagery of dhrupad (dhruvapada),
bishnupad (Viṣṇupada) and other “Hindawī” (Braj) song-texts is a polemical defense of their use in
Ṣūfī spiritual music (samā‘) sessions. This text has three chapters, dealing with the technical
terminology of musical performance of these song-texts and a detailed description of female beauty
and adornment (sikh nakh barnan/sarāpā), a Ṣūfī gloss of the terminology of Vaiṣṇaviṭe Kṛṣṇa-
mythology and the natural imagery of seasonal Bārahmāsā songs. ‘Abd al-Wāḥid Bilgrāmī’s strategy in
the Ḥaqāiq-e Hindī is also an instance of code-switching and aberrant decoding, but is an oppositio in
imitando hypotext for Āzād’s hypertextual semiotic strategy in the Ghizlān. ‘Abd al-Wāḥid imposes an
Islamicate Ṣūfī/ghazal code over the vocabulary and imagery of Vaiṣṇaviṭe Kṛṣṇa-
mythology/nāyikābheda texts (see Phukan 2009) in an emic strategy of assimilation (“adapting the
new phenomenon to old schemas,” Todorov 1982,27) “from a distance” (Alam 1996) rather than
accommodation (“adapting old schemas to the new object,” Todorov [1982,27] ). His reading
strategy’s a poetic of familiarization and thus akin to Borges’ “Averroës” ( contra Phukan 2009).

107. ratipradīpa, literally “love-lamp.” Kālidāsa, Birth of Kumāra (Kumārasambhava) 1.10 seems to be
the earliest instance of the word suratapradīpa.

108. Tripathi 2007,402.

109. For the lamp as both witness ( synistor lychnos) and god of lovemaking, see Kost 1971,126-32.
See also Cameron 1981,283; Marcovich 1988,1-8; Cairns 1998,171-8 and Gutzwiller 2007,319-20.
110
. Henderson 2002,246, Praxagora’s (“woman effective in public”) monologue to her lamp.

111. Paton 1916,1:130.

112. Ibid.,188.

113. Bailey 1993,3:242.

114. Genette 1997,384. Genette pejoratively invokes Borges and Calvino. Genette theorizes that
hypertextuality involves “any relationship uniting a text B [which I shall call the hypertext] to an
earlier text A [I shall, of course, call it the hypotext], upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not
that of commentary”…“It may yet be of another kind such as text B not speaking of text A at all but
being unable to exist, as such, without A, from which it originates through a process I shall
provisionally call transformation, and which it consequently evokes more or less perceptibly without
necessarily speaking of it or citing it” (Genette:1997a,5; my ellipses).

115. Pischel 1938,344.

116. Doshi 1960,33.

117. Sheth 1986,943.

118. Dard, n.d.,71.

119. Ibid.,110.

120. See Ḥālī 1996,59, Habibunisa Begum 1971; Ḥakīm 1973; Schimmel 1971,195; 1979, Banon 1982;
Ṣābrī 1990; Rūhelah 2002; Rahman 2003. Genres like the MasTnawī indite topoi of profane
homoerotic/heterosexual love, but most MasTnawīs impose a Ṣūfī-anagogic code even on these topoi.
In the Urdu ghazal, topoi of profane erotic love occur in the marginal sub-genre of mu‘āmilah bandī or
adā bandī (Faruqi 1997,4:147-171) and the genre of Rekhtī (Vanita 2012). Faruqi sahib states that
Ghalib’s abstract, convention-loving temperament and lack of interest in human relations necessarily
resulted in a paucity of erotic topoi in his poetry (is kā lāzmī natījah yeh huwā kih Ghālib key yahāñ
jinsī t‘alluqāt kā bayān bahut kam hai, Faruqi 1997,4:148).

121. Althusser 1971,176.

122. Jameson 2002,ix.

123. Latin præjudicium “prior judgment,” from præ- “before” + judicium “judgment,” from judex (gen.
judicis) “judge”. Cf. Gadamer 2004,268-85.

124. Geertz 1973,57.

125. Eco 1990,64-82.

126. Winch 1990,x, 32.

127. Eco 1992,144.

128. Wittgenstein 2009, §12, §23 et passim.

129. Ibid., §§138-242; §219. Cf. §§ 211, 217-18. Cf. Bordieu 1984,424, 567 on doxa.

130. Lyotard 1979,63-64.

131. Kristeva 1982 passim.

132. Cf. Ramanujan 1999,157 on “counter-texts.”

133. Geertz 1973,126-141.

134. Todorov 1980, 1984b.

135. Cf. Bourdieu 2003,170-171 on orthodoxy and heterodoxy.

136. C.f. Eco 1990, 1992 on “Overinterpretation.”

137. Ibid.,40.

138. Eco 1992,143.

139. Ibid.

140. Lotman 1990,134.

141. Ibid.,123 et passim.

142. Wittgenstein 2009, § 243, 269.

143. Gadamer 2004,82.

144. Bourdieu 1993,161 et passim.

145. Cf. Bakhtin 1984,6.

146. Eco 1992,48.

147. Eco cites as an instance of overinterpretation the Anglo-Italian poet and scholar Gabriele
Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti’s (1783-1854 CE) attempts to decode Dante using the aberrant Masonic-
Rosicrucian codes instead of the consensual Medieval Catholic code. In a muted tenor, (ibid.,65) he
also critiques Borges’ “Menardian” proposal of reading the Imitation of Christ as if it were written by
Louis Ferdinand Céline. Eco’s exemplum recalls James Thurber’s very short and witty story (Thurber
1999), where a reader habituated to the set of “reading protocols” (Delany 1980, 1984, passim) of
the detective fiction genre “forced” to read Macbeth deduces that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are too
obvious choices and that Macduff’s the “real” killer, before being convinced by the mischievous
narrator that the killer’s actually Lady Macbeth’s father!

148. This also applies to decoding other mu‘āmilah band/adā band distichs in the Urdu (and especially)
Persian Ghalibean ghazal-corpus as well as that of other eighteenth century Urdu poets. It also
applies to the Persian maktab-e wuq‘ū, where the topos is the marginal non-anagogic profane beloved
rather than the dominant Ṣūfīc anagogic Beloved.

149. “Not new things, but old things, spoken anew” ( non nove, sed vetera noviter dicta), attributed to
St. Vincent of Lérins (died 445 CE).

150. ‘Ābidī 1969, 223.

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