===
0396,
9
===

 

{396,9}

nazdiik apne ham ne to sab kar rakhaa hai sahl
phir miir is me;N murdan-e dushvaar kyuu;N nah ho

1) {near / according to} us, we have made and kept everything easy/simple
2) then, Mir, in this why wouldn't there be a difficult death?

 

Notes:

nazdiik : 'Near (to, - ke ), hard (by), close (to or by), not far (from), adjoining, contiguous (to); ... ;—in the opinion (of), in the estimation (of)'. (Platts p.1136)

 

sahl : 'Easy, simple; facile, soft'. (Platts p.707)

 

murdan : 'To die, expire'. (Steingass p.1213)

 

dushvaar : 'Difficult, hard, arduous, troublesome, trying'. (Platts p.518)

S. R. Faruqi:

In the first divan itself he has composed a theme similar to this one, but there without as much success [{377,4}]:

hu))e the jaise mar jaate par ab to sa;xt ;hairat hai
kiyaa dushvaar naa-daanii se ham ne kaar-e aasaa;N ko

[it happened as if we would have died; but now we're severely astonished
we made difficult, through ignorance, an easy task]

In the present verse the insha'iyah style of the second line has created an abundance of meaning: (1) In our opinion, every task is easy for us-- then why is a difficult task like death not easy for us? (2) Why wouldn't a difficult task like death be easy for us? (That is, it's undoubtedly easy.) (3) A difficult task like death, we have made easy. (That is, it takes only as long as dying; there's no difficulty in it.)

In murdan-e dushvaar there are also two meanings: (1) Dying, which is a difficult task. (2) To die with difficulty-- that is, to die with resistance and after suffering. The second meaning is more interesting, because in it there's not only uniqueness but also paradox-- why wouldn't it be easy for us to die with harshness and difficulty?

In the tone there's sarcasm toward himself-- that despite everything he has clung to life, that he doesn't die.

FWP:

SETS == OPPOSITES
MOTIFS
NAMES
TERMS == INSHA'IYAH

Most elegantly, apne nazdiik has both a literal sense ('near us, around us') and an extended or metaphorical sense ('in our opinion, according to us'); see the definition above. So either 'we' have kept everything around us easy/simple, or else 'we' think-- perhaps quite wrongly-- that we've kept everything easy. So that's two possibilities right there. Either way, the 'we' could be for the speaker himself, or for some larger group (we lovers? we humans?).

Then there's is me;N , 'in this'. In what?

=In this group of things that 'we' have made easy, why wouldn't even difficult death itself be included? The speaker speculates-- will it, or won't it?

=In the very easiness of our life, which makes it all the more difficult to be compelled to suffer death.

=In the fact that we've made everything else easy-- death thus seems infuriatingly difficult by comparison.

=In our belief that we've made everything easy-- death is especially difficult because it discredits our foolish claim of control.

And of course, as SRF points out, murdan-e dushvaar can mean either 'difficult death' (in the sense that death is inherently difficult), or 'a difficult death' (in the sense of a painful, prolonged dying rather than a quick easy one).

Doesn't that all add up to a fine penumbra of possibilities? And not artificial, contrived ones either, but real ones that we all confront in our own lives. Not bad, for a poem roughly 19 words long.