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nā-chār ho chaman meñ nah rahye kahūñ hūñ jab
bulbul kahe hai aur koʾī din barā-e gul
1a) having become helpless, when I say, 'One shouldn't remain in the garden',
1b) when I say, 'Having become helpless, one shouldn't remain in the garden',
2) the Nightingale says, 'A few days more, for the rose's sake'
nā-chār : 'adj. & adv. Without remedy, remediless; constrained; helpless, destitute, abandoned, forlorn, distressed, poor, miserable'. (Platts p.1110)
FWP:
SETS == DIALOGUE; MIDPOINTS
MOTIFS == SPEAKING
NAMES == NIGHTINGALE
TERMSSRF elucidates the main possibilities very elegantly. The phrase nā-chār ho (with its following kar of course idiomatically omitted) can apply to the speaker's situation (he has no choice but to say what he says), or else can be part of his utterance (what he says is, don't remain helplessly in the garden). It could even describe the Nightingale's response in the second line (when I say X, then helplessly the Nightingale says Y). Thus it's a classic, unusually versatile example of what I call a 'midpoint' phrase. And the clever rigging of the grammar ensures that we can't tell who's being urged to leave the garden (the speaker might be addressing either himself, or the Nightingale).
The last points that SRF makes are particularly striking. The way barā-e gul as 'for the Rose's sake!' can of course be taken literally. But it can also have the same exclamatory, colloquial, intensifying resonance as 'for the Lord's sake!' or 'for God's sake!' adds a different possible tone, and thus a whole new dimension, to our reading of the verse. Or rather, it adds several different possible tones; just think of all the ways 'for God's sake!' can be said-- imploring, challenging, scolding, etc.
In fact, barā-e gul is as flexible in tone as is aur koʾī din . Both of them are idiomatic, verb-free, and potentially (and potently) highly exclamatory, able to be endowed by us readers with all the emotional overtones we can bring to bear, from our own lives and our own imaginations.
Compare Ghalib's unforgettable ghazal with the similarly haunting refrain koʾī din aur :
G{66,1}.
Note for translation fans: Urdu is notoriously poor in adverbs. One common way to improvise more of them is with se ( ḳhvushī se , 'with happiness', for 'happily, willingly'), and another is with a kar construction ( hañs kar , 'having laughed', for 'laughingly'). In the first line, nā-chār ho [ kar ] can be read literally as 'having become helpless', which implies a temporal change from a previous state of non-helplessness. Or it can be read more freely as 'helplessly', a generalized adverbial condition that gives no further information. As usual, I have preferred the clunkier but more meaning-rich form. But in many cases, depending on the context, a translator could quite legitimately choose the adverbial form.