===
1554,
6
===

 

{1554,6}

turk-bache se ʿishq kiyā thā reḳhte kyā kyā maiñ ne kahe
raftah raftah hindusitāñ se shiʿr mirā īrān gayā

1) I had fallen in love with a Turkish boy-- what-all rekhtahs I composed/'said'!
2) {gradually/ 'gone gone'}, from Hindustan my poetry went to Iran

 

Notes:

raftah raftah : 'Going on, in the act of going, in process of time; step by step, by degrees, gradually; leisurely, easily.

FWP:

SETS == POETRY
MOTIFS == [BELOVED IS A BOY]
NAMES == HINDUSTAN; IRAN; REKHTAH; TURK
TERMS

SRF understandably didn't include this one in his anthology, since its literary merit is minor. But it has other kinds of interest, so I wanted to add it in on the website.

Most centrally, it shows how even specific real-world references are deployed in the service of wordplay rather than any sort of 'natural-poetry' descriptive accuracy. The idea that Mir's poetry gradually traveled to Iran in pursuit of a Turkish boy is literarily clever, rather than in any sense realistic. The possibility of 'Iran' as a rhyme-word obviously triggered the whole verse, and the enjoyable wordplay of raftah raftah (which normally means 'gradually', but here can be envisioned as describing the actual process of traveling by stages) surely helped to seal the deal. There's also the enjoyable wordplay of 'gone gone' and 'went'.

The verse also, unusually, uses reḳhtah in the plural, and in a context that shows indisputably that the term refers to a genre of poetry, rather than being used as a language name (that is, as an archaic name for Urdu).

Note for meter fans: We have to choose between scanning turk as one long syllable, and scanning bachche without the tashdīd , as bache , short-long. I vote for the latter, though I don't like it.

For more on reḳhtah as a genre name, see {297,7}.

[See also {1526,2}.]

 

 
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