FWP:
SETS == LIST; MULTIVALENT WORDS ( ;hairat )
BEKHUDI: {21,6}
For background see S. R. Faruqi's choices. For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}.
ABOUT ;hairat : It's sometimes used for 'surprise', but its primary meaning is something stronger, something that freezes you in your tracks. I use 'amazement' as a good all-purpose compromise translation, but often a more accurate choice would be 'stupefaction', almost in the literal sense of experiencing something that 'stupefies', that creates a stupor. Thus the reaction of ;hairat is not a little jump, a startled step back, a sudden movement. Rather, it's a profound, wordless stillness that may (in the ghazal world) last for an indefinitely long time, and that may also look like awe. It is sometimes associated with a gesture of touching a finger to the lower teeth of one's open, jaw-dropped mouth; for an example see the painting in {50,1}. On the connection between ;hairat and mirrors, see {352x,4}. For a discussion of the sophisticated (and Sufistic) connotations of ;hairat , see Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 278-281.
Thus the 'footprint', with its wide-open
eye (or wide-open mouth) shape and perpetually unmoving state of helpless
collapse, can be perhaps the ultimate model of ;hairat
, as in {53,3} and {116,8}.
The mirror too is an image of amazement, as in {63,1} and {217,8x}. The perpetually fixed gaze of a painted eye in a picture might also be such an image, as in {92,2}. And another such image of course can be the mystical, entranced,
self-oblivious state(s) envisioned in the present verse. In {184,2} the lover finds that such 'amazement' makes effective speech impossible. In A Garden of Kashmir, as a translation for ;hairat I used 'stupefaction', which also could be defended.
In Persian the past participle az-;xvud-raftah means, literally, 'gone from the self'. (We received a related lesson about the grammar of raftan , 'to go', in {3,4}.) Then the suffix ii makes 'gone-from-self-ness'. But then-- doesn't 'gone-from-self-nesses' (with the plural ending haa ) seem a bit over the top? Perhaps it's meant to suggest that such episodes happen repeatedly; perhaps it's meant to make us reflect on whether there are many different ways to be gone from the self. For more on such (awkwardly) pluralized abstractions, see {1,2}.
The first line is a negative list-- neither A, nor B-- with no indication of whom or what those negations may apply to. Perhaps they describe the speaker/lover, or perhaps they describe the 'gone-from-self-nesses' in the second line. As so often, the decision is left entirely up to us.
For more on the double reading of salaamat
in the second line, see the discussion in {51,4}.
Asi:
There is no concern about wellbeing, nor fear of disgrace. My amazement has become gone-from-itself, and has passed beyong the borders of these ideas.
== Asi, p. 101