FWP:
SETS == CATCH-22; REPETITION;
WORDPLAY == TRANSLATABLES
LIFE/DEATH: {7,2}
On the pronunciation of the rhyme-words in this ghazal, see the discussion in {95,1}.
What a lovely verse! Doesn't it look alluringly easy and natural, beguilingly clear, and isn't it so completely colloquial in its language? And yet at the same time-- how hard it is to explicate the relationship between the two lines!
The verse sets up some kind of an unbreakable 'Catch-22' feedback loop-- living on hope, not hoping to live, and on and on from one to the other without end. If people live on hope, then since the speaker is alive, he must have hope too. Yet he doesn't-- he's so far from having any hope, that he doesn't even hope to live. So with no hope of living, and no hope that he can live on, surely he must be dead? But he's not, because he can still say that he has no hope. So perhaps he's living on the hope of having hope to live? No, living on hope is for other people-- he don't even have any hope of living at all. But if people live on hope, then since he's alive, he must have hope too. And so on-- the whole rhetorical loop can be run through again and again, with no way out of it.
The extreme simplicity of this verse makes it the kind people in the Urdu literary tradition describe as 'unattainably simple' [sahl-e mumtana((]. The normal meaning of mumtana(( is 'prohibited, forbidden; impossible' (Platts p.1068), and I've tried for a translation that reflects those ideas. Hali uses this term for the verse, though either he or his calligrapher gets it a bit askew; other commentators (Bekhud Dihlavi p. 146, Chishti p. 512) quote him approvingly, and use the standard form of the phrase. Mihr too quotes Hali, and adds the perfect definition: it's a verse that looks so easy that you think you can go right home and do one yourself. But of course, you can't.
Perhaps because of this very simplicity, the verse is also remarkably translatable. Its wonderfully enjoyable wordplay helps: the repetion of ummiid , the two forms of jiinaa , the structural and rhythmic parallels of kahte hai;N jiite hai;N .
For other verses that engage in similar kinds of wordplay about life and death, see Arshi's suggested {189,8}; it's an even darker verse, and {161,9} is grim as well. But as in the case of this verse, the charm of their style overrides their bleakness of tone. There's also the logically argued {115,5}.
Compare also {143,5}, which similarly states, and then discredits, a useless truism.
Hali:
This verse is 'simple and unattainable' [sahl-o-mumtana(( , though the usual term is sahl-e mumtana((]. In this ground, it would be difficult for a better verse than this to emerge.
==Urdu text: Yadgar-e Ghalib, p. 147