kis bāt pah maġhrūr hai ai ʿajz-e tamannā
sāmān-e duʿā vaḥshat-o-tāṡīr-e duʿā hech
1) over what idea/thing are you proud/haughty, oh weakness/powerlessness of longing/prayer?!
2) the equipment for prayer-- wildness/madness; and the effect of prayer-- nothing!
maġhrūr : 'Proud, arrogant, presumptuous, haughty, self-conceited; fastidious'. (Platts p.1051)
ʿajz : 'Powerlessness, impotence, weakness, helplessness, submission, wretchedness'. (Platts p.759)
tamannā : 'Wish, desire, longing, inclination ... ; request, prayer, supplication, petition'. (Platts p.337)
duʿā : 'Prayer, supplication (to God); an invocation of good, a blessing, benediction'. (Platts p.518)
vaḥshat : 'Loneliness, solitariness, dreariness; — sadness, grief, care; — wildness, fierceness, ferocity, savageness; barbarity, barbarism; — timidity, fear, fright, dread, terror, horror; — distraction, madness'. (Platts p.1183)
hech : 'Not any, none, no; nothing; — worthless, good-for-nothing; — shallow, superficial; — a mere trifle; — adv. Never; at no rate, on no account at all'. (Platts p.1244)
hech : 'Nothing; a mere trifle; lost, annihilated; never, at no rate, on no account at all'. (Steingass p.1520)
ʿajz-e tamannā = to be weak in the matter of longings; that is, the abandonment of longing. We abandoned longings because we didn't have the capability of fulfilling them. Weakness of longing wants to strut around before the world, acting the part of contentment and resignation. The poet says, 'Oh lack of longing, what occasion is this for pride?! If you had formed a longing and then prayed for its fulfillment, then to try to supervise the prayer is only wildness/madness, and about the fulfillment of prayers there's no telling.' So to speak, even if the longing had existed, then the present situation would only have remained. For this reason, weakness of longing is in reality a confession of duress.
For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.
What is the relationship between tamannā and duʿā ? Normally tamannā means 'longing', but it also means 'prayer, supplication', so that it could quite well overlap with duʿā (see the definitions above). As so often, we're left to decide for ourselves.
Gyan Chand takes ʿajz-e tamannā to mean the abandonment of longing. But the iẓāfat is a wonderfully flexible construction, and it's also quite possible to take ʿajz-e tamannā as meaning the 'helplessness, submissiveness' of 'prayer, supplication'. Since such a mood of surrender to God's will is so highly valued by pious Muslims, it might well be a source of pride (or, if semi-personified, might itself be an experiencer of pride). This reading provides a really elegant setup for the second line.
Why then be proud of one's submissiveness and reliance on prayer? For in fact the 'equipment of prayer' is 'wildness, bleakness, madness'-- and a remarkable array of other qualities, every single one of them extremely negative (see the definition of vaḥshat above). And as if that isn't grim enough, the 'effect of prayer' is-- 'nothing'.
Asi:
Oh weakness of longing-- after all, of what idea/thing are you proud? The equipment for prayer is wholly wildness, and the effect of prayer is 'nothing'. Thus every pride of yours is inappropriate and trifling.
== Asi, p. 108