;Gaflat se hai ;Guruur tujhe varnah hai bhii kuchh
yaa;N vuh samaa;N hai jaise kih dekhe hai ko))ii ;xvaab

1) because of heedlessness/negligence, you're proud/deceived; otherwise, is there even/also anything
2) here {that / such a} likeness/similitude is-- the way that {someone sees a dream / you see some dream}



;Guruur : '(orig.) 'A thing by which one is deceived'; pride, haughtiness, vanity, vainglory'. (Platts p.770)


samaan : 'Like, similar, equal, adequate, akin, alike, same, one, uniform'. (Platts p.672)

S. R. Faruqi:

He has used ;Guruur in its original meaning, but its Urdu meaning too ('pride') is also appropriate.

Then, dekhe hai ko))ii ;xvaab too has two interpretations: (1) someone would be seeing a dream; that is, any individual person; (2) you would be seeing some dream. In the light of the first interpretation, again, two meanings emerge. The first is that here, the likeness is as if some person would be seeing a dream; that is, the world's hustle and bustle and solidity are only like someone's dream. On the other hand, there's also the reading that here the likeness is as if some person would be in a dream; that is, this world is like someone dreaming.

A person absorbed in a dream is both alive and also not alive. Then there's this: that the life of that dreamer is something that has no relationship to his outward circumstances. For example, the dreamer is sleeping on a bed, but in his dream he sees himself hunting in the jungle. The reality of the world is like a dream-- this theme Mir has already used in a very complex and multivalent way:


In the first divan there's also this more famous verse:


But the theme of the present verse, that this world is some dream that someone is seeing, is extremely lofty. Two hundred years after Mir, Borges, in his story 'The Circular Ruins', dug up this theme. The central character of the story wanders around in search of reality. A time comes when he feels that the universe is only a dream. Then at the very end it seems to him that he himself is a dream that some other entity is seeing.

[See also {423,11}.]



How cleverly the verse plays with its own grammar! For literally, hai bhii kuchh means 'There is even/also something'. Yet even in the course of the first line, the verse persuades us that that's actually a rhetorical question, 'Is there even/also anything?' or an indignant exclamation 'As if there's even/also anything!'. It's the power of bhii , in that particularly idiomatic position that gives it overtones of objection or refutation. And what is to be refuted is an error caused either by pride (which would surely cause the solipsistic beloved to believe that, at a minimum, she herself in her radiant beauty must exist), or else by deceit (and since common sense does show us a world, it's much more plausible to take the world's existence, rather than its nonexistence, as the content of the deceit).

Then of course yaa;N is a brilliantly placed 'midpoint' adverb: it can be read either with the first line, or with the second. It doesn't greatly change the interpretive possibilities, but it increases the (dream-like) confusion: where are we exactly, where is the 'here'? SRF has pointed out the similar flexibility of ko))ii , which can apply to either 'some person' or 'some dream'. Of course, in Urdu one 'sees' a dream, rather than 'having' one; I've kept the literal translation.

A final twist of the cognitive knife is samaan . For the idea that our world is a dream, or a dreamer, is not amorphous and vague enough for Mir's purposes. On the contrary, in fact-- the situation is only 'like' or 'similar to' a situation in which our world is either a dream, or a dreamer. So we readers are left to 'see' the dream/situation in whatever way we prefer.