About this translation of Rahman Baba

This new English translation of Rahman Baba has been made for two reason.

Reasons for the translation

First, out of a deep respect and admiration for the poems.

For Pushtuns, poetry probably doesn't get any better, and the translators, Momin Khan and Robert Sampson, share the same enjoyment and stimulation of Rahman Baba's poems that people all along the Frontier have for more than 300 years!

But the translation has also been done out of a concern for the work of earlier translators.

The entire diwan of Rahmna Baba has never been completely translated into English. And those poems that have been are, at times, patchy. The translators share the view, with many others, that the poety of the Pushtuns deserves the best scholarship possible in English.

Earlier publications

Momin Khan, graduate and translator from the Swat Valley

Early copies of the diwan were made by hand, and apparently were in wide circulation as early as 1728. The first printed diwan in Pushtu was produced in Lahore in 1877. This edition was based on the authoritative collection of Rahman poems made by Maulvi Ahmad and edited by T.P.Hughes. At least three different attempts have been made to collect a diwan from different manuscripts. In some versions the diwan is divided into two separate daftars (volumes). Poems in each volume are arranged according to the rhyming letter that ends each line.

Translation of the diwan into English has been limited. Of the 343 poems Raverty translated 36, Plowden 35, Enevoldsen 50 and Benawa 12.

However, many of these translations are of the same poems, so the total number of poems that have been translated is only around 80.

Plowden’s translations are fraught with error and muddled sentence structure. Though Enevoldsen’s beautiful rhyming translation are more pleasing to the ear, the compromises he makes to accommodate the rhyme often disrupt Rahman original meaning.

To base an understanding of Rahman Baba on these translations would lead to the kinds of errors that plague Caroe and Howell’s analysis of Khushal Khan Khattak.

These concerns over accuracy, and the limited number of translated poems were the stimulus for a fresh translation of the entire diwan made for this research.

Guidelines in the new translation

Robert Sampson, teacher at Edwardes College, Peshawar

The new translation was made from Rasa’s 1997 anthology. This was chosen because it is the most popular, and hence most influential, version of the diwan in use today.

Although the poems are not numbered in the diwan, the numbers used in this new translation are based on the order in which they occur in Raza’s anthology.

The diwan contains 343 poems. Of these the majority are in the form of ghazals, between 8 and 12 lines in length. Six poems are between 40 and 50 lines long, and D 46 is the longest, with 94 lines.

Following the pattern of the ghazal that was perfected by Hafiz and other Persian poets, each line has two parts (misre) that rhyme with each other in the first line only. The end of each line rhymes, and ends with the same letter of the alphabet.

The last line contains the takhallus (the poet’s name), following the style first used by Sanai.