Ghazal 51, Verse 9x

Gyan Chand:

Having seen the beauty of the beloved, the state of amazement overpowered me, and for this reason I became gone from himself. Now I neither have any concern about living in wellbeing, nor any fear of people's taunts and reproaches. This gone-from-self-ness-- wellbeing to it! (175-76)

FWP:

SETS

For background see S. R. Faruqi's choices.

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}.

A note on ;hairat : As for ;hairat , it's 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 to ;hairat is never a little jump, a startled step back, a sudden movement. Rather, it's a profound, frozen stillness that may (in the ghazal world) last for an indefinitely long time, and that may also look like awe. 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}.

And another such image of course can the mystical, entranced, self-oblivious state(s) envisioned in the present verse.

For more on the double reading of salaamat in the second line, see the discussion in {51,4}.