Ghazal 84, Verse 5x

Asi:

Endurance intends to make the heart a prisoner of the tearing of the wound, so that he would in no way emerge from it; and Pain is in a kind of ambush, seeking somehow to lament, and vent its spleen.

== Asi, pp. 161-162

Zamin:

Twofold grief and suffering afflicts the madman. One is the claim of Endurance that he should die, but by no means lose his grip on self-control; on the other side is Pain, which insistently demands that he should hasten to lament and complain.

== Zamin, p. 229

Gyan Chand:

How can I have endurance! Endurance has created such a situation, that I would imprison the heart in ripping-- that is, that the heart would become ripped apart. This will be at the very time when Endurance will have turned its face away. Pain remains anxious for me to begin to lament-- as if there's not Endurance, but Pain.

== Gyan Chand, p. 259

FWP:

SETS == A,B; I AND; KIH; PARALLELISM; SUBJECT?

For background see S. R. Faruqi's choices. For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}.

The idiomatic turn of phrase 'X-- and Y!' is the foundation of both lines here; for greater recognizability, on the SETS page this structure is given its most common form, 'I and'. The idea is to point to the extreme incommensurability of X and Y, as though they can hardly even be mentioned in the same breath, much less compared in words. (A similar idiomatic structure is kahaa;N yih , kahaa;N vuh ! ) This 'incommensurability trope' has a paradoxical feeling to it: 'How can X and Y exist in the same world?'. (Or else, conversely, it might be 'X and Y are each other's completely opposite yin-and-yang complements'.)

One obvious reading is to assign the 'X' qualities to the lover, and the 'Y' qualities to the beloved. But the commentators offer a reading in which all the qualities belong to the lover, so that the verse describes a struggle between personified aspects of his psyche. Really 'I and' verses like this are so open-ended that the possible readings range widely.

A final fillip of indeterminacy is provided by the flexibility of kih . Both lines are so structured that it might introduce either a clause that describes the 'Y' quality alone, as in (1a) and (2a), or a clause that describes a reaction to the whole 'X-- and Y!' situation, as in (1b) and (2b).