nah puuchh nus;xah-e marham jaraa;hat-e
dil kaa
kih us me;N rezah-e almaas juzv-e a((:zam hai
1) don't ask about the prescription for salve/ointment
for wounds of the heart
2) for in it fragments of diamond are the chief part
He says, for the wound of the heart, the prescriptionfor salve that has been devised-- don't ask about it. Because in that prescription a great/major element of the medicines is a fragment of diamond. The meaning is that for the wound of the heart, it's necessary to use a salve from which the wound would keep on increasing 'twofold by day, fourfold by night'. (280)
He says that the cure for the wound of the heart is death.
[Or:] If the meaning of 'wound of the heart' would be 'the wound of the pain of love', then the cure for love is that however much it would be increased, however much of the beloved's tormenting there would be to endure, it's so much to the good. (388)
SETS == INEXPRESSIBILITY
The commentators generally take it that the diamond-fragment would be used to scrape or deepen the wound, either perhaps in a medical sense (to remove infected tissue, etc.); or else in a masochistic sense to heighten the pain/pleasure of the wound (a purpose for which the lover often uses his fingernails, as in {15,8} and {19,1} and other verses).
But on a darker reading, it's equally possible that the diamond-fragment is an evocation of the bits of diamond that are used like a poison, to pierce the intestines and cause death from internal bleeding-- a very lover-like death, in fact. For the most conspicuous example of such a use, see {2,1}-- where the diamond is a 'gift' among wounds that are also 'gifts', so that suffering seems to be a gift, but so does death. And in the present verse, suffering is part of the prescription-- but so is death. Are they parts of one single process (you suffer worse and worse until you finally die of the wound), or is the latter an antidote for the former (you suffer so badly that you then seek the relief of death)? In the world of the ghazal, with its pain/pleasure equations, it's hardly possible to tell the two apart.
Nazm:
And the remaining elements are salt and musk-- that is, the things that would make a wound further increase. (222)