jab tak dahaan-e za;xm nah paidaa kare ko))ii
mushkil hai tujh se raah-e su;xan vaa kare ko))ii
1) as long as someone would not create the mouth of a
wound
2) it is difficult/doubtful, that someone would make open the road of speech
with you
mushkil : 'Difficult, hard; painful; intricate, knotty; —dubious, doubtful; obscure; ambiguous'. (Platts p.1040)
That is, as long as someone wouldn't endure the wound of passion, it is difficult that you would show kindness to him. (243)
As long as someone wouldn't create the mouth of a wound, the road of speech cannot open. That is, oh True Beloved or human beloved, if someone wants to meet you, then he needs to be wounded by the arrow of your coquetry. Only this situation is such that you would show kindness to him. (434)
SETS == WORDPLAY
ROAD: {10,12}
This famous ghazal contains some brilliant verses, and I'm happy to have the chance to enjoy it once again. S. R. Faruqi devoted an early Urdu article to analyzing it; the article was translated in 1981, and links to it are provided here.
This opening-verse is energized almost entirely by wordplay. Fortunately, it's based on such an obvious metaphor that we have the same one in English: we call it the 'mouth' of a wound because of the obvious physical resemblance. And in the ghazal world at least (as Faruqi observes), 'because it resembles two red lips, and because the bone which can be glimpsed through a deep wound shows like the whiteness of teeth'.
A wound-mouth, like a real mouth, must be 'made open' in order for speech to take place. But an open wound-mouth is no guarantee of successful speech-- it's only a precondition. If someone would open a wound-mouth, only then might he be able to open 'the road of speech' with the beloved. But there's no assurance at all that this will actually occur. The verbs are in the subjunctive, and the whole process is made to sound highly uncertain. Another 'wound-mouth' appears in {11,5x}.
Why is there a 'road of speech', and not just speech? An obvious wordplay reason is that a road too is something else that must be 'made open' before it's of any use, so that the same verb, vaa karnaa , works elegantly with both metaphors. And more subtly, the road provides an extra layer of complexity-- of distance to be traversed, of barriers to be overcome, of stages of progress-- that clearly evokes the sequential stages and levels of the Sufi path(s). The wound-mouth is only the beginning: it's like paying the toll that lets you onto a long, uncertain toll-road. (Compare the 'road of inquiry' in {214,5}.)
NOTE FOR GRAMMAR FANS: This negative structure ('as long as he would not open a wound-mouth') is normally used in Urdu, while English usually prefers an affirmative construction ('until he opens a wound-mouth'). Both languages can of course produce a range of other structures as well, but these are the most common ones. The presence or absence of negation has produced many careless mistranslations. This is something to watch out for, both when translating and when reading translations.
This opening-verse offers intriguing parallels with the closing-verse, {214,12}.
Hali:
In Sufi terminology, conversation between the worshipper and the worshipped involves ranks which accomplished mystics and knowers attain. He says that conversation with the True Beloved cannot take place with this everyday mouth; rather, it is necessary to create the mouth of a wound. That is, until the heart is wounded with the sword of passion, this rank cannot be attained.
==Urdu text: pp. 163-64 in Hali, Yadgar-e Ghalib