proposition raises all sorts of problems for the critic who may justifiably treat them as those of interlanguage and intertext I shall quote the Urdu poem and its English translation in full in order to see if the two languages concur in the validity of such a thesis [The Urdu original (A) is on page 38 ] (B) Introductions Death meet them These simple-hearted who Neither pray nor drink Who are neither artful nor worfdiy- wise Who have learning Of neither books nor of machines Of neither this world nor another Merely faithless in all things Don t be shy Death, Meet them Come ahead you also come ahead To meet Death Come you nouveau nche Don t bother to hide your begging-bowls There is no life in you now slaves of Mammon and of Time Laugh with Death woo him please him Death these are negative men More than negative less than men Give them a sweet glance Translated by M H K Quresh & Carlo Coppola Fho English translation above is just the best there is but reading the Urdu text alongside prov/idos a collation of texts which makes one acutely aware of the discrepancy of diction which these two poems embody The English text is contemporary down to earth secular and denotative thp Urdu is more evocative overlaid with connotation and exploitative of registers—including those of socio-literary and scholastic discourse—to which much Urdu writing is heir Certainly Rashed s upbringing and eartv training in the Perso-Arabic infused cultuie of the pre 1947 Punjab can explain a great deal of such a bent of mind and the choice and turn of phrase It is indeed unfair to compare for original quality the original to a translation yet I am bringing both these texts into discussion in order to highlight their separate merits and converging possibilities lather than neuessar ily to assign priontv to eitner The purpose of this demonstration is to show up the difficulty in any attempt to convey in contemporary English the Rashed text the reasons being embedded in the vastly different sensibility of each language but more particularly in the individual usage Th s comment c, rnr an Ic appl'y ne ther to the translation of poetry in generdi nor to translation of al of Rdshed s work Annual of Urdu Studies #5 40