Wrestling with Shah Latif
Feature Article | Translation & Poetics
“ How does one carry Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai into English without stripping his rhythm, spiritual depth and cultural memory? Through translation theory, oral tradition and meter, this essay wrestles with how every verse might be given a stable address, which form could carry Shah’s voice, and whether he can speak beyond Sindh and remain himself. ”
Reading Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai is not a task one completes; it is a journey one surrenders to. I have not read all the Surs, Baits and Vayes, but I am on the path, and every verse draws me deeper.
The Gap Between Two Languages
As a student of English literature, I turned to translations alongside the original Sindhi texts, and found myself standing in the space between the two languages. Several translators have made admirable attempts, among them Elsa Kazi, Muhammad Yakoob Agha, Ameena Khamesani, Agha Saleem, Faiz Muhammad Khoso and Amar Fayaz Buriro, and each has taught me something. Yet in my own reading, something vital remains elusive. Their works feel like carefully constructed bridges that do not quite touch the other side. The words are there, but the spirit slips through.
This is not a matter of skill but of essence. Translation is not merely about replacing one word with another; it is about carrying the soul of the original into a new form. It is about standing in the desert with Sassui, feeling the burning sand under your feet. It is about a longing so fierce that it shatters the self. Of the translations I have read, the renderings by Elsa Kazi and Ameena Khamesani come closest, to my ear, to achieving this, yet even they make me ask: can Shah truly be translated?
Reading Shah Honestly
Before this, I had no particular connection to Latif. My children do not know him yet, and I suspect many other children do not either. If we are honest, much of our engagement with his poetry stays at the surface. We quote him at gatherings, post his verses on social media and nod at his philosophy, and then return to our routines largely untouched by the vastness of his wisdom. I include myself in that gentle accusation. It is easier to admire a poet than to sit with him.
But Shah’s poetry is not meant merely to be quoted; it is meant to be lived. That realisation has led me to a conclusion: if he is to be translated, it must be done with a soul as much as with words. The challenge now is not only how to translate him, but whether it can be done without losing the very essence that makes his poetry timeless.
Two Questions Before a Single Line
If I am to take on the task of translating Shah into English, I must first confront two questions. Should each Bait be given a unique number, so that every verse can be cited with precision? And what form of English poetry should carry the translation: free verse, prose poetry or an attempt at structured rhythm? Should it mimic the way Shah’s words echo across the Sindhi landscape, or should it shape itself to the modern reader?
The First Dilemma: One Address for Every Verse
The first and most pressing issue is numbering each Bait so that it can be universally referenced: no more scrambling through different versions, no more debates over which line comes where. From the old Ganj to the modern Ambile presentation, the differences in diction and arrangement are striking. That is partly how languages breathe and evolve, like an old house patched up and remodelled over centuries, yet still standing in its essence.
Here is where the real difficulty begins. No single version, whether a translation or a compilation, matches another exactly. The sequence of Surs differs. The arrangement of Baits differs. Some Baits are omitted in one version and included in another.
At this point one feels like an archaeologist reconstructing an ancient city, except that half the bricks have been rearranged by well-meaning scholars who left no map behind. Before translation can responsibly begin, a single, authoritative text needs to be chosen.
The ideal method would number Shah’s verses the way the Quran is cited by chapter and verse, with something clean and precise like 1:1:1 (Sur:Dastan:Bait). But which version do we follow? The Ganj? Dr. Nabi Bux Baloch’s edition, the fruit of some thirty years of labour? Or some other version waiting on the shelves of an archive? I explore that question, and make my own case for the Baloch edition and a universal numbering system, in a companion essay, Stabilizing Shah Jo Risalo. Here it is enough to say that I cannot settle it alone. It needs the wisdom of scholars and, just as importantly, of independent thinkers willing to question received arrangements for the sake of reaching the real Shah. But one thing is certain: before a single word is translated, every Bait and Vaye should be anchored to a text that readers everywhere can cite in the same way.
The Second Dilemma: Which Form Should Shah Wear?
The second dilemma is more profound. If Shah is to step into the English world, which poetic form should he wear? Which meter should carry his voice? Which iamb should echo his rhythms? This is not only a linguistic puzzle; it is a poetic identity crisis.
I still recall my prosody classes in 1991–92, where Professor Ghulam Haider Baloch stood before us, his smile calm yet knowing, his voice low yet intense, guiding us through the landscape of English verse. He made us learn the forms and drilled into us the difference between a sonnet and a ballad, an ode and a villanelle, a haiku and a limerick, an epic and an elegy, a sestina and a pastoral, terza rima and a dramatic monologue, blank verse and free verse, each with its own rhythm and its own soul.
Then came the great revelation: the structure of verse itself. Stressed and unstressed syllables, dancing before us like a poetic ballet. And at the head of that dance, the grand ruler of English verse: the iamb.
Ah, the iamb! That little two-syllable foot, unstressed followed by stressed, marching through poetry. If you have ever unconsciously tapped your foot to “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, then congratulations: you have waltzed with iambic pentameter.
English poetry relies on meter, the pattern of stressed (´) and unstressed (˘) syllables. The basic unit of meter is the foot, and different feet create different rhythms. Here are the five most common.
Iambic pentameter is the heartbeat of Shakespeare and Milton: five feet of iambs per line. Here it is in Shakespeare, with each foot marked.
Blank verse is iambic pentameter without rhyme. This is the line Milton used in Paradise Lost, making poetry grand yet flexible.
Free verse is where structure takes a holiday and rhythm emerges organically: think Walt Whitman, think much of modern poetry, think a river flowing without a rigid bank. Rhymed verse is where sound is king: couplets, quatrains or any pattern in which words embrace in harmony, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Chaucer’s tales to Pope’s satires. And ballad meter is the common folk’s rhythm, alternating four-beat and three-beat lines, as in Emily Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me.
But here is the real catch. If we drape Shah’s poetry in any of these forms, will he still be Shah? His poetry is not only syllables and rhymes; it carries the soul of Sindh, its oral traditions, and a cadence that echoes the deserts, the rivers and the Sufi imagination. If I shape his words into English iambs, he might gain a new audience, but he might also lose his Sindhi essence and become Westernised for English readers.
Shah’s Own Forms
The reverse is also true. The Bait and the Vaye are indigenous Sindhi forms, with their own meter, rhythm and rhyme, a complete poetic system with firm footing, fully capable of carrying any masterpiece. If we translated Milton’s Paradise Lost into Sindhi Bait, it would no longer be Miltonic. By the same logic, if we translate Shah into true English iambic pentameter, it will no longer be Latifi.
A Spectrum of Choices
Dr. H. T. Sorley, in Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit (1940), translated select verses into English, and he was candid about his aim: a rendering that stays close enough to the text to satisfy scholars of language, but that reads as literature in its own right, without needing the Sindhi original beside it. That is one honest answer to the problem. It is not the only one, and every answer sits somewhere on a spectrum between loyalty and freedom.
| English form | What it offers Shah | What it risks |
|---|---|---|
| Prose or prose poetry | Closeness to meaning; room for imagery | The pulse of the verse disappears |
| Free verse | Flexibility; a modern, living voice | Loose rhythm can dilute the oral cadence |
| Iambic pentameter / blank verse | Dignity; a familiar sound for English readers | A Westernised Shah, no longer Latifi |
| Ballad or rhymed measure | Song-like memorability | Rhyme can force words that Shah never chose |
| Sindhi-shaped rhythm in English (an experiment) | Echoes of the original’s sound and structure | It may sound strange to ears trained on English verse |
Will orthodox Sindhi scholars accept a translation that leans toward English form? Some will welcome it, and some will hesitate, and both reactions come from love of the poet. A translation that earns the trust of Sindhi readers will have to show that it understands what Shah’s own forms were doing, even when it cannot reproduce them.
To Translate Is to Betray?
This is the storm one must navigate. The Italian saying traduttore, traditore, “translator, traitor”, has followed every translator for centuries. But the alternative is worse. To leave Shah untranslated would keep him, for most of the world, inside a language spoken by tens of millions and read by far fewer outside the region, a poet whom the world might never meet. Sindhi is spoken beyond the borders of Sindh, in India and across the diaspora, yet English remains the doorway through which most readers beyond the region would first approach him.
So the work of translation is not betrayal alone. It is also hospitality: an act of welcoming a poet into a new house, and hoping that he recognises himself there.
And so the question remains.
Feature Article | Translation & Poetics
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Sindhi poetic forms and the problem of translating into English
Editorial Note
References and further study
Baloch, Nabi Bakhsh Khan. Shah Jo Risalo. Sindh Culture Department, Government of Sindh, 2009.
Sorley, H. T. Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit: His Poetry, Life and Times. London: Oxford University Press, 1940.
Schimmel, Annemarie. Pearls from the Indus: Studies in Sindhi Culture. Jamshoro: Sindhi Adabi Board, 1986.
Bhittaipedia. Online edition of Shah Jo Risalo with translations, including those by Muhammad Yakoob Agha.
Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In On Translation, edited by Reuben A. Brower. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 1995.
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York: Random House, 1965.
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