This is my translation of a poem by my homeboy Makhdoom Mohiuddin. I did this last week, and the translation is still a work in progress — so if you know Urdu and English, and have suggestions, please hit me up in the comments (same goes for transliteration).

The poem itself was collected in his 1944 anthology, Surkh Sawera, or Red Dawn.

muhabbat ki chhaoN
makhdoom mohiuddin

raat aur din yooNhi aate jaate rahe
husn aur ishq takmeel paate rahe

Shade of Love
Makhdoom Mohiuddin

When I slept in the shade of love
Even thorns seemed to be flowers then

That was a matter of the beginning of passion!
That was a night of love, full of stars

My heart’s strings were struck by the pick
Fires rose up, a kind of intoxication cast over

The one endowed with beauty was endowed abundantly
The one I looked at endlessly was revelation

Once my whole heart was washed over with lightning
Lightning was dissolved in my every vein

My heart’s amusement became the reason for my heart’s pain
My heart’s amusement became the story of my tears

My life began to change in a moment
My life began to be cast in the mould of sorrow

The day of love declined, the evening began
My heart began to throb, my eyes began to cry

Night and day came and went like this
Finding beauty and love finished

Revelation. I’ve translated toor as revelation. toor literally means hill or mountain, but refers to Mount Sinai and to the revelation received by Moses there. On Mount Sinai:

For the uninitiated, it might help to check out the rest of the comics series here.

Click on image for full size:

Che lives.

(This comic is based, almost verbatim, on a true story. Thank you, Sheila.)

how do you tell someone that the moon is beautiful?
how do you tell them the way the stars shine?
there’s more to you than i could possibly describe
i could run out of words just talking about your smile

i’m weary and my pen nib is scared

and that’s odd because nibs shouldn’t have emotions

i’m scrubbing it with an old toothbrush — one my uncle used when he came to canada on a trip

i just finished redrawing the first panel of my diana comic and i like the new rendition, and the new background effect, much better; and so i photoshopped it in

i want to sleep — i usually (usually? that’s a laugh) go to bed by 6:00 a.m. and it’s now 11:00 a.m. — people keep asking me if i ever sleep

i once had a dream that was a black and white comic — this is long before i even knew about sin city — it had panels, it had sound and motion effects … i don’t remember much of it

comics — i could go on for a long time speaking about the various aspects of comics but most people’s eyes would glaze over

sometimes you repeat a word so much that you start to doubt if it is a real word, you roll it over your tongue and try to savour its cadences but all you taste is a funny feeling; you repeat the word to yourself and it seems to be the most ludicrous thing you’ve ever heard — is it really a word? — you check the dictionary and it just blows your mind that there it is, right there, these letters arranged in this order placed in this context

i want to draw more comics and i want to do unexpected things with them

after my “no man’s land” strip people were caught by surprise by the diana comic — it wasn’t expected — it wasn’t humourous and that seemed to be out of vein of my usual activities

i like doing unexpected things

after i’m done washing these pen nibs i’m going to sleep

and then one of the nibs breaks — not the nib itself but the brass reservoir control on it breaks — and that hurts because it’s a good nib and a replacement is going to be expensive and i wonder if art stores have boxing day sales

it strikes me then, that not it but the other nib was the one that was scared

and that’s odd because nibs shouldn’t have emotions

i certainly need some sleep

(click on thumbnail)

for diana (though, not about diana), thanks to payal for her help…