Most people, myself included, know this poem from the famous song from the 1976 film Kabhi Kabhie. For this entry, I went back to the complete literary poem behind it.
The poem
The complete Urdu poem is on Rekhta. I read it alongside a Roman transliteration and a deliberately plain line-by-line rendering before reading two literary translations.
I catch some of the words because Urdu shares them with Hindi, but not enough to follow the poem on my own.
The poem is still under copyright, so I am linking to the full text rather than reproducing it here.
Translation
Once in a While
Life could have been a joy
If lived within the shade of your face.
Darkness, the fate of my being,
Would hide itself from your glance.
No wonder. A stranger to grief,
I could have remained lost in your charms,
Absorbed myself in the tales
Of your lithe body, your sleepy eyes.
If I had to face the world’s bitterness,
I could have sipped sweetness from your lips.
Life, a bareheaded frenzy, a cry, could search for me;
But I would steal moments of peace within the shade of your face.
But all this did not happen.
I don’t own you; I’m not sad because of you; I don’t look for you.
Life passes as if
Coveting friendship no more.
I embrace all life’s miseries;
I now pass through strange streets.
Dark shadows leap towards me.
From the desert of life and death;
There is no way, no end, not even a ray of light.
My life wanders in a void, a void in which someday
I, too, shall be lost; I know all this, but
Once in a while these thoughts come to mind.
After reading the translations
I read Sain Sucha’s “Sometimes” and Carlo Coppola and M. H. K. Qureshi’s “Once in a While”.
The poem reminded me how much emotion and love can be conveyed by Urdu. It amazes me because this is a version of Urdu I can barely understand, and even that is mostly because of the words it shares with Hindi.
Even with words I don’t understand, it is clear to me that the English translations do not do justice to the original. The original has a quiet melancholy, but it never becomes “boo-hoo, poor me.” It feels more like: this is just how life is. I’m just telling you.
Hearing it
I then listened to a recording attributed to Sahir himself. It is wonderful and rare to hear a poem in the voice of the poet who wrote it.
Compared with the movie version, the reading is more measured. The repeated lines which are customary in reading poems in Urdu, really emphasize the phrases that stand out. The reverb and other effects work well in the movie. Without them, though, I feel much closer to the poet as he recites it.
What I learned
“Kabhi Kabhi” was a poem long before it became a film song. It is a nazm, not a ghazal: one thought continues through the poem rather than moving through couplets that can largely stand on their own. It was included in Talkhiyan, Sahir’s first collection. Rekhta has a record of a first edition from 1944.
Talkhiyan means “Bitternesses,” and the same word appears in the poem: talkhiyan zamane ki, the bitternesses of the world. At first, the speaker imagines the life he might have lived with the woman he loved. Then comes magar ye ho na saka: “But this could not happen.” From there, he is living with the sorrows of the world and wandering without a road or light.
Sahir was associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement. The poem starts with one lost love and ends among “the sorrows of the whole world.”
I also learned that 1976 was not the first attempt to bring the poem into a film. Singer Sudha Malhotra recalled recording an unreleased version with Geeta Dutt for a shelved Chetan Anand film around 1959–60. Khayyam had already written the melody that was later revived for Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie.
The song in the 1976 movie is not the complete literary poem. It keeps the refrain and some of the imagery, but rewrites much of it as a more direct romantic song. Later, Amitabh Bachchan’s poet recites selected lines from the darker original.
Rereading it
The lines starting magar ye ho na saka are the most memorable for me. Of course, you know all along that the speaker has lost the woman. Even so, I am not prepared for this. In my plain rendering:
ki tu nahin, tera gham, teri justuju bhi nahin
You are not here; nor is my grief for you, nor even my search for you.
The loss is not just that she is gone. Even the sorrow and the search for her are gone. It leaves a lump in my throat.