Zulfikar Ghose
The Attack on Sialkot
Grandfather, eighty now, his pilgrimage
to Meccaover, still lives there, at peace
with his Muslim conscience. At our last meeting
he sat in the courtyard of a mosque, still
as an idol, while I stood outside, garish
as a poster against the whitewashed wail
in my mohair suit and corduroy hat,
advertising my patient secularism.
Gunfire made Sialkot a kiln to fire
Pakistan’s earthen-pot faith, I listened
to the news hour after hour the whole month
and saw maps in newspapers~ an arrow
pointed at Sialkot. Grandfather’s breast-plate
of Islam had become fragile as china
in the intruding heresy of tanks.
I see that arrow still : aimed at grandfather.
It was a messy, a child’s pudding-plate
of a town during nay first seven years.
I pulled at grandfather’s beard and dragged down
his turban when he carried me to school.
He turned five times a day to Mecca, bowed
low in prayer and at night swung me round
the bed so that my feet did not insult
the holy direction, the one truth he knew.
From east and southeast the tanks, from the air
the jets converged all month on Sialkot
in a massive pilgrimage, bloodier than
the sacrifice of goats at the end of Ramadan.
Grandfather, the landmarks are falling, which
way will you turn now? Islam, Islam, that’s
all you cared for, stubborn as a child, while
I had gone westward, begun to eat pork.
Grandfather, if the old house falls, if you
die where you built and Sialkot collapses~
I shall have no Mecca to turn to, who
admire cathedrals for their architecture.
l~eligion is irrelevant to grief:
you will not agree~ nor will Pakistan~
finding in this war the old Islamic
pride rise like a congregation in a mosque.
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POETRY
Arthur Waley
By Ivan Morris
R^R~. indeed is the author whohas both the
opportunity and the ability to introduce a
lady of tenth-century Japan is interspersed with
a translation of about a quarter of her vast
major foreign literature to the general reader diary-notebook(Waleyregarded this as the most
in his own country. Arthur Waley made two satisfactory of all his works), and Yiian Mei, a
such literatures knownto the English-speaking scintillating account of a poet and literary
world. hedonist in eighteenth-century China.
In x9x6, whenhis first translations of Chinese
tPhoems
e Far were
East privately printed,ofthe literature and
of WAL~V’S ability to understand Far Eastern
was the preserve specialists literature and to makeit important for readers
of dabblers in quaint exotica. Now,fifty years in the West was due to a rare concatenation of
later, almost every educated reader in England
and America, even those who have never talents. First, he was a meticulous and erudite
glanced at a T’ang poemor read a single page scholar. His education at Rugbyand at King’s
of The Tale o] Genii, knows that China and College, where he was one of the talented group
of menwhostudied at Cambridgeshortly before
Japan possess rich literary traditions and that
manyof their greatest worksare readily avail- the First World War, gave him a thorough
able in translation. WithoutWaley’sbooksit is training in the classics, a training that can be of
unlikely that the classics of China and Japan the greatest use to the Orientalist and that is
would have becomesuch an important part of becoming increasingly rare among younger
our heritage. In France, for example,despite a specialists in the field. Waley’svast learning
added a valuable dimension to his understand-
long tradition of Oriental studies and numerous
scholarly translations, The Tale o[ Genii is ing of Chinese and Japanese culture, enabling
hardly knownexcept to the occasional japono- him to discern the type of analogies and cori-
logue; and few educated Frenchmenhave read trasts that are not encouraged by the more
the poemsof Li Po or Po Chfi-i, or heard of rigid specialisation nowin vogue.
Sei Sh6nagonor Y/Jan Mei. Secondly, he was a remarkablelinguist. Apart
from knowing the commonEuropean languages,
A distinguished biographer, Waleymastered he had a complete commandof Chinese and
a mosteffective genre that consists of integrating
the biography of a writer with selected trans- Japanese, two of the most complicated langu-
lations of his worksand an imaginative picture ages in the world, and as unlike each other as
of his cultural background.Here the outstand- they are from English; he could read Syriac,
Ainu, and Mongol; he spoke Yiddish and was
ing examples are The Pillow-Boo k o[ Sei conversant with the intricacies of Talmudic
Sh6nagon, in which a concise evocation of the
life and times of a brilliantly malicious Court literature. Like Sir George Sansom,the other
~
great English interpreter of Japanese culture,
Waleywas an autodidact in Oriental languages.
To teach oneself Chineseor Japanese is no mean
Iv^re MoRRIs,author o[ Nationalism and
the Right Wing in Japan and o[ The feat even with today’s plethora of dictionaries,
Worldof the Shining Prince: Court Life in 1 A recent article aboutSansom’sworkis Geoffrey
Ancient Japan, is Professor of Japaneseat Gorer’s "Japan’sPast," (ENcov~T~R, May~965). Sir
ColumbiaUniversity where he is Chairman George Sansom(r883-~965) was an almost exact
of the Departmentof East Asian Languages contemporaryof Waley(i889-~966); his studies,
andCultures. He is also an AssociateFellow whichweremainlydevotedto history and language,
o] St. Antony’sCollege, Oxford. perfectly complemented Waley’sworkon Japanese
literature.
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