In these times of protests, if someone were to ask me to single out THE most romantic Urdu verse I would unhesitatingly pick out this jewel by Momin Khan Momin:
Tum mere paas hote ho goya
Jab koi doosra nahi hota
You are close beside me as if
No other person can be with me
The rest of the ghazal has several other, often-recited sher, too such as:
Haal-e dil yaar se likhun kyunkar
Haath dil se juda nahin hota
How shall I describe my state to my beloved
I can not detach my hand from my heart
And:
Tum hamare kissi tarah na huwe
Varna duniya mein kya nahin hota
You never ever became mine no matter what
Or else, what could I not have achieved in life
But poetry, like love, is subjective and deeply personal. And for me the one sher that stands out from Urdu’s admittedly vast corpus of romantic poetry is this short, seemingly simple verse for reasons that are hard to describe. I like to, also, use this sher in lectures and translation workshops to demonstrate the futility and loss that lies at the heart of any translation.
In Urdu, the entire “weight” (wazan) of the sher rests on the word ‘goya’, that almost untranslatable conjunction; as if, like, as though, apparently, etc. do not carry the same weight as ‘goya’. Momin’s contemporary, Mirza Ghalib, is said to have declared his willingness to give away his entire diwan for this one verse!