About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Zehr-e-Ishq* (The Poison of Love) by Nawab Mirza Shauq Lakhnavi. It is a short *masnavi*, a narrative poem in rhyming couplets, of about five hundred and sixty couplets, telling in the first person the story of a young man's love for a merchant's daughter who lives in his own quarter of the city.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page زہر عشق, downloaded in October 2026. The Wikisource text breaks off in the middle of a couplet near the very end. The rest of the poem, the last fifteen couplets, has been taken from a printed edition of the *masnavi* (title page: نواب مرزا شوق لکھنوی) scanned and freely available on archive.org under the name "Masnawi Zahr E Ishq". The printed text and the Wikisource text agree, line for line, up to the point where Wikisource stops.

What is left out and what was changed: the whole poem is given, in the poet's order, with his own section headings, such as The First Sight, The Beauty's Letter, The Last Plea and The Beloved's Bier. Nothing has been taken from the modern edition except the closing couplets of the poem itself. The poem has been divided into four parts for easier reading; these part titles are new. Each couplet is printed as one two-line block. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: Mirza Shauq Lakhnavi died in 1871, long before 1961, and the poem dates from his lifetime. The text is therefore in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new and keeps each couplet as two lines, with accuracy put before rhyme. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. Where an idiom or a line is not clear, the note says so.

The lovers in the poem are not named: the speaker is "I", and the girl is "the merchant's daughter", "that rose" or "that moon". Other names are given in one spelling throughout: Ahmad (the Prophet), Ali or Haidar, Majnun or Qais, Laila, Shirin, Farhad, Nal and Daman, Bahram, Rustam, Sam, Joseph, Banaras. Urdu terms kept in the English are printed in italics, explained where they first appear, and listed in the glossary at the end of the book.

Introduction

The poem opens with the praise of God, of the Prophet and of Ali, and with a short passage on the power of love, which "picks out the young and kills them one by one" and "makes the beauties swallow poison". The story then begins. One cloudy day the speaker goes up on his roof and sees the merchant's daughter on hers. They fall in love at first sight, and the poem follows them through his illness, his parents' anxious questions, her first letter, his answer, her teasing denial, and at last their secret meetings, when she visits him on her way back from the shrine.

The turn of the story comes when her family find out. On the night of the *Nauchandi* she comes to him for the last time and tells him that she is to be sent away to Banaras. Her long last speech is the heart of the poem: a meditation on the passing of all things, followed by a list of tender and exact instructions on how he must behave when she is dead, so that her honour is kept, and a last night of love. He tries to talk her out of her resolve, but she tells him that death is better than a life of taunts.

The last part follows the morning after: her farewell, the cry from the merchant's house, the mourning of her parents and of the whole quarter, her bier carried under a canopy with a bridal garland, and her mother's lament. The speaker keeps his promise not to betray her at the funeral, but alone at her grave he breaks down, goes home and takes poison himself. He survives, and in a dream she reproaches him for forgetting her last wishes. The poem ends quietly with the two lines of its moral: "This is what I earned in love: I gave my heart, and made friends with grief."