In your ocean eyes

Blame Neha. Faiz is untranslatable in general, and Teri samundar aankhon mein (see original here) doubly so, but the Bilal Tanweer translation she put up was so godawful, that I figured I couldn't possibly do any worse. So here you go:

This shore of sunlight where evening sets,
where both times meet -
neither day nor night, neither now nor then -
an eternal instant, instantly fleet.
On this shore of sunlight, an instant or two,
the leaping lips,
the jingling caress,
our togetherness neither false nor true.
Why feel ashamed? Why talk of blame?
Why lie?
When this evening's sun sinks
in your ocean eyes
households shall sleep content
and the wanderer wave goodbye.

- Faiz Ahmed Faiz (translation mine)

Obviously there are a few departures from the original here - what I wanted to do was be as faithful as possible to the rhythm of Faiz's poem - its friskiness, its momentum, its rhymes and half rhymes. That's meant sacrificing accuracy here and there (and inverting the order of "Jab teri samundar aankhon mein / is shaam ka sooraj doobega"), but I quite like the result.

One serious change is the shortening of "Kis kaaran jhooti baat karo" to "Why lie?", which not only considerably shortens the line, but also makes it rhyme with the lines that follow rather than with the line immediately preceding it. An alternative line would "Why tell these lies in vain?" but that just strikes me as being unnecessarily clunky.