Born in Pakistan, the Urdu modernist poet Miraji began his forays into translation and lyric by scrounging for literary exemplars in Lahore libraries. Among them was the poet Sappho. This chapter turns to Miraji's essay on Sappho, a lyricist whose life and lyric was always on the move to speak about Miraji as a queer Hindustani lyricist-theorist who died in Bombay longing for Pakistan. Over the course of his essay, Miraji began to fold Sappho's voice into his own, asking, in the process, for hamdardī, shared solicitude, rather than veracity as a mode of belonging-knowing. Following his process of aligning the fifth century poet Sappho with Urdu modernism, this chapter plaits migrating texts as translations, routed through Lahore, flowering into the grammar of surmise, the signature of prophecy, to offer another telos-sojourn through which we, through Miraji, can imaginatively theorize queer archives, and queer histories.
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