Author: Ahmad Faraz
Translator(s): M H K Qureshi
Publisher: Star Publications
Year: 2004
Language: multilingual
Pages: 258
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8176500925
Description
This collection of the poet is being presented with text in Urdu, Hindi and Roman script-as also the lyrical translation in English.
In this translation of Faraz's poetry an attempt has been made to preserve the spirit of the original. No effort was made to interpret. The translation is a literal and faithful rendering, and it has avoided the temptation, to use better and more lucid alternative expressions especially where the original images and metaphors were derived from the religion.
This, however, is past history, and it is time that this communication gap is bridged. Firstly, Urdu today is a fully developed language, and its literary idiom is familiar to millions in almost all parts of Pakistan and India. What is more, its contemporary literature, poetry in particular, is also the favourite and much loved reading of Indo-Pakistani communities settled in may Western developed literature that nurtured its growth and its has produced, in the last four or five decades, a whole crop of very gifted writers in both pose and verse. Among them a highly celebrated name these days is that of the poet, Ahmad Faraz.
The classical poetic idiom that Faraz employs, laden with symbols peculiar to our eastern feudal tradition, and multi-layered meaning of apparently simple words, peculiar to our poetic usage present the translator into another language with almost insuperable difficulties, particularly if the language happens to be as far removed from Oriental poetic tradition as English is. The translator of this volume has wrestled bravely and assiduously English translation from Urdu.
Contents
Return
Truth is also a lie
Dreams do not die
White canes
Condemned
Worry not
You and I
Mirror
Astray cloud
Sometimes, very often
Bough on the tree of sorrow
The wasted crop
Neither the moon stops
What did I have
Nestless Birds
Poet and tyrant
Courier pigeons
Last hours of the night
Second migration
Demon
Winds, the messengers
Last night of the departing year
Beirut
Shylock
The waverig heart
I am alive
Do not kill the voices!
Pen is victorious!
The mercenaries
My poems, my ghazals
Why should we sell our dreams?
Norman moir
Mute cuckoos