Poems By Faiz (Oip)

Excellent translation

Cover was different than picture shown but in excellent condition, very happy with the book and the fact that is has both the english and urdu translations.

. There is a jeweled, ecstatic quality which seems to be the special property of Islamic and Sufi verse, familiar to some Western readers now by the recent wild popularity of Rumi; similarly, there is an entranced and erotic tone particular to certain Indian poets, as in the great Bengali figure Tagore. The poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz rests at a meeting point between the two, but at many other crossroads as well. He was born in 1911 in Punjab, which was part of India at his birth and of Pakistan at his death in 1984. He was raised an orthodox Muslim but came to see himself as agnostic; he had a traditional grounding in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, knew these literatures intimately, and yet opened himself to the influences of English Romanticism and European surrealism; he wrote ghazals (the recurring poetic form of Urdu and its eighteenth-century master, Ghalib) and sonnets. He also, perhaps inevitably, felt the influence of Marxism, and he extended the reach of Urdu into the characteristic twentieth-century poetic form of political witness. He was shunned and imprisoned by repressive politicians and came to his official honors posthumously; but in the literary world and among the Pakistani people he seems to have been a beloved and revered figure. Reading his verse even in translation one finds a radiance and generosity, a quality of goodness, that makes his personal reputation believable; it certainly puts to shame, say, the crabbed right-wing politics of many of the Modernist poets. The selection done by V. G. Kiernan (POEMS BY FAIZ, New Delhi, Oxford India Paperbacks, reprinted 2000) is a particularly interesting book from the point of view of translation: there is an Urdu text and transliteration, but also a close literal version as well as one in verse; one can follow, in a sense, some of the distance Faiz covers to get to English, and the rhymed versions, with their late Romantic manner, are often quite good. There is also 100 POEMS BY FAIZ AHMED FAIZ, translated by Sarvat Rahman (New Delhi, Abhinav Publications, 2002), not as good as Kiernan's versions but with poems not included there.Glenn Shea, from Glenn's Book Notes, at www.bookbarnniantic.com

...from a great poet.

This is the best translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz I've read since discovering his work in an anthology of Urdu poetry. It would be higher in the rankings if Amazon bothered to note that Kiernan was personally acquainted with Faiz and received his input on the selection and character of the translations. Kiernan has also usefully supplied the student of Urdu and otherwise curious person with four sets of each poem: The poetic and metrically regular main translation; a literal free verse translation; and the Urdu text in both Nastaliq and Roman alphabet versions. Faiz's verse reads like a mixture of Keats, Hart Crane, and Shelley, with all the brilliant sensuality, haunting imagery, and revolutionary fervor of those poets minus Crane's overwrought diction and Shelley's affective melodrama.

Great poetry from a classic writer

Love the 4-way format with Urdu, romanized Urdu, literal translation and poetic English translation by V. G. Kiernan.

Don't know whether this book does justice to faiz's poetry. Why "we will see" is not covered in this book?

One of favourite poet .A progressive writer who taught readers to read and listen some thing different types of poetry rather than old Urdu traditional poetry.

The only aspect of this book that compelled me to reduce my rating of this otherwise perfect book to 4 Stars is the page thickness/quality. The printing on one side of the page is faintly visible on the other side, thus lessening the impact of my reading.