Ghazal has a unique charm and beauty, and the genre in spite of changing times and different socio-economic mileus has kept its appeal intact. Its haunting melody, its delicate handling of the subject, its approach to ideas through emotions, as also its repetition of the radeef (the end word or phrase or part of the line) and its kafias (rhymes) weave a web of magic the force of which is hard to resist. It has a rare disarming quality which requires that even the hard stuff is purveyed most softly. Ghazal today is no longer confined to Persian (from where it came to India) and Urdu. It is gaining popularity in other languages too, especially in the subcontinent. But even though ghazal is being written in other languages also, it is the Urdu ghazal which has the greatest appeal. In the second half of the twentieth century, some people thought that ghazal would not be able to handle the increasingly complex and hard realities of our times. But it was a false alarm and the ghazal continues to hold sway over the elite and the commoners alike.
I am conscious of the difficulties of translating poetry from one language to the other, especially the difficulty involved in doing justice to the complex texture of the ghazal. The challenge here is the challenge of being faithful to the original and at the Same time retaining at least some of its charm and beauty. It not only the idea of the original that is to be conveyed, but I soul, its strength, its poignancy and sweetness and, if possible, its rythem and resonance should also reach the reader. One of the ways I could think of meeting this challenge is to translate the verses in rhymed couplets, provided the rhymes are natural and not forced.
For the present anthology, my thanks are first and foremost to late Shri Prakash Pandit who was a great connoisseur of Urdu poetry and knew some of the poets personally. He has made wonderful selection giving the widest possible representation. Have only updated it. Even now, I know, some good poets have been left out. Thanks are also due to Shri o. P. Sapra and Dr. Nadeem Ahmed Qadri for their help in preparing the manuscript and reading the proofs. Their help were very valuable indeed last but not the least; I thank my publishers for giving me an assignment right after my heart.
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