The nazm, with its highly intricate varieties, voices, variations and vicissitudes, is a profound poetic form with a fascinating history Compiled comprehensively for the first time, this collection presents the best of Urdu nazms from the sixteenth century to now.
Selected, edited and translated by Anisur Rahman, the 140 nazms in the book trace the evolution of the form right from its roots in the Deccan to various geographies across South Asia, where it flourished and acquired its plurality. The dazzling English translations published along with their transliterated originals make for pleasurable and illuminating reading. Hazaar Rang Shaain: The Wonderful World of the Urdu Nazm is a book for everyone who is curious about how poetry colours our lives.
'We live and die by our poets. In putting together this phenomenal collection, Anisur Rahman has touched an emotional chord that defines a living tradition connecting multilingual cultures."
Anisur Rahman is a bilingual poet in English and Urdu, a translator and literary critic. Formerly a Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, a Central University in New Delhi, and Senior Advisor at Rekhta Foundation, the world's largest website on the Urdu language, literature, and culture (www.rekhta.org), he has worked and published in the areas of comparative, translation, postcolonial and Urdu studies. He has to his credit six books authored by him, five edited/co-edited volumes and two collections of Urdu poetry in English translation. His most recent publications include Earthenware: Sixty Poems (Rubric Publishing, 2018), In Translation: Positions and Paradigms (Orient Blackswan, 2019). Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi: The Wonderful World of Urdu Ghazals (HarperCollins, 2019) and Socioliterary Cultures in South Asia (Niyogi Books, 2019). Rahman has been a Shastri Fellow at the University of Alberta, Canada (2001-2002) and a Visiting Scholar at Purdue University, USA (2007).
Anisur Rahman has had a long and distinguished career as an academic, literary critic, editor, translator, anthologist and a poet in English and Urdu. I had the pleasure of publishing a number of his translations of modern Urdu poetry in the Journal of South Asian Literature (26:1-2, 1991) which later appeared in his much-lauded Fire and the Rose: An Anthology of Modern Urdu Poetry (Rupa & Co., 1995). That anthology started with the early twentieth century poet-innovators and presented a panoramic view of modern Urdu poetry with forty-five poets and their most representative poems. Given the positive reception which this volume of modern Urdu poetry received, Rahman turned his thoughts back in literary time. He published Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi: The Wonderful World of Urdu Ghazals (HarperCollins, 2019) where he turned to the timeless Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) for the first part of his title. May this be added that anyone who attempts to translate poetry ought to have that Ghalib couplet memorized which Rahman has ably translated: 'Desires in thousands I had, for each I would die/With many I had luck, for many I would sigh'. Indeed, every translator is likely to have his/her hits and misses-luck' and 'sighs'--but I submit that in that volume of ghazals, as well as in this volume of nazms we have been presented with 'many' more hits than usual where Rahman has 'had luck'.
Coming fast on the heels of the previous volume, Rahman brings us now to the first comprehensive selection of Urdu nazms in English translation. His all-inclusive introduction to this volume, 'Urdu Nazm: Frames of Reference' and his Translator's Note' would be particularly helpful to the reader. While in the former, he engages with the idea of the 'nazm' and the plethora of the types and sub-types of this category of verse, in the latter he justifiably states that his objective for preparing this volume is to provide the reader a larger view of the multiple traditions of Urdu poetry that developed and matured over the last five centuries. As important as the other features of the volume are his biographical-cum-critical notes on poets that would help the reader in contextualizing them in literary and historical contexts to which they belong.
To create a context for the poets that follow, Rahman puts them into six major sections where he defines the main features of each age and the poets who represented them. The titles of the six sections into which the span of Urdu poetry is divided are helpful signposts to what should be expected in each section. The first ('Making a Tradition') lays the foundation of the book and shows us how Urdu and its poetry developed in the Deccan during the sixteenth century before moving towards various centres in the north where it flourished.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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