Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in 1911 in Kala Qader, British India (present-day Pakistan). He studied Arabic and English literature at Government College and Oriental College. A dedicated member of the Communist Party, Faiz often found himself afoul of Pakistan's ruling elites, leading to his exile and imprisonment. While he primarily wrote in Urdu, with few exceptions of Punjabi, Hindustani, and Persian verse, Faiz's body of work reaches deep into the fecund linguistic soil of the Indian subcontinent to draw nourishment from Hindustani, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962 and the Lotus Prize for African and Asian Literature in 1976, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize before his death in 1984 at the age of 73.
Faiz stands alongside Mahmoud Darwish (who recounts their shared exile in Beirut in Memories of Forgetfulness), Nazim Hikmet (whom Faiz translated into Urdu), and Pablo Neruda (a friend) as an iconic figure of twentieth-century world literature. Urdu idiom on either side of the India-Pakistan border has absorbed his poetry to such a degree that it’s not uncommon to hear people quoting him in everyday conversations. His ghazals have been performed by many of South Asia’s most prominent singers. Yet despite his popularity and international profile, Faiz has largely remained unknown to Western readers. “To have to introduce Faiz’s name” to Western readers, Agha Shahid Ali writes in a review of Naomi Lazard’s 1988 translation of Faiz’s work, “a name that is mentioned in Pakistan . . . as often as the sun is, seem[s] a terrible insult.”
In his essay “The Mind of Winter: Reflections of Life in Exile,” Edward Said calls Faiz a poet of exile, engaged in lending “dignity to a condition legislated to deny dignity—to deny an identity to people.” I have the difficult privilege of being an émigré. I migrated from Pakistan to the United States in 1998. My paternal and maternal grandparents migrated from India with my young aunts and uncles at Partition. Dissolution of “home”—a place of familiarity, kinship, and historical continuity—has been the defining experience of my life. And Faiz’s poetry, in no small way, has helped me grapple with a condition that is terrifying, liberating, and above all, fugitive from settled notions about identity.
- Umair Kazi
Pakistan | Short Fiction | Urdu
July, 2017Azra Abbas’s short fiction is known for its enigmatic descriptions and unusual points of view. Whether it is the memoir of a hapless chameleon who gets inadvertently crushed by a group of schoolchildren, or a woman who walks across town wondering when she can scratch her tailbone without attracting notice, Abbas’s stories are always whimsical and mysterious. In this tale, a man contemplates crossing the street, and, it would appear, ultimately fails to do so.
- Daisy Rockwell
Pakistan | Poems | Punjabi | Urdu
April, 2012Munir Niazi writes wistfully of the past, but he is also a poet of our times. He cherishes both the old and the new, and creates rhythms that evoke the feeling of being on the brink of a possible happy future that remains elusive. In addition to his specific family circumstances, Niazi's migration from East Punjab to West Punjab was a critical event of his early years and affected his life and work deeply. His imaginative world is a living lyric of warm relationships and moments of peace all too often shattered by conflict, violence, or indifference.
Pakistan | Short Fiction | Urdu
January, 2010Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55) is perhaps the best-known Modernist fiction writer in South Asia. His stories won him censure during his lifetime, including five trials for writing obscene material (in each instance he was acquitted). Since his death, his fiction has been widely cited by South Asian writers and his border stories have been used in classrooms to help students come to some understanding of the atrocities that took place during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. His stories that take place in Bombay offer another view of the times—full of the characters of pulp fiction, they depict a seedy world of opportunity, ambiguous morals, and cosmopolitan energy. His evocative use of the colloquial (and swear words), as well as his often abrupt and ambiguous conclusions, can be seen as attempts to destabilize the prim sense of morality that dominated the subcontinent's social sphere during his lifetime.
Pakistan | Short Fiction | Urdu
October, 2009Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55) is perhaps the best-known Modernist fiction writer in South Asia. His stories won him censure during his lifetime, including five trials for writing obscene material (in each instance he was acquitted). Since his death, his fiction has been widely cited by South Asian writers and his border stories have been used in classrooms to help students come to some understanding of the atrocities that took place during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. His stories that take place in Bombay offer another view of the times—full of the characters of pulp fiction, they depict a seedy world of opportunity, ambiguous morals, and cosmopolitan energy. His evocative use of the colloquial (and swear words), as well as his often abrupt and ambiguous conclusions, can be seen as attempts to destabilize the prim sense of morality that dominated the subcontinent's social sphere during his lifetime.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).