Ghazals

Selected Urdu ghazals with English translation; includes text and introduction.

This book is a companion volume to author's earlier book, "Masterpieces of Urdu Ghazal" which contained English translations of 108 ghazals selected from nine major poets. The present volume contains 129 ghazals representing 20 outstanding Urdu poets. Thus, this anthology, taken together with The Masterpieces, may rightly claim to be a fully representative collection of Urdu ghazals in English translation. The ghazals are carefully selected and explained in English for the average readers as well as Urdu Connoisseurs. The book contains brief biographical notes and introductory essays on the ghazals.

The finest ghazals of Mir Taqi Mir, the most accomplished of Urdu poets. The prolific Mir Taqi Mir (1723–1810), widely regarded as the most accomplished poet in Urdu, composed his ghazals—a poetic form of rhyming couplets—in a distinctive Indian style arising from the Persian ghazal tradition. Here, the lover and beloved live in a world of extremes: the outsider is the hero, prosperity is poverty, and death would be preferable to the indifference of the beloved. Ghazals offers a comprehensive collection of Mir’s finest work, translated by a renowned expert on Urdu poetry.

The primary aim of this book is to enable its audience in composing ghazals, including writing lyrics and setting music melody to it. The book is unique and original in that it introduces the history of ghazal, elaborates its technical structure and provides guidance on setting a musical score. The book also incorporates some of my compositions over the past four decades – 18 Urdu ghazals and 1 Nazm in a collection that my ghazal-loving friends affectionately call “Diwan-e-Aman” in the lighter vein. The impetus and inspiration behind these compositions are the rubayaths of the famous Persian poet Omar Qayyam and the ghazals of Hazrat Amir Khusrau. I am greatly indebted to those immortal poets. It is the outcome of my humble effort to strike a golden mean between using easily understandable language, drawing from the depths of literature and maintaining originality.

The second volume in this series presents the reader with an extensive study of some major genres of Persian poetry from the first centuries after the rise of Islam to the end of the Timurid era and the inauguration of Safavid rule in the beginning of the sixteenth century. The authors explore the development of poetic genres, from the panegyric (qaside), to short lyrical poems (ghazal), and the quatrains (roba'i), tracing the stylistic evolution of Persian poetry up to 1500 and examine the vital role of these poetic forms within the rich landscape of Persian literature.

"Ali's ghazals are contemporary and colloquial, deceptively simple, yet still grounded in tradition....Highly recommended."—Library Journal The beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali presents his own American ghazals. Calling on a line or phrase from fellow poets, Ali salutes those known and loved—W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, James Tate, and more—while in other searingly honest verse he courageously faces his own mortality.

A collection of poems dealing with love & loss, memory & time

Short poetic conversations with God, where the Ineffable is found in ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. The subjects range from playfulness, death, sex, children, all consuming burning love, AIDS, starvation to meditations on Time and True Love.