The murkiness of his prison cell is relieved only by his imagination that conjures up the image of his beloved:

As the cell's slit grows dim
My heart imagines your hair studded with stars,
And as the fetters become visible,
Dawn, I imagine, must have lit up 
your face.
("Dedicated to your Alleyways")

Shiv K. Kumar has rendered great service to lovers of Urdu poetry by offering in The Best of Faiz, his translation of about a hundred ghazals and nazms. A commendable feature of this book is that it carries the Urdu text with parallel Roman script, to enable even the non-Urdu-knowing readers to enjoy Faiz.

"To judge of poets is the faculty of poets only", says Ben Jonson. Indeed, it should be equally true of a poet translating the work of another poet. This may explain how Kumar, himself a well-known Indian-English poet, has succeeded in recreating Faiz's poetry with great felicity and sensitivity. It may be said that of all the English translations of Faiz published so far - by Agha Shahid Ali, V. G. Kiernan, Naomi Lazard and others - Kumar's translation is the most outstanding. In fact, it is almost definitive in capturing the aesthetic tranquillity and emotional intensity of Faiz's poetry. To recreate the music of words in translation must have been a formidable task for him. To quote Faiz, who has translated some of his own poems: "Translating poetry... when the languages involved are as far removed from each other in cultural background, rhythmic and formal patterns, and the vocabulary of symbol allusion, as Urdu and English", can be an arduous undertaking. But in his translation, Kumar has overcome these problems.

Faiz, who was a trendsetter in modern Urdu poetry - like T. S. Eliot in his "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - talks of love in the life of a contemporary man. In his poem, "Ask Me Not for That Old Fervour", the lover says:

I had then imagined
That your love would spark off my 
being, ....
That your beauty would bring every 
spring to eternal blossom.

But, then, Faiz turns around to say that "there are sorrows other than heartache, joys other than love's rapture..."

The Best of Faiz is, however, flawed in one respect; instead of the English translation appearing face to face with the Urdu text, it appears on the following page. Maybe, Kumar could have also used Devnagiri script to make his book more broad-based. This is because Faiz is being read as much in the original in Urdu as in Hindi. His popularity with the general public is also due to such ghazal singers as Iqbal Bano, Mehdi Hasan, Nur Jehan and Farida Khanam who have sung his ghazals.

Even though Faiz sometimes gives his readers the impression that he has Marxist leanings, he is essentially a romantic poet. In his poem, "Poesy's Domain", he tends to articulate in a forthright manner, his basic poetic preoccupation: "These luscious corn-fields bursting with youth/ why do they yield hunger alone?..." All these themes are there indeed... and many more: "but the gently parting lips of that beauty.../ and oh, the alluring contours of her body../ now tell me yourself, could there be such witchery elsewhere?/ Well, for me this is it..."

Here is a book that should delight all lovers of poetry.

ALI ASGHAR

The Best of Faiz, translated by Shiv K. Kumar, UBSPD, p. 220, Rs. 195.