Agha Shahid Ali: Cross Cultural Influences (January 1997)

Agha Shahid Ali describes his experience translating the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz; Faiz is relatively unknown in the West, Ali notes, despite his stature as one of the most significant poets of Pakistan, and the ways in which he balanced his revolutionary politics with his “often stringently classical aesthetics.” Ali turns to translations of another Urdu poet, Ghalib, to consider the difficulties and possibilities of translation, and shows, through close readings of Faiz, the ways in which Faiz transformed the ghazal form.