[Reader-list] Fwd: [AMUNetwork] Shahryar's Poetry

[Faizan Ahmed]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: [AMUNetwork] Shahryar's Poetry
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 08:06:28 +0530
From: AMU PRO <amupro at sancharnet.in>
To: amunetwork at yahoogroups.com>

THROUGH THE CLOSED DOORWAY:

A new translation of Shahryar's nazms

The much-loved Urdu poet, Shahryar, will now reach out to a larger audience
 through a new English translation of his poetry.  Published by the
 prestigious publishing company, Rupa & Co. and translated into English by
 Rakhshanda Jalil, a collection of hundred nazms is due to hit bookstalls in
 all major cities across India by September.  Entitled Through the Closed
 Doorway; these nazms explore the joys and sorrows of ordinary, lived
 experiences, the complexities and ambivalences of city life, the oppressive
 sense of melancholy and dislocation of the urban milieu.

 Shahryar's songs for popular Hindi films such as "Umrao Jaan", "Gaman",
 "Anjuman" and "Faasle" enjoy and enduring mass appeal.  Taxi drivers in
 Mumbai are still apt to play Seene mein jalan aankhon mein toofan sa kyoon
 hai/Is shehr mein har shaqs pareshan sa kyuoon hai decades after the film's
 release.  Popular Hindi film playback singer, Asha Bhonsle, is still known
 to open many a concert with those haunting lines from "Umrao Jaan" Yeh kya
 jagah hai doston, yeh kaun sa dayar hai/Hadd-e-nigah tak jahan ghubar hi
 ghubar hai.  Equally respected by the connoisseurs of Urdu poetry, Shahryar
 today enjoys a formidable reputation as one of the foremost poets of his
 generation.  Spanning over 40 years, his voice has remained compelling,
 insightful and completely unaffected.

 Despite early critical acclaim and commercial success, Shahryar has
 consistently refused to become a performer playing to the gallery at
 mushairas, or merely a successful wordsmith churning out hits from a plush
 Bollywood studio.  Practically from the beginning of his career, he has been
 straddling two worlds with consummate ease - that of academia and poetics. 
 Honoured with several prestigious national and international awards
 including the Sahitya Akademi award, Shahryar retired as Chairman and
 Professor of Urdu from the Aligarh Muslim University in 1996.  His first
 collection of poems, sme-Aazam was published in 1965.  Since then he has
 published four others: Saatvan Dar, Hijr Ke Mausam, Khwab Ka Dar Band Hai
 and Neend Ki Kirchein.  He has also published five collections in Devanagri
 script, thus bridging the Urdu-Hindi divide and reaching out to those who
 appreciate Urdu poetry but cannot read the Urdu script.  His latest
 collection, brought out by the Sahitya Akademi, is entitled Dhund Ki Roshni.

 What sets apart Shahryar's poetics from that of other modern Urdu poets is
 the sheer lyricism, the sweet melodiousness that is all the more striking
 because it is garbed in an everyday, conversational idiom.  The relentless
 probing of his own heart and the human predicament is viewed through the
 prism of his intensely personal experiences.  At the same time, there is
 none of the stridiency and militant ideological onslaught of any particular
 school of thought that mars much of the modern poetry coming out of India,
 irrespective of language.  Instead, there is a collage of images that tell a
 story of their own.  Sensual, multi-coloured, delicately filigreed, these
 word pictures - tumbling out of a kaleidoscope of the known and the familiar
 - capture the pathos and alienation of the urban individual with just a few
 deftly dawn strokes.  Unabashedly personal, Shahryar's nazms, such as the
 ones chosen here for translation, reach out to form an immediate bond
 claming a sense of kinship, touching a chord somewhere, evoking the
 tremulous wonder of dreams.

Rahat Abrar

PRO

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