The True Subject: Selected Poems

by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Naomi Lazard (Translator)

In this bilingual edition of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's mature work, Naomi Lazard captures his universal appeal: a voice of great pathos, charm, and authenticity that has until now been little known in the English-speaking world.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Genres: Poetry, Pakistan, Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Faiz Ahmad Faiz [فيض ١حمد فيض] was born on February 13, 1911, in Sialkot, British India, which is now part of Pakistan. He had a privileged childhood as the son of wealthy landowners Sultan Fatima and Sultan Muhammad Khan, who passed away in 1913, shortly after his birth. His father was a prominent lawyer and a member of an elite literary circle which included Allama Iqbal, the national poet of Pakistan.

In 1916, Faiz entered Moulvi Ibrahim Sialkoti, a famous regional school, and was later admitted to the Skotch Mission High School where he studied Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. He received a Bachelor's degree in Arabic, followed by a master's degree in English, from the Government College in Lahore in 1932, and later received a second master's degree in Arabic from the Oriental College in Lahore.After graduating in 1935, Faiz began a teaching career at M.A.O. College in Amritsar and then at Hailey College of Commerce in Lahore.

Faiz's early poems had been conventional, light-hearted treatises on love and beauty, but while in Lahore he began to expand into politics, community, and the thematic interconnectedness he felt was fundamental in both life and poetry. It was also during this period that he married Alys George, a British expatriate, with whom he had two daughters. In 1942, he left teaching to join the British Indian Army, for which he received a British Empire Medal for his service during World War II. After the partition of India in 1947, Faiz resigned from the army and became the editor of The Pakistan Times, a socialist English-language newspaper.

On March 9, 1951, Faiz was arrested with a group of army officers under the Safety Act, and charged with the failed coup attempt that became known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. He was sentenced to death and spent four years in prison before being released. Two of his poetry collections, Dast-e Saba and Zindan Namah, focus on life in prison, which he considered an opportunity to see the world in a new way. While living in Pakistan after his release, Faiz was appointed to the National Council of the Arts by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government, and his poems, which had previously been translated into Russian, earned him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963.

In 1964, Faiz settled in Karachi and was appointed principal of Abdullah Haroon College, while also working as an editor and writer for several distinguished magazines and newspapers. He worked in an honorary capacity for the Department of Information during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, and wrote stark poems of outrage over the bloodshed between Pakistan, India, and what later became Bangladesh. However, when Bhutto was overthrown by Zia Ul-Haq, Faiz was forced into exile in Beirut, Lebanon. There he edited the magazine Lotus, and continued to write poems in Urdu. He remained in exile until 1982. He died in Lahore in 1984, shortly after receiving a nomination for the Nobel Prize.

Throughout his tumultuous life, Faiz continually wrote and published, becoming the best-selling modern Urdu poet in both India and Pakistan. While his work is written in fairly strict diction, his poems maintain a casual, conversational tone, creating tension between the elite and the common, somewhat in the tradition of Ghalib, the reknowned 19th century Urdu poet. Faiz is especially celebrated for his poems in traditional Urdu forms, such as the ghazal, and his remarkable ability to expand the conventional thematic expectations to include political and social issues.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spring comes; suddenly all those days return,
all the youthful days that died on your lips,
that have been lost in the void, are born again
each time the roses display themselves.
Their scent belongs to you; it is your perfume.
The roses are also the blood of your lovers.
The torments return, melancholy
with the suffering of friends,
intoxicated with embraces of moon-bodied beauties.
All the chapters of the heart's oppression return,
all the questions and all the answers
between you and me.
Spring comes, ready with all the old accounts reopened.
*
The door of my sorrowing house opens against its will:
here come my visitors.
Here comes evening, to spread out before her
the carpet woven by nostalgia wherever I step.
Here comes midnight, telling the story
of her broken heart to the moon and the stars.
Here comes morning with her gleaming scalpel
to play with the wounds of memory.
Here comes noon,
whiplets of flame hidden inside her sleeve.
Here come all my visitors: round the clock
they beat their tracks to my door.
But the heart and the eye are impervious
to who comes, and when, or who leaves.
They are far away, galloping home,
hands holding tight to the ocean's mane,
shoulders crushed under their burden—
fears, questions, forebodings.
*
This evening my old friend, loneliness,
has come to drink with me. We wait together
for the moon to rise, for your brilliant face
to appear in the heart of every shadow.
*
in the distance, an April of nameless flowers
agitates the moon's heart.
*
Today, if the breath of breeze
wants to scatter petals in the garden of memory,
why shouldn't it?
If a forgotten pain
in some corner of the past
wants to burst into flame again, let it happen.
Though you act like a stranger now—
come, be close to me for a few minutes.
Though after this meeting
we will know even better what we have lost,
and the gauze of words left unspoken
hangs between one line and another,
neither of us will mention our promises.
Nothing will be said of loyalty or faithlessness.
If my eyelashes want to tell you something
about wiping out the lines
left by the dust of time on your face,
you can listen or not, just as you like.
And what your eyes fail to hide from me—
if you care to, of course you may say it,
or not, as the case may be.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before You Came
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Before you came things were just what they were:
the road precisely a road, the horizon fixed,
the limit of what could be seen,
a glass of wine no more than a glass of wine.

With you the world took on the spectrum
radiating from my heart: your eyes gold
as they open to me, slate the colour
that falls each time I lose all hope.

With your advent roses burst into flame:
you were the artist of dried-up leaves, sorceress
who flicked her wrist to change dust into soot.
You lacquered the night black.

As for the sky, the road, the cup of wine:
one was my tear-drenched shirt,
the other an aching nerve,
the third a mirror that never reflected the same
thing.

Now you are here again - stay with me.
This time things will fall into place;
the road can be the road,
the sky nothing but the sky;
the glass of wine, as it should be, the glass of
wine.

[Huda AlAbri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Painfully beautiful poems...

[Qasim Ijaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent translation of a selection of Faiz’s Urdu poems that Naomi Lazard - a poet herself, collaborated with Faiz over a decade to produce. The preface of the book goes into some detail about the inherent difficulties both idiomatic and metaphorical in translation from Urdu to English which is well worth reading before reading the poems.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poems is powerful - poems that reflect the struggle and resistance as well as life. I enjoyed that there was both the urdu - in urdu script along with the english translation.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I expected to love this collection of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s late work, and Naomi Lazard worked directly with the poet on the translations before he died. I don’t know from Urdu, so the renderings may be accurate. But the plainspoken, no-nonsense directness of the English tends to turn Faiz from a popular, intensely political Urdu poet into an understated, odorless sentimentalist whose work would pass muster in almost any mainstream poetry magazine.

Lazard explains in her intro that the passive constructions Urdu allows, along with its taste for “blank of blank” phrases (“city of pain,” “land of isolation,” etc.), caused her to reach for “language that is more active, more specific, clearer.” I appreciate her dilemma, but her phrase also carries a lot of pragmatic Anglophone presumptions about what poetic language should be. These renderings left me wanting to see less of the action and more of the artful filigree.

[Aazib Chaudhry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this volume better than Agha Shahid Ali's translations of Faiz's poems in his The Rebel's Silhouette. Granted some of Ali's translations are better, but, overall, this is the superior book. I'd rate it 3.5.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning.

[morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is beyond gorgeous