Ghalib : selected poems and letters / edited and translated by Frances W. Pritchett and Owen T. A. Cornwall.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This selection of poetry and prose by Ghalib provides an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the preeminent Urdu poet of the nineteenth century. Ghalib's poems, especially his ghazals, remain beloved throughout South Asia for their arresting intelligence and lively wit. His letters--informal, humorous, and deeply personal--reveal the vigor of his prose style and the warmth of his friendships. These careful translations allow readers with little or no knowledge of Urdu to appreciate the wide range of Ghalib's poetry, from his gift for extreme simplicity to his taste for unresolvable complexities of structure.

Beginning with a critical introduction for nonspecialists and specialists alike, Frances Pritchett and Owen Cornwall present a selection of Ghalib's works, carefully annotating details of poetic form. Their translation maintains line-for-line accuracy and thereby preserves complex poetic devices that play upon the tension between the two lines of each verse. The book includes whole ghazals, selected individual verses from other ghazals, poems in other genres, and letters. The book also includes a glossary, the Urdu text of the original poetry, and an appendix containing Ghalib's comments on his own verses.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

If Arthur Schopenhauer was right in saying that a poem cannot be translated, it can only be rewritten, then Pritchett and Cornwall hit the right chord in translating this collection of poems and correspondence by Indian poet Ghalib (1797-1869). As they write in their introduction, "Ghalib gives a hard time to translators." Ghalib built his ghazel, an Arabic lyrical form, in layers of high diction, marked by multiple internal ambiguities, metaphor, and punning. These poetic attributes require a competent translator--better, a poet--who can tackle the subtleties of meaning and wordplay. Pritchett and Cornwall are skilled translators, and in rendering Ghalib's lines without breaking or reshaping them they accomplish what amounts to transmogrification. Certainly the text is meaningful and clear in terms of style. But there is a price to pay: in their attempt to serve Anglophone readers, the translators oversimplified, adding some words of their choice to reproduce the Urdu origin. They justify their adaptation, their "transcreation," by pointing out that many translators feel entitled, even required, to help the reader, and this is what they did. This caveat aside, the book is reliable, reader friendly, and translated with enthusiasm and relish. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Abdul Sattar Jawad, Duke University