In The Lightning Should Have Fallen On Ghalib: Selected Poems Of Ghalib poet Robert Bly and Urdu scholar Sunil Dutta endeavour to bring the intensity and finesse of Ghalib s poetry to English readers. Ghalib s poetry combines humour and anguish, for eg.
Annemarie Schimmel, one of the world's foremost authorities on Persian literature, provides a comprehensive introduction to the complicated and highly sophisticated system of rhetoric and imagery used by the poets of Iran, Ottoman Turkey, and Muslim India. She shows that these images have been used and refined over the centuries and reflect the changing conditions in the Muslim world. According to Schimmel, Persian poetry does not aim to be spontaneous in spirit or highly personal in form. Instead it is rooted in conventions and rules of prosody, rhymes, and verbal instrumentation. Ideally, every verse should be like a precious stone--perfectly formed and multifaceted--and convey the dynamic relationship between everyday reality and the transcendental. Persian poetry, Schimmel explains, is more similar to medieval European verse than Western poetry as it has been written since the Romantic period. The characteristic verse form is the ghazal--a set of rhyming couplets--which serves as a vehicle for shrouding in conventional tropes the poet's real intentions. Because Persian poetry is neither narrative nor dramatic in its overall form, its strength lies in an "architectonic" design; each precisely expressed image is carefully fitted into a pattern of linked figures of speech. Schimmel shows that at its heart Persian poetry transforms the world into a web of symbols embedded in Islamic culture.
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.
A memoir—written in the wake of a cancer diagnosis—that zeroes in on the crux between two brothers: one who became an LAPD officer, and the other a terrorist Sunil Dutta is a twenty-year veteran of the LAPD. Before that, he was a biologist at the University of California and a translator of classic Indian poetry. Before that, he was a destitute refugee, one of so many uprooted by the genocidal violence surrounding the Partition of India. Back then, he had a brother. Back then, they were children together, chasing whatever fun and solace they could find in impossible conditions. Sunil looked up to Raju. He admired his strength, his character. Raju took a different path. He was arrested, he fled the law, he became a fugitive. He became a terrorist. Then he became a father—and then a murderer. After being diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer later in life, Sunil urgently wanted to understand what choices had led he and his brother down such radically different paths. In Stealing Green Mangoes, Dutta takes us from his family home in Rajasthan to America, to France, to the streets of southeastern Los Angeles, homing in on the questions that tore him and Raju apart: Can you outgrow the madness that made you? Can you make peace with the ghosts of your past? A memoir with sweeping, spiritual ambitions, Stealing Green Mangoes tells the story of a man who pushed back against the forces that captured his own brother and built a compassionate, meaningful life in a broken world.
Mirza Asadullah Khan (1797–1869), popularly, Ghalib, is the most influential poet of the Urdu language. He is noted for the ghazals he wrote during his lifetime, which have since been interpreted and sung by different people in myriad ways. Ghalib’s popularity has today extended beyond the Indian subcontinent to the Hindustani diaspora around the world. In this book, Gopi Chand Narang studies Ghalib’s poetics by tracing the archetypical roots of his creative consciousness and enigmatic thought in Buddhist dialectical philosophy, particularly in the concept of shunyata. He underscores the importance of the Mughal era’s Sabke Hindi poetry, especially through Bedil, whom Ghalib considered his mentor. The author also engages with Ghalib criticism that has flourished since his death and analyses the important works of the poet, including pieces from early Nuskhas and Divan-e Ghalib, strengthening this central argument. Much has been written about Ghalib’s life and his poetry. A marked departure from this dominant trend, Narang’s book looks at Ghalib from different angles and places him in the galaxy of the great Eastern poets, stretching far beyond the boundaries of India and the Urdu language.
"Morning Poems is a sensational collection — Robert Bly's best in many years. Inspired by the example of William Stafford, Bly decided to embark on the project of writing a daily poem: Every morning he would stay in bed until he had completed the day's work. These 'little adventures/In Morning longing,' as he calls them, address classic poetic subjects (childhood, the seasons, death and heaven) in a way that capitalizes fully on the pun in the book's title. These are morning poems, full of the delight and mystery of waking in a new day, and they also do their share of mourning, elegizing the deceases and capturing the 'moment of sorror before creation.' Some of the poems are dialogues where unconventional speakers include mice, maple trees, bundles of grain, the body, the 'oldest mind' and the soul. A particularly moving sequence involves Bly's imaginative transactions with a great and unlikely precursor, Wallace Stevens. The whole is a fascinating and original book from one of our most fascinating authors." — David Lehman
This imaginative approach to the work of the Urdu poet Ghalib (1797-1869) presents highly original renderings, made by seven well-known American poets, of Ghalib's ghazals.
Where have all the grownups gone? In answering that question with the same freewheeling erudition and intuitive brilliance that made Iron John a national bestseller, poet, storyteller and translator Robert Bly tells us that we live in a "sibling society, " in which adults have regressed into adolescence and adolescents refuse to grow up.