Not enough attention has been paid to the poets of the Indian sub-conteinent, among whom Iftikhar Arif is a distinctive and memorable voice some, life the now almost forgotten Dom Moraes, have written in English, but the vernacular languages have never lost their grip, and Arif writes in Urdu. Interestingly, though, his poems work extremely well in English too; he is one of those fortunate to be eminently translatable. Moreover, we enter a not particularly strange world here. Strange, yes, in the sense that all real poetry is in some sense strange; but these poems belong to the modern world and are acquainted with irony as mush as myth. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay them is to say that they are alive, as poems, in English. How much more so, then, in their original language.
Poems by
Iftikhar Arif
Translated from the Urdu by Brenda Walker
IFfIKHAR ARIF was born on March 21, 1943 in Lucknow, India and attended. University there, gaining a Masters Degree in Sociology. In 1965 he moved to Pakistan where he worked with Radio Pakistan, later joining Pakistan Television Corporation as a Senior Producer and Scripts Editor. He continues to present and participate in various radio and television programmes in Pakistan, and also the U.K. Since 1983 he has been Executive Secretary of the Third World Foundation's Urdu Markaz, London.
Mehr-e-Do Neem, his first collection of Urdu poems, was published in 1983, and since then several editions of his book have been published in Karachi, Delhi and London. In 1984 he received the Pakistan Writers' Guild award for the best book of the year. He has also received the Faiz Ahmad Faiz award for poetry in India in 1988. Besides English, his poems have been translated into various other languages. He is well known internationally and has attended a number of Urdu and international literary seminars, conferences and poetry symposia.
With his unabashed liking for classical imagery and diction, to which he has added a new dimension, Iftikhar Arif is at heart a poet of defiance and a champion of the deprived. For him poetry is a means of restoring human dignity and hope in a fragmented world.
BRENDA WALKER's career has been divided between the arts and education, her university studies being at London and Keele. During the last few years she has devoted herself to poetry in translation, working on Eastern European and Middle Eastern texts. Her own poetry is published by Headland Press.
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