Faiz, A Wailing Nightingale: Urdu Poems

Now, a remarkable anthology brings together 104 Urdu poems of the celebrated Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz (newly translated to English by Dr. Khalid Hameed Shaida). Born one hundred years ago in Sialkot, one of Pakistan’s cradles of poetry, Faiz’s mastery of the classical traditions of preceding generations of poets arose from the exhaustive study of works in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and English. But he was not content to limit himself to aesthetics and form, and over the course …