Celebrating Faiz, Urdu love poet

The Pakistan Academy of Letters is planning a series of events to commemorate the centenary of Pakistan’s premier Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The Academy hopes to promote wider recognition of Faiz’s work through a translation project, international conferences, and even a memorial stamp. Though varying education levels and dialects in Pakistan often make poetry inaccessible to everyone, Faiz was widely respected throughout the nation, especially for his poetry of love.

Read more at the New Statesman:

Faiz's language of choice, Urdu—Pakistan's lingua franca—is associated not with any specific province, but with the Mughal courts of the 18th century, where it gained royal patronage as a literary language. We know for certain that even the most warlike tribes among the Pathans and the Baluch are devoted to love poetry. Faiz excelled at it; his love poems are immediately expressive and abound in fabulous images, with flashes of forbidden love, particularly poignant in societies where people are killed for romantic liaisons even today.

Even his harshest protest poems are nuanced with a wider kind of love and longing. His signature works in free verse also employ the specific devices of a split voice or the idea of divided love, in which romantic passion transforms, often without warning, into a tormented love of humanity; from a soporific romantic trope into an unsparing picture of harrowing poverty, unbearable loss and self-obsessed leadership. Yet Faiz very rarely sacrificed lyricism for rhetorical effect, as the large number of his verses performed by the greatest Pakistani singers (including the foremost diva, Noor Jehan) attests . . .