Here is a joint review of four recently published books with diverse substance like critical insights in Urdu, poems in Urdu, a female Iranian poet’s Persian poems translated into Urdu, and a Pakistani writer’s introversive monologue in English
‘It is an enlightening discourse on the wherewithal of the new literary theory which has paved way for a thoughtful but comprehensive appreciation of the socio-cultural apperception of literature as a potent creative entity.’
Maba’ad Jadeediyat (Itlaqi Jihaat)
Compiler: Dr. Nasir Abbas Nayyar
Publisher: Beaconbooks, Multan
Pages: 464; Price: Rs.750/-
Barzakh kay Phool
Author: Javed Anwar
Publisher: Ilqa Publications, 12-K, Main Boulevard, Gulberg 2, Lahore
Pages: 86; Price: Rs.295/-
Forugh Furrokhzad ki NazmaiN
Selection & Translation: Parto Rohilla
Publisher: Zar Nigar Book Foundation, Imran Road, Khayaban 2 , Faisalabad/
413-K, DHA, Phase V, Lahore
Pages: 261; Price: Rs.500/-
Unheard Voice for Deaf Ears
Author: Prof. Rafiq Ahmad Dogar
Available at: Ilmi Book House, Lahore/Kitab Markaz, Faisalabad
Pages: 138
Literary publications continue to appear and receive cognizable response from the reading public despite the divertive fury and furore of the times we live in. Literature in fact serves as a dilutant for the heightening tension and irritation arising from the invasion of our lives by the lethal ‘duo’ of commercialism and technology.
Here is a joint review of four recently published books with diverse substance like critical insights in Urdu, poems in Urdu, a female Iranian poet’s Persian poems translated into Urdu, and a Pakistani writer’s introversive monologue in English.
Maba’ad Jadeediyat (Itlaqi Jihaat)
Dr. Nasir Abbas Nayyar is a noted Urdu critic – knowledgeable but versatile. A few years ago, he compiled and published a miscellany of essays under this title, written by different authors, on the quasi-literary theories of post-modernism and structuralism. The present edition of the book, however, carries some additional material on the latest developments in these and allied domains.
The compiler’s prologue to the publication is an adept critical estimation of the themes and issues having a direct or indirect bearing on its topic. Here he reflects over the term post-modernism, its sustainability as a concept, and the speculative beginnings of the post-modernistic era in the literature of Urdu. Post-modernism is considered an uninhibited mental outlook which stipulates creative freedom and pluralism. Dr. Gopi Chand Narang, Dr. Shams-ur-Rahman Faruqi, Dr. Wazir Agha, Shamim Hanafi, Dr. Faheem Azami, Dr. Muhammad Ali Siddiqui, Devendra Assar, Zamir A Badayuni, Muhammad Salahuddin Parvez, Ahmad Sohail, Dr. Manazir Ashiq Harganvi, Dr. Muhammad Iqbal Afaqi, and many others have led the ongoing discussion on the relationship between modernism and post-modernism. Some of them have included structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction in the pale of this discussion. It is an enlightening discourse on the wherewithal of the new literary theory which has paved way for a thoughtful but comprehensive appreciation of the socio-cultural apperception of literature as a potent creative entity.
The book incorporates critical essays on the theory by Devendra Assar, Fahim Azami, Gopi Chand Narang, Wahab Ashrafi, Qazi Afzaal Hussain, Abul Kalam Qasmi, and Nasir Abbas Nayyar, besides specific studies on Ghalib, Faiz, Meer, Majid Amjad, N. M. Rashed, Manto, Bedi, and Azad in its light. A critique of feminism and feministic literature by Hamid Kashmiri, Qasim Yaqub, and Nasir Abbas Nayyar respectively, is a special feature of the book. The symposium, purported to have been arranged a decade ago, on the contemporary critical issues pertaining to the understanding, interpretation and analysis of literature, with Muhammad Ali Siddiqui, Rafiq Sandheelvi and Nasir Abbas Nayyar as participants, is meant to remind the reader of the relevance and applicability of the new critical approaches in the prevailing socio-cultural paradigm.
‘The writer here is exploring the unfathomed bounds of truth which has distanced itself from us, the denizens of a world bemused by gossip, graft, and gunnery. The prose pieces in the book could be likened to short essays on a variety of themes drawn on facts and fantasies.’
Barzakh kay Phool
Dr. Javed Anwar (1959-2011), a psychiatrist by profession, was a talented Urdu poet too. This book comprises his verse – both nazm and ghazal with a mix of a few prose poems. The collection, fourth in a series, compiled by him in his life time, has been published posthumously. Its content has a symbolistic design laid on the mosaic of a bizarre impressionistic imagery.
Barzakh is viewed as a barrier between the temporal and spiritual worlds in which the soul awaits after death and before resurrection on the Day of Judgment. Its pertinence in Javed Anwar’s poetics converges on the theme of bifurcation of values, positive and negative i.e., faith and doubt, fair and foul, love and hate, philanthropy and misanthropy et al. Some of the poems in the collection read like an internal monologue wistfully voicing the poet’s unmitigated delusion of grandeur – a dire apprehension of the dilemma of being.
The three poems titled Barzakh kay phool alias Schizophrenia, Khayal khwab andesh and Nazm, jo kabhi likhi ja’e gi tend to illustrate the poet’s morbid state of mind vis-à-vis the unseemly truths of a relentless diurnal existence. Kaun huN ma’ey kahaN huN ma’ey/Mujhko koi pata nahiNis the poet’s dilemma in this mess. Ma’ey ek nazm likhuNga laikin sunanay nahiN auNga …/Faqat nazm hogi k paida’ish-e marg par qahqaha zan/K zairo zabar, paish kay beech may jazm hogi sounds like a voice in the wilderness crying over the portents of the speaker’s creative infertility in a hostile socio-cultural milieu. The lines cited below would seem to reaffirm this phenomenon:
La matloob aur la maaloom/Sab maloom hai namaloom
Jisay dhooNdta huN yehaN wohaN/Woh wohiN nahi hai jahaN huN ma’ey
Zehan may ek baykhayali may kaha jumla kisi ka/Sarsarati aag banta jaraha hai/Bailchay
la’o/KahaN par dafn haiN hum/Apni mitti khod kar dhaikaiN!
Forugh Farrokhzad ki NazmaiN
Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-67) was an influential but controversial modernist Iranian poet, actor, film director, a vocal feminist and an irresistible iconoclast. Noted litterateur Parto Rohilla has rendered poetic translation of Forugh’s chosen verse into Urdu, from her poetic collections Aseer(The Captive), Deewar (The Wall), IsyaN (The Sin), Tovallodi Digar (Another Birth) and Fasl-i-Sard (The Cold Season). Anwar Masood and N. M. Rashed have spoken very high of Forugh’s themes and poetic accent as a champion of feminism in her country. Love, beauty and death form central themes of her poetry that she expatiates upon in a distinctive feministic tone.
Parto’s strong academic background in Persian aided by his innate poetic skills, seems to have stood him in good stead while translating Forugh’s verses in Urdu. The former has ensured preservation of the original ambience of the Persian verse in the painstaking exercise.
Allama Zia Hussain Zia’s flap on the dust cover of the book is aimed to succinctly evaluate its salient features. The Zar Nigar Book Foundation seems to have gradually established its credentials as a publisher of quality literary stuff in a befitting artistic frame.
Unheard Voice for Deaf Ears
Prof. Rafiq Ahmad Dogar is a veteran educationist and literary writer. This is his fourth major work after Victorian Social and Political Thinkers, Three Victorian Novelists, and Mark Rutherford: The Crucial Tensions.
Prof. Dogar has all along been a committed teacher of literature with a strong analytical proclivity. As an intellectual too he seems to have evolved a reasoning, unorthodox in character, yet pertinent to the post-modernistic structures and formulations of the age-long literary tradition. The instant work would seem to amplify this impression.
Commenting on the limits of a literary writer’s functions in the contemporaneous socio-cultural milieu, he once proclaimed that ‘The role of a literary writer in my socio-cultural milieu is very significant and decisive, but arduous, when the whole social scenario seems to be lost in the morass of greed, deceit and lust for domination over others for nothing… The role of a literary artist is nothing short of a Messiah’s.’
The book in view, with an ironic title on its face, seeks to censure ‘our literary, ethical, social, religious and political values’ distorted by ‘some sort of personal, national, sectarian hysteria’. An imperceptible didactic strain runs beneath the monologuized, reflective prose in the work, meant for open eyes, and not for deaf ears as ironically implied in the title.
‘But those unheard are sweeter’! The writer here is exploring the unfathomed bounds of truth which has distanced itself from us, the denizens of a world bemused by gossip, graft, and gunnery. The prose pieces in the book could be likened to short essays on a variety of themes drawn on facts and fantasies.
Replete with Baconian wisdom, the essays mirror the writer’s grave concern for human values in a world of ‘binary oppositions’. Their epigrammatic phraseology lends a measure of force and poignancy to his (writer’s) observations. And thus in the final analysis the book turns out to be, echoing his own words, ‘a bouquet of love, understanding and harmony’.