Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-84) ranks among the doyens of modern poetry, let alone Urdu. Coinciding with the ongoing Faiz International Festival at Lahore (Nov 17-19 2017), Pakistan Today and ABC pay tribute to the last of the great Urdu poets.
‘Apart from ‘the power of Neruda’, Edward Said (1935-2003) has noted ‘the sensuality of Yeats’ (1865-1939) in Faiz’s work. Names of Adonis (b 1930), a Syrian-Lebanese poet and Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), a Palestinian poet, have also been suggested for comparison of Faiz’s work. Iqbal’s poetic inspiration came from Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Rumi (1207-73); Faiz found his inspiration in Marx (1818-83) and Ghalib (1797-1869).’
By Syed Afsar Sajid
Northrop Frye (1912-91) discusses ‘the myths of concerns and myths of freedom in literature’ whereas Faiz’s narrative, to cite Munir Saami, is the ‘narrative of freedom’ –freedom from ignorance, tyranny, dogma, injustice, and imperialism. The archetypes and metaphors that the latter has chosen for his work are those of love, peace, harmony, and hope.
The renowned Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda (1904-73) and Faiz were contemporaries. Both of them were masters of art and craft but despite their overwhelming revolutionary ideas, they ‘never allowed ideological epiphany to burden their poems with shoddy rhetoric’. Apart from ‘the power of Neruda’, Edward Said (1935-2003) has noted ‘the sensuality of Yeats’ (1865-1939) in Faiz’s work. Names of Adonis (b 1930), a Syrian-Lebanese poet and Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), a Palestinian poet, have also been suggested for comparison of Faiz’s work.
Iqbal’s poetic inspiration came from Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Rumi (1207-73); Faiz found his inspiration in Marx (1818-83) and Ghalib (1797-1869).
Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-84) ranks among the doyens of modern poetry, let alone Urdu. He embarked upon his eventful journey to creative stardom from the rural interior of Sialkot district and shared with Allama Iqbal the honour of being a pupil of Shams-ul-Ulama Syed Mir Hassan (1844-1929). Patras Bokhari, Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum, and Moulvi Muhammad Shafi were also his teachers while Hasrat Mohani, Josh Malihabadi, Hafeez Jalandhari and Akhtar Sheerani served as his poetic inspiration besides Dr M D Taseer, Maulana Abdul Majeed Salik, Maulana Chiragh Hasan Hasrat and Pandit Harichand Akhtar who constituted Faiz’s literary camaraderie.
‘Faiz stood for the downtrodden and the disadvantaged. He transformed the ghazal into a medium of high aesthetic apperception together with a profound concern for humanity at large without altering its traditional artistic canvas and format.’
After completing his postgraduate studies at Government College, Lahore he served as a lecturer in English at MAO College, Amritsar and Hailey College, Lahore, had a short stint in the Indian Army (in its Public Relations Department) and then adopted journalism as a career by joining The Pakistan Times as its chief editor. He had to suffer the ordeal of prolonged imprisonment (1951-55) for his alleged involvement in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case. Two of his popular verse collections Dast-e-Saba and ZindaN Nama were the product of this period.
Faiz was a supporter of the progressive writers’ movement pioneered among others, by Syed Sajjad Zaheer (1905-73), a leading leftist intellectual and writer, in the early 1930s. His ideological commitment to the communist philosophy earned him the coveted Lenin peace prize in 1962. Among magazines, he edited the monthly Adab-e-Lateef (Lahore), the weekly Lail-o-Nihar (Lahore) and the Lotus magazine (Moscow, London, and Beirut). He was also associated for some time with the Pakistan Arts Council, the National Council of the Arts and the Lok Virsa. Finally, he settled down in Karachi in 1964 and joined the Abdullah Haroon College, as principal.
‘To introduce Faiz Ahmad Faiz in a very short time is, as William Blake said, to put the world in a grain of sand, or as Ghalib said, is like squeezing the ocean into a drop of water.’
Faiz’s major poetic works include Naqsh-e-Faryadi (1941), Dast-e-Saba (1953), ZindaN Nama (1956), Dast-e-Tah-e-Sang (1965), Sar-e-Wadi-e-Sina (1971), Sham-e-Shahr YaraN (1979), Meray Dil Meray Musafir (1981) and Ghubar-e-Ayyam (1984); Nuskha’ha-e-Wafa (1984) being a miscellany of his verse. Meezan, a collection of literary articles (1956) and Pakistani Culture (English & Urdu) are his noted prose works.
Faiz stood for the downtrodden and the disadvantaged. He transformed the ghazal into a medium of high aesthetic apperception together with a profound concern for humanity at large without altering its traditional artistic canvas and format. Though a firm ideologue, he refrained from assuming the persona of a self-righteous propagandist in verse. His imagination effects an apt synthesis between experience and its lyrical expression in verse. Despite the ‘Persianate’ feature of its diction, his verse deeply moves the reader and enthrals his sensibilities. He thought that a true creative artist restraining himself within the bounds of his art, had to explore his self, his people and the past, present and future of his age with a view to gauging his knowledge as well as the perception in the perspective of contemporaneity.
Dr Musadiq Hussain, an alumnus of the Moscow University and an avid Faiz enthusiast, thinks that Faiz’s thought is revolutionary in character: he (Faiz) ‘feels’ as a lover, speaks in the language and accent of a poet and contemplates human existence as a mystic. ‘To introduce Faiz Ahmad Faiz in a very short time is, as William Blake said, to put the world in a grain of sand, or as Ghalib said, is like squeezing the ocean into a drop of water.’ (Munir Saami)
Dr Asghar Ali Baluch of GC University, Faisalabad published a book titled Faiz ki Sha’iri may Punjab Rang in the wake of the festivities marking the advent of Faiz Centenary (2011), in which he has highlighted the native complexion of Faiz’s Punjabi verse, his commitment to the language, literature and culture of the Punjab, his devotion to its Sufi poets, and his own verse in Punjabi as such besides a critical study of Raat di Raat (an anthology of Faiz’s select poems rendered into Punjabi by Ahmad Salim and Majid Siddiqui). A fine artistic amalgam of the topical and the universal served to distinguish Faiz’s poetics and transform him into a legend in his own lifetime.
Admittedly Faiz’s scholarship in English lent a cosmopolitan élan, as it were, to his creative work which has been translated into many languages of the world. Victor Kiernan, Naomi Lazard, Andrew McCord, Agha Shahid Ali and Dr Riz Rahim are some of his eminent translators in English aside from Mir Gul Khan Nasir, a well-known Baluchi poet, who translated Sar-e-Wadi-e-Sina into Baluchi.
The motto of creativity that Faiz set for himself should serve as a perennial source of inspiration, and also emulation, for writers and poets of all classes and creeds:
Hum parwarish-e-loh-o-qalam kartay raheN gay
Jo dil pay guzarti hai raqam kartay raheN gay
(We would continue to nurture the paper and pen (writing implements) so as to be able to keep a record of what is happening to our heart.)
