Daily Times

TALMEEHAT BY WAHEEDUDDIN SALEEM & EDITED BY RAUF PAREKH — Talmeehaat means allusions. As it is a literary device, allusion leaves to the reader to figure out the meaning or context of the expressions and the objects that the writer or poet intends to refer to. This work by Waheeduddin Salim, first published some 90 years ago, is still relevant today and has some rare allusions richly and finely explained. It includes all the relevant allusions used in Urdu including the ones taken from Persian, Arabic and Hindi sources.

QURRATULAIN HYDER: ZINDAGI AUR FANN BY JAMEEL AKHTAR — this book encapsulates the life and works of Qurratulain Hyder, an influential Indian Urdu novelist and short story writer, an academic and a journalist. One of the most outstanding literary names in Urdu literature, she is best known for her magnum opus, Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), a novel first published in Urdu in 1959, that stretches from the 4th Century BC to post Partition. Some extracts of her important works are also featured in this book.

INTIKHAB-E-KALAM BY IFTIKHAR ARIF & COMPILED BY ABDUL AZIZ SAHIR — this is a representative selection of Iftikhar Arif’s poetry. He is a veteran poet and his poetry laments the loss of moral values and speaks contemptuously of greed, hypocrisy and callousness that mar our society today. But he sees the social and political milieu in a wider historical perspective. He has published three collections of poetry Mehr-i-Do Neem, Harf-i-Baryab and Jahan-i-Maaloom. His collected works Kitab-i-Dil-o-Dunya was published in 2009.

POEMS FROM IQBAL: RENDERINGS IN ENGLISH VERSE WITH COMPARATIVE URDU TEXT BY VG KIERNAN — Muhammad Iqbal was acknowledged during his lifetime as the most important poet of Muslim India in the twentieth century, both for the quality of his verse and for the influence exercised by his ideas. This volume contains a rendering in English of over a hundred poems chosen from the four collections of Iqbal’s poetry written in Urdu, which include religion, satire and other themes. The English versions are accompanied by the original text.

FAIZ: 50 POEMS SELECTED & TRANSLATED FROM URDU BY MAHMOOD JAMAL — The book is a selection of Faiz’s 50 most popular poems, translated in a language and style that will appeal to a wide cross section of readers. It contains not only the Urdu original, but also the transliterated version for non-Urdu readers.

Published in Daily Times, February 3^rd 2019.