Customer Reviews

Masterpieces of Urdu Ghazal: From the 17th to the 20th Century

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If you have heard of Ghalib and Mir, and want to know more about urdu poets and ghazals, this is the book. A collection of ghazals and short biographies of the most prominent names in urdu including Wali, Dard, Mir, Ghalib, Faiz, Iqbal and Firaq. The book helped me in several ways: 1) Introduced me to the excellent poetry of some of the names I was not very familiar with, like Mir Dard. 2) Helped me to completely decipher the meaning of many verses I had often heard but didn't quite understand. 3) Helped me in improving my persian reading skills, a script that I recently learned.

As all the verses were presented in persian and roman scripts along with the english translation, I had the choice of the most appropriate tradeoff between 'ease of understanding' and 'accuracy' according to the difficulty level of each verse.

Lastly I must mention that the preface to the book and the introductory piece on the tradition of ghazal are very well written as well.

Beautiful poetry, well translated and put into historical context.