Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib

by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Tony Barnstone (Translator), Bilal Shaw (Translator)

Overview

Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan (1797-1869), known by his pen names Asad (“lion”) and Ghalib (“superior”), is the famous romantic and mystical poet of the Mughal Empire (1526-1858) in India. He is the most-beloved and most widely read poet of the Urdu language, the dominant language of northern India and Pakistan that emerged through the blending of Hindustani with Arabic and Persian.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945680502
Publisher:	White Pine Press
Publication date:	11/02/2021
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan (1797-1869), known by his pen names Asad (“lion”) and Ghalib (“superior”), is the famous romantic and mystical poet of the Mughal Empire (1526-1858) in India. He is the most-beloved and most widely read poet of the Urdu language, the dominant language of northern India and Pakistan that emerged through the blending of Hindustani with Arabic and Persian. He is known for the beautiful prose of his letters and in fact he brought about a paradigm shift in how letters were written and communicated during his time. His focus on informal yet beautiful writing, rather than flowery formal prose, was his greatest contribution to the art of writing Urdu letters. He is also arguably the world’s most extraordinary writer of poems in the ghazal form (though certain Persian poets such as Hafez and Rumi give him a run for the money). Tony Barnstone is Professor of English and Environment Studies at Whittier College and the author of 19 books and a music CD. He has served as the Visiting Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Bowling Green State Universityand as the Visiting Professor of Translation in the Ph.D. Program at the University of California, Irvine. He has a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to Pulp Sonnets, his books of poetry include Beast in the Apartment; Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry; The Golem of Los Angeles which won the Poets Prize and the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry; Sad Jazz: Sonnets; and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone, and a chapbook of poems titled Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks. His books in these areas include Mother Is a Bird: Sonnets of Yi Poet; Chinese Erotic Poetry; The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry; Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry; Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei; The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters; and the textbooks Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Literatures of Asia, and Literatures of the Middle East. His bilingual Spanish/English selected poems, Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (1999-2012) appeared in 2014. He has also co-edited the anthologies Dead and Undead Poems and Monster Verse. Among his awards are the Poets Prize, Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the California Arts Council, the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry and the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry. His CD of folk rock/blues songs (in collaboration with singer-songwriters Ariana Hall and John Clinebell, based upon Tongue of War and titled Tokyo’s Burning: World War II Songs) is available on Amazon.com, Rhapsody, and CD Baby. His website is https://www.whittier.edu/academics/english/barnstone Bilal Shaw is a Kashmiri scientist working in quantum information science who did his PhD at the University of Southern California. In the past he has worked on DNA-based computation and nanotechnology, software architecture, and theoretical self-assembly. He has worked as a scientist in the Analytics department at ID Analytics in San Diego, where he applied machine-learning techniques to build statistical risk models for fraud and credit space and at the meditation app Headspace. He is also an accomplished poet.

Table of Contents

Introduction:

Ghalib's Life and Times 11

The Religious and Erotic Traditions 16

Ghazals as the Blues 23

Opening Up the Rhyme 26

The Problem with Repetends 30

Rhetorical Play and Wit 32

The Poems

The Hidden Flame 41

Out of Heartfire 42

The Jewel of the Party 43

At This Party 45

The Spell of Desire 47

Murderess 48

Executioner 50

The Idol 52

A Direction in Which to Pray 53

What Comes 55

Seeking a Gash 57

Enough 60

Enter My Dream 62

Thirst 63

A Smaller Miracle 64

Wine Wave 66

Stay Drunk 68

The Empty Cup 69

A Stunned Drop of Wine 70

Then 71

The Betel Nut 72

My Desires Are Legion 73

The Sound of My Own Failure 75

The Accounting 76

Deadbeat Heart 78

Pawned to This Cruel Life 79

She Pawned Her Heart 81

The Dead Lamp 82

Everything Will Be Dust 83

Red Flowers Hidden in Dust 84

Handful of Dust 87

Dust 88

Why Sing the Blues? 89

Why? 91

What We Say 93

Glances Lined with Kohl 95

Kohl for the Eyes 96

Hennaed Feet 97

I Am Human, After All 99

The Stare 101

Rupture 102

The Face in the Mirror 103

More to Say 104

Some Life 106

When the Dead Rise 107

A Footprint in Paradise 108

Be Generous 109

Veil 110

What? 111

The Cure for Life 113

Infected by Love 114

No Medicine 115

Where Is My Heart? 117

Famine 118

A Woundgift 119

Who Cares? 120

Heartgrief School 121

The Desert Sea 122

Wasteland 123

The Traveler 125

Call Down Lightning 126

Lunatic Beggar 127

Madness of the Night of Separation 128

Blood-Filled Eyes 130

A Rose in the Dirt 131

Give Me Lunacy, at Least 133

How Tight Is the World? 135

The Tulip 137

Dew on a Red Tulip 138

Nothing Is What Breathes from Me 140

Nothing 142

No One 143

Notes on the Poems 145

About the Translators 149

Editorial Reviews

"Ghalib is the Shakespeare of India, the last great poet of the Mughal empire. His poems have been sung in Urdu gatherings for centuries, offering visions of passionate love in a merging of the human and divine. Tony Barnstone and Bilal Shaw have made them sing in English.” —John Balaban - prize winning poet, translator

From the Publisher