Texts of Islam

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Kāzim Khān, Khattak, Surnamed Shaidā: The Poems of Kāzim Khān, Khattak

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This is a collection of translated Pashto lyric poems from 19th-century Afghanistan, working squarely within the classical Persian ghazal tradition — a form built around couplets on love, longing, and the transience of worldly things, with the poet signing their pen name ("Shaidā") in the closing verse. The poems share a consistent speaker: a lover tormented by an aloof, devastating beloved whose curling tresses, dark glances, and slow approach are the central obsessions, rendered through the tradition's stock imagery of gazelles, nightingales, roses, wine, and classical lover-figures like Majnūn and Farhad. Beyond romantic suffering, several poems develop a philosophical argument about humility and power — the extended "waves" sequence insists that the meek overcome the proud, that the lowly oyster gains the pearl while the caravan of waves carries none, with the ocean itself serving as both figure and proof. The perspective is notably self-aware and self-deprecating: Shaidā repeatedly calls himself worthless, demented, and "a poor simple Afghān of Roh," positioning Afghan identity within a cosmopolitan Persian literary tradition while marking it as peripheral to Hindustan's splendors. Raverty's translation preserves the couplet structure and explanatory footnotes (glossing allusions to Layla, Farhad, the Humā bird) but renders the verse in a stiff, Latinate English that distances rather than approximates the originals' musicality. Readers interested in classical Persianate literary culture, Pashto poetry, or 19th-century colonial translation practice will find the most value here; those seeking the poems as living literature may find the translation an obstacle.

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Kāzim Khān, Khattak, Surnamed Shaidā: The Poems of Kāzim Khān, Khattak

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