Afzal Ahmed Syed: The Contemporary Urdu Poet of Sindh, Pakistan

Afzal Ahmed Syed is a contemporary Urdu poet and translator, famous for his mastery of both classical and modern Urdu poetic expression.

Born in the region of Ghazipur, India, in the year of 1946, Afzal Ahmed Syed has lived since the year of 1976 in the city of Karachi, Pakistan, where he works as an entomologist. He is the author of the modern nazm collections چھينی ہوئ تاريخ (An Arrogated Past, 1984), دو زبانوں ميں سزاۓ موت (Death Sentence in Two Languages, 1990), and روکوکو اور دوسری دنيائيں (Rococo and Other Worlds, 2000). Another collection of classical ghazals is titled خيمہُ سياہ (The Dark Pavilion, 1988).

The poetry of Afzal Ahmed Syed was anthologized in An Evening of Caged Beasts: Seven Postmodernist Urdu Poets (New York: OUP, 1999). The Wesleyan University Press Poetry Series has issued a selection of Syed’s poetry in translation, titled Rococo and Other Worlds in the year of 2010, which features poetry from his three Urdu nazm collections.

Syed has translated a wide and significant body of works by contemporary poets, playwrights and novelists. He was believed to be the one of the first Urdu translators of Gabriel García Márquez and Jean Genet. His work has been widely released in the leading Urdu literary periodicals such as Shabkhoon, Aaj, and Dunyazad. He presently teaches at Habib University.

Bibliography

Original works

In Urdu

• چھينی ہوئ تاريخ: نظميں – An Arrogated Past (Karachi: Aaj Ki Kitaben, 1984)
• خيمہُ سياہ: غزليات – The Dark Pavilion (Karachi: Aaj Ki Kitaben, 1988)
• دو زبانوں ميں سزاۓ موت: نظميں – Death Sentence in Two Languages (Karachi: Aaj Ki Kitaben, 1990)
• روکوکو اور دوسری دنيائيں : نظميں – Rococo and Other Worlds (Karachi: Aaj Ki Kitaben, 2000)

In English translation

• Rococo and Other Worlds: Selected Poetry of Afzal Ahmed Syed, Translated from Urdu by Musharraf Ali Farooqi

Translations by Afzal Ahmed Syed

Poetry

Miroslav Holub (Czech), Dunya Mikhail (Arabic), Yehuda Amichai (Hebrew), Tadeusz Borowski (Polish), Zbigniew Herbert (Polish), Tadeusz Rozewicz (Polish), Wisława Szymborska (Polish), Aleksander Wat (Polish), Marin Sorescu (Romanian), Jan Prokop (Polish), Osip Mandelstam (Russian), Orhan Veli (Turkish).

Fiction of Afzal Ahmed Syed

Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of A Death Foretold.

Plays

Jean Genet, The Maids. Goran Stefanovski, Sarajevo: Tales from a City