Honeyed Poison

Persian has had a long and distinguished presence in South Asia. From its first introduction to this region in the 1500s down to the coming of the British colonists, it flowered and flourished. Both as a lingua franca and as the vehicle for aesthetic expression during the Mughal rule (1526-1707) and later in the court of the Sikh rulers of the Punjab (1799-1849), it found fertile ground. With the arrival of the British in the Sub-continent, the rich and varied heritage nurtured over centuries was abandoned. Despite some rare exceptions—like Mirza Asadullah Ghalib (1797-1869) and Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) who continued to compose poetry in Farsi as well as Urdu—Persian lost its wider appeal. It was no longer the language of official affairs, and so of social advancement, nor appreciated as extensively as it once was.Translating modern Iranian poets into English is a commendable initiative by an individual. The translator is a polyglot, at home in Urdu, Punjabi, English, Persian, Chinese, and Spanish. With the rich and layered tradition of these cultures and their continuum of poetic wealth, this nuanced body of work has a distinctive global resonance.M. Athar Tahir