Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-04T09:44:28.903Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Ghazals of Ghalib: Versions from the Urdu. Edited by Aijaz Ahmad, pp. xxx, 174. New York, London, Columbia University Press, 1971. £4.75.

Review products

Ghazals of Ghalib: Versions from the Urdu. Edited by Aijaz Ahmad, pp. xxx, 174. New York, London, Columbia University Press, 1971. £4.75.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Reviews of Books
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1974

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 A similar piece of fatuity occurs on p. 68, where in a characteristically pretentious note a discussion of ambiguity reminds Mr. Ahmad of “Mr. Empson” who, we are told, “should read these verses of Ghalib”—adding in the next breath that they need to be “read in the original”. I may perhaps be permitted to remark at this point on Mr. Ahmad's ignorance of, or ignoring of, a book which his interested reader could consult, viz. Ghalib: life and letters, translated and edited by myself and Khurshidul Islam. He recommends three things to his readers (all of them in Urdu)—Yādgār-i-Ghālib, Ghālib's own letters, and the work of S. M. Ikram. These same three things form the main basis of our book. (For our grateful, and duly acknowledged, use of lkram seep. 11 of our Introduction.) The book was published simultaneously by Allen and Unwin in Britain and Harvard University Press in the U.S.A. in October 1969. Mr. Ahmad's Introduction is dated April 15, 1970, and his book was published in 1971.

2 Emphasis in this and the following quotation is mine.