- Author Name : V. G. Kiernan
The task of a translator, of works composed in a language unrelated to his own is to capture at least an echo of the original, adapt and absorb it into his own language while effectively adhering to the laws of the pre-existing text. In this work, an attempt has been made to capture and appropriate the spirit of a different land and a different language with the aim of reproducing this spirit in a form which will effectively reveal the rich cultural and history of that land, and more specifically of Urdu poetry to Australian and New Zealand readers. The question may well be posed: how is it possible for a female citizen of an ostensibly secular, multi-cultural country, which in its own particular complexity, blends a forty thousand year history of aboriginal inhabitants with a two hundred year history of European settlement, to attempt to interpret the work of a male poet, born against the background of a turbulent, polytheistic, oppressive, imperialist-dominated Indian subcontinent, and whose orientation was to be dislocated following Partition? The answer is believed by the author to lie in the transcendence of social and geographical limitations by a commonness of human experience – related instincts which cut across cultural boundaries, plus in some form of intellectual affinity with the poet, in this case Faiz Ahmed Faiz.