FAIZ'S GLOBAL LITERARY IDENTITY: PERSPECTIVES FROM ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

This article examines the global literary identity of Faiz Ahmed Faiz through the body of his poetry rendered into English over more than five decades. It argues that this identity cannot be explained by the thematic range of his work or by his political reputation alone. English translation placed Faiz within new linguistic, aesthetic and critical systems, where readers with different historical and cultural experiences encountered him anew. Beginning with Victor G. Kiernan's Poems by Faiz (1971), the English tradition expanded through the labour of many translators, anthologists, journalists and critics, among them Daud Kamal, Naomi Lazard, Agha Shahid Ali, Shiv K. Kumar, Majeed Siddiqui, Ameesh Joshi, Estelle Dryland, Shoaib Hashmi and Sulaiman Zubair. The article traces the chronology of this tradition, compares the quantity and distribution of translated poems, and studies three recurring problems: the transfer of Urdu prosody and musical structure, the choice between literal fidelity and recreative freedom, and the politics of selection that determines which Faiz appears in English. It concludes that Faiz in English is not a fixed corpus of translated texts but a plural and continually renewed literary formation. Keywords: Faiz Ahmed Faiz; English translation; Urdu poetry; translation studies; literary reception; world literature; anthology