12 Best Urdu Poetry Books in English, Ranked as a Ladder

Raza Mir teaches management in New Jersey and is, on the side, one of the warmest guides Urdu poetry has in English. He moves through dozens of poets from the eighteenth century to now, giving each poem in Roman letters so you can say it aloud, then the English, then a short piece of context: who this person was, what they were furious about, why the couplet your relatives quote at weddings is actually far sadder than the wedding. The register is a friend explaining rather than a scholar lecturing, and it assumes you know nothing without ever making that feel awkward.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz lived from 1911 to 1984, worked as a journalist and a teacher, was jailed by the Pakistani state in the 1950s, and wrote some of his most famous poems inside prison. Baran Farooqi's selection runs across his career, from the early romantic work to the political poems that got sung at protests for the next seventy years. What makes him the easiest great Urdu poet to read in English is that his images are pictures rather than wordplay: a dawn that is not the promised dawn, a beloved who might be a woman or a country. Pictures survive the crossing.

Gulzar writes film songs that people mistake for simple, and poems that people mistake for songs. This selection, translated by Pavan K. Varma, is bilingual, so the original sits with the English and you can follow the sound even if you read only one of the two scripts. The poems are short, domestic and slightly odd: a moon that behaves like a neighbour, a train window, a woman's absence measured in ordinary objects. He also works in the triveni, a three line form he invented, where the third line turns the first two inside out.

Kaifi Azmi wrote lyrics for Hindi cinema, belonged to the Progressive Writers movement, and produced a body of poetry that keeps returning to one subject: what this society does to its women, and what it costs. Rakhshanda Jalil's selection gathers those poems, including the famous nazm that tells a woman to get up and walk beside the man rather than behind him. The poems are direct, often angry, and easier on a new reader than the classical ghazal, because a nazm argues one thing from beginning to end instead of leaping between couplets.

Anisur Rahman taught English for decades and has spent the years since building the anthologies Urdu poetry in English badly needed. This one takes the ghazal from the eighteenth century to the present, gives you poets in sequence rather than in isolation, and opens with an introduction that explains the machinery: the repeated refrain, the rhyme that comes just before it, the way each couplet is its own small world. Reading it feels like being walked through a very old building by someone who knows which staircases are safe.

Parveen Shakir published her first collection, Khushbu, in 1976, worked in the Pakistani civil service, and died in a car accident in Islamabad in 1994 at forty two. Her poems put a woman at the centre of the ghazal as the one who wants rather than the one who is wanted, which sounds unremarkable now and was not remotely unremarkable then. Naima Rashid's translations keep the sharpness rather than smoothing her into a greeting card, and the selection covers the early romantic work as well as the later, colder poems about marriage and reputation.

Surinder Deol builds a life of Sahir Ludhianvi around free verse translations of more than ninety of his poems and songs, so you get the biography and the work in one volume. Sahir is the rare figure who was a serious Urdu poet before he was a film lyricist and stayed one afterwards, which is why the songs carry lines nobody would risk writing today. The portrait covers the Ludhiana years, the move to Bombay, the political poems, and the long unhappy business of his private life without turning it into gossip.

Ghalib lived from 1797 to 1869, watched Delhi burn in 1857, wrote constantly to friends about money, mangoes and mortality, and produced ghazals so compressed that Urdu readers still argue about single lines. This Columbia edition pairs a selection of the poems with a selection of the letters, and includes the Urdu text of the original poetry, which matters because a bare English Ghalib often reads like a shrug. The letters are the surprise: gossipy, self mocking, completely modern, the voice of a man complaining about his pension.

Mir Taqi Mir wrote in the eighteenth century, lived through the sacking of Delhi more than once, and moved to Lucknow late in life carrying the grief of a city that no longer existed. His ghazals are plainer than Ghalib's and sadder, built on ordinary words placed with terrible precision. This Murty Classical Library volume comes with translations by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who spent a lifetime on Mir, and the series prints the original text facing the English so you can follow the line as you read.

If the ghazal is the form everybody quotes, the nazm is where modern Urdu poetry has done most of its thinking. This anthology follows the nazm through its long argument with itself, from the reformers of the nineteenth century to poets writing now, with Rahman's translations and the same patient introductions he gave the ghazal book. It is the better volume for a reader who finds couplets frustrating, because a nazm holds one subject and follows it through, the way an English poem does.

Fahmida Riaz wrote about desire and the female body at a time when the Pakistani state under Zia ul Haq took a direct interest in what women published, and she spent years of exile in India as a result. This English selection carries the poems that made her dangerous: sexuality written without shame, motherhood written without sentiment, and later work about borders and the disappointing sameness of the two countries. Her voice is harder and more political than Parveen Shakir's, and there is very little decoration in it.

Iqbal is claimed by India and Pakistan both, taught in schools on either side of the border, and read properly by fewer people than either country pretends. Mustansir Mir's selection gives you the range: the early patriotic poems, the long arguments with God, the poems about selfhood and will that made Iqbal a philosopher who happened to write in verse. Mir translates for meaning rather than music and explains what he is doing, which is the honest approach with a poet this loaded with ideas.