Faiz wrote a considerable fraction of his poetry from prison (1951-55), and some of it indicates his disillusionment with the direction taken by Pakistan after Independence (1947). He was awarded the Lenin
peace prize in 1963, and, besides Lahore and Amritsar in the sub-continent, spent time
in London, Moscow and Beirut. He worked initially for the Pakistani army, but was a journalist or editor for most of the rest of his working life.
Urdu poetry - like two of the languages it originates from, Arabic and Persian
- uses metaphor exceptionally well, and
poets before Faiz used the beloved to symbolize death and God; life was often presented
as the wait for union with the beloved. Faiz took the metaphor a step further, using the
beloved to symbolize also the country, the revolution, and the fight for
economic justice for all. His poetry can hence be read at many levels simultaneously:
as love poetry, as poetry of the conscience, and sometimes as an address to the divine. It is futile to try to separate the strands, just as, in Sufi poetry and prayer, and in the earlier and more traditional
forms of Urdu poetry, it is futile to try and separate the lover from the divine. The reader is not meant to separate the strands, and is meant to read all strands simultaneously, appreciating that the same words can mean all this and more.
Like all other Urdu poetry, Faiz's liberally employs allusions to Islamic myth and religious thought, knowledge of which greatly enhance the pleasure of reading it. For example, the aforementioned hum dekhenge says "and the cry of ana 'l haq shall rise" in the context of a political revolution. A thousand odd years ago, ana l' haqq (I am Truth/I am the Creative Truth/I am Reality) was the then-blasphemous response of Sufi thinker Mansur-al-hallaj, when, knocking on his (religious) teacher's door, he was asked "who is there?". Today, it is the most famous of Sufi phrases; Sufism being the subversive Islam that dared to consider man in the same light, breath, sentence, status, as the divine. And Faiz alludes appropriately to this subversiveness in hum dekhenge which is about the Islamic promise of justice for all.
I have tried to retain the starkness of Faiz's verse - in my opinion it's most attractive quality. Follow my attempts at translating those of his poems that I love most. All originals from: Faiz Ahmed Faiz, SAre Sukhan HamAre, second edition, Rajkamal Prakashan, New Delhi, 1991. All translations with permission from his estate.