Muhammad Tahir Ghani (Author)
Muhammad Tahir Ghani (d. 1669), better known as Ghani Kashmiri, is arguably the greatest Persian poet of Kashmir and one of its literary and cultural icons. Highly popular in India and the larger Persianspeaking world up to the modern times, he influenced many generations of Persian and Urdu poets in India. Ghani's forte lies in his remarkable
use of language to create poems with multiple layers of meaning. This, along with his versatility in creating delightful metaphors and images, makes him one of the few medieval poets with a striking appeal to the modern reader.
Bazaz Nusrat & Mufti Mudasir (Translator)
Translator(s)
Every moment it seeks to slip from the mind's nook
Fresh poetic meaning is a gazelle to be captured
The Captured Gazelle is an elegant and lucent translation of the poems of the seventeenth-century Persian poet Mulla Tahir Ghani, better known as Ghani Kashmiri. Eulogized by poets such as Mir and Iqbal, Ghani is an outstanding representative of sabk-e-Hindi or the 'Indian style' in Persian poetry, which became a hallmark of the Mughal-Safavid literary culture.
The introduction situates Ghani against his unique background in which Iranian and Indian poetic cultures came together to create a glorious literary age in Kashmir, while the translations capture Ghani in his wide spectrum of moods-satirical, playful, self-pitying, pessimistic, mystically resigned-bringing alive his wit and ingenuity in a modern idiom without losing hold on the tone.
