Word: urdu
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...Musharraf Farooqi, the 39-year-old translator, is an unlikely savior. Growing up in Pakistan, he read of Amir Hamza's exploits in abridged Urdu versions adapted for children - virtually the sole form in which the epic survived into the 20th century. Farooqi, who admits to not being the most diligent student, would drift into daydreams inspired by the stories in class, imagining, he says, that he was a demon "running around with a tree trunk and clobbering humans with it." In university, he frequently shirked his prescribed engineering curriculum for a pile of dog-eared folk tales scrounged from...
...whose court in the 16th century became the epicenter of Persian literary culture. Akbar was so enchanted by these swashbuckling accounts of derring-do that he commissioned 1,400 exquisite canvas folios depicting scenes from them (five of the paintings accompany this article). According to C.M. Naim, professor of Urdu studies at the University of Chicago, the illustrated Hamzanama (as the collected works are known) is "the Taj Mahal of medieval painting...
...reminded Pakistanis of a cultural identity that undercut their religious one," says Farooqi. "It needed to be ignored." But Farooqi, thankfully, could not ignore it. After a stint in journalism in Karachi, he moved to Canada in 1994 and, while dabbling in children's fiction, set up the Urdu Project, an online journal of translations and literary criticism. Then, on a wintry night in 1999, Farooqi says that a "horse-headed gent" and an "elephant-eared lady" - figures from the dastan - came to him in a dream and told him to embark on a translation of the epic...
...Farooqi decided to heed the call. But instead of tackling all 46 volumes of an 1883 text - which he knew nobody would read in its entirety - he decided to tackle a blend of two shorter versions: the 1855 rendering by the Urdu poet Ghalib Lakhnavi, and an 1871 text by the Urdu scholar Abdullah Bilgrami, who took Lakhnavi's edition and added various flourishes and refrains to restore its original bardic character. Even so, Farooqi's translation is almost a thousand pages in total. It was a Herculean labor. "When I looked at the first page," Farooqi confesses, "I thought...
...NYPD has, since 9/11, built up one of the most impressive intelligence organizations in the world. The Department has officers based in the U.K., Israel and Europe, among other places. It also has hundreds of linguists who speak Farsi, Arabic and Urdu. Its intelligence division is led by David Cohen, who spent 35 years...