Faiz in English and French: Creating a sense of place and time across languages

This paper examines how translators of poetry address the sense of place captured in historically and culturally significant poetry. Urdu-language poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s revolutionary poem ‘Mujh se pehli si muhabbat meri mehboob na mang’, presents unique challenges to translation due to the way it both draws on and subverts Urdu poetic tradition. Written just before the end of British rule in India, the poem represents a very specific moment in history and is, in turn, historic in its own right. How then might this sense of history and place be preserved when the poem is translated into English and French long after the moment it captures has passed? This article will examine four translations into English and two into French to ascertain how and to what extent translators are able to meaningfully communicate to new audiences the sense of place and time inherent in the original.