By Jonaid Iqbal
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Academy of Letters (PAL) on Thursday released Bainul Aqvami Adab-intikhab (selection from world literature), a 960 pages book containing Urdu translation of both prose and poetry.
The writings were selected from Australia, Angola, Argentine, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Bosnia, the US, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Brazil, the Great Britain, Bulgaria, Poland, Paraguay, Myanmar, Peru, Tajikistan, Turkey, Thailand, Japan, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, India, South Africa, South Korea, Czech and Slovakia, China, Dominican Republic, Zimbabwe, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sierra Lone, Syria, France, Palestine, Finland, Kyrgyzstan, Columbia, Kenya, Cuba, Guatemala, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mongolia, Mexico, Norway, Nigeria, Nepal, Romania, Vietnam, Holland, Uruguay and Ukraine.
It contains writings of some 400 writers including Bertrand Russell, James Joyce, Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Qazi Nazrul Islam, Prem Chand, Quratul Ain Hyder, Rajindra Singh Bedi, Jean Paul Sartre, Maupassant, Changez Aitmov, Garcia Marquez, Nelson Mandela, Nazim Hikmet, Farrogh Farrukh, Mehmood Darvesh, Octavia Paz, Franz Kafka, Herman Hess, Chekhov, Khalil Jibran and T. S. Eliot.
The translation has been done by Khalid Iqbal Yasir, Ihsan Akbar, Sattar Tahir, Shamsur Rahman Faruqui, Nayyar Masud, Ejaz Faruqui, Mirza Hamid Beg, Ghaus Bukhsh, Mohammad Athar Masood, Saleem Akhtar, Kishwar Naheed, Masud Akhtar Shaikh, Mohsin Bhopali, Afzal Hussain Randhawa, Amjad Islam Amjad, Tabassum Kashmiri, Nida Fazil, Muneerud Din Ahmad, Saleem Shahzad, again to name a few.
The volume has been edited by Dr. Rashid Hameed, Mohammad Asim But, and Afzal Shahid while PAL Chaiman Fakhar Zaman is the chief editor.
The book will open window of ideas to new thoughts that invigorates minds and helps them to live the brilliance of great minds.
While introducing the book, PAL Chief, Fakhar Zaman expressed the hope that the selection would help readers of Urdu literature to understand the prevailing trends of world literature.
The book would be distributed among writer guests of the forthcoming three-day International Conference on Sufism and Peace, scheduled to begin from March 14.
Source: Dawn
Date:2/13/2010
