Firaq : English translation of Firaq Gorakhpuris popular Urdu couplets

The Romantic era poet, Firaq Gorakhpuri, is a lover of all things beautiful. He writes of love, but there is a deep pain in the way he expresses his longings for the beloved, even when they are together.Loneliness and quietude of the vast night spent in separation from the beloved forms a dreamy backdrop of several of Firaqs ghazals and nazms. However, this loneliness and quietude he talks of goes back to the beginning of creation even before mankind. He talks of the calm that encapsulated the universe before the big bang. He writes:Fan-e-ghazal ko azal se talash thi jin kiTere sukuut mein payi gayi wohi baateNThe craft of ghazal writing, a quest since eternitywere found in the quietude of your companyIn Firaqs poetry, romance is merely one aspect of love; his love encompasses the sentimentality of the entire universe. It is symbolic, erotic, enigmatic, and at the same time, practical and worldly. The central themes of all his poems are beauty, love, relationships, nature, and philosophy. His poetry has a lovely suppleness, softness, and languor, which is rarely found in the Urdu poetry of that era.This book contains notes on Urdu poetry, Literary movements, and Firaq Gorakhpuri, along with a selection of 50 popular couplets of Firaq presented in Urdu, Devanagari, and Roman scripts, followed by its English translation.