Mirza Ghalib

Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan, who wrote as Ghalib, was born in Agra in 1797 and lived most of his life in Delhi, where he died in 1869. He wrote in Urdu and in Persian, and is generally counted among the greatest Urdu poets of the ghazal. The book from which these pieces come describes him as coming of a distinguished Turkish family of Samarkand, and as Poet Laureate at the court of Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal emperor.

The six pieces given here are drawn from Hindustani Lyrics (London: The Sufi Publishing Society, 1919), in the English verse of Inayat Khan and Jessie Duncan Westbrook; five appear in the main series and one among the closing fragments. They are free renderings, not literal translations.