https://www.alijawadzaidi.com/award-winners
The jury was unanimous in its decision to award the first prize to ‘Palestinian,’ Poorna Swami’s translation of ‘Falasteeni’ by Fehmida Riaz, and the runner-up prize to ‘Prohibition,’ Mohd Aqib’s translation of ‘Pabandi’ by Ahmed Nadim Qasmi.
Jury comments:
The jury considered the following aspects: the merit of the poem in the source language, the quality of translation into the target language with respect to experiential richness, diction, tone, and overall impact, and its contemporary relevance. The poem ‘Palestinian’ translated its source material with fidelity, but without sacrificing a poetic sensibility of its own. Among the poems we examined, it presented a shining example of how good translation threads the needle between minimising the loss of original metaphor and maximising the lyrical quality of the output language. The quality of submitted translations was consistently good, making for a tough choice but, ultimately, this poem truly stood out. The runner-up, ‘Prohibition,’ is a short poem and the translator has effectively communicated its resistance against censorship and prohibition. The jury found the poem’s imagery of rolling pearls and drops falling on raging fires most evocative.
The Jury
Anisur Rahman is a literary critic, translator, and bilingual poet in English and Urdu. Formerly a Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, a Central University in New Delhi, and a Senior Advisor at Rekhta Foundation (www.rekhta.org), he has worked and published in the areas of comparative, translation, postcolonial, and Urdu studies. His recent publications include Earthenware: Sixty Poems (Rubric Publishing, 2018), In Translation: Positions and Paradigms (Orient Blackswan, 2019), Socioliterary Cultures in South Asia (Niyogi Books, 2019), Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi: The Wonderful World of Urdu Ghazals (HarperCollins, 2019), and Hazaar Rang Shaairi: The Wonderful World of the Urdu Nazm (HarperCollins 2022). Rahman has been a Shastri Fellow at the University of Alberta, Canada (2001-2002) and a Visiting Scholar at Purdue University, USA (2007).
Raza Mir is a professor of management at William Paterson University in the USA. His latest books are Iqbal: Poet of the East (Penguin, 2022) and Murder at the Mushaira (Aleph 2021).
The Winner
Poorna Swami is a writer and choreographer from Bangalore, India. Her essays and reportage have appeared in The Caravan, Open, and London Review of Books (web), among others. Formerly the India editor-at-large for the international translation quarterly Asymptote, she co-edited the journal’s first feature on Indian language poetry in English translation. Poorna is now a PhD student in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University, where she studies 20th-century Urdu and Hindi literature, with an emphasis on feminist histories, transnational networks, and translation. A prize-winning poet, she has published poems in journals such as Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Indian Quarterly.
The Runner-up
Mohd Aqib is a UGC Junior Research Fellow and Ph.D. candidate at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. His Ph.D. title is ‘Aesthetics of Bilingualism in English Self-Translations of Three Post-Partition Urdu Novels.’ His publications include translations from Urdu to English, Urdu ghazals, and two co-written book chapters investigating the interventions of digital technology in Indian poetics.