Description
Translated from the Telugu by Afsar Mohammad & Shamala Gallagher.
This volume brings together, for the first time in English translation (translated by the poet in collaboration with Shamala Gallagher) the selected, and often groundbreaking poetry of the celebrated Telugu poet Afsar Mohammad, known for his trendsetting poetry and literary criticism in the post-1980s Telugu literary culture. Beside an erudite translator’s note from Gallagher, Evening with a Sufi also contains two in-depth essays on Afsar Mohammad’s poetry by David Shulman and Cheran rudhramoorthy, plus an interview with the poet by poet and translator Rohith.
Every time I read his poems, Afsar Mohammad fascinates me with his hard-hitting, blunt images. … There is a passion of a Sufi and the pains of a common man in his poems. — Gulzar
Afsar Mohammad’s Evening with a Sufi conjures for me devotion and rapture mapped onto the human need for bread, need for belonging to place, and the longing for writing the unwritten. Each poem spells the promise of a better world. Afsar is a poet whose heart aches for justice; these poems ‘bend their bodies down’ to the feet of the Sufi, reciting. Translated from the Telugu, Shamala Gallagher renders a crisp poetry in English that will stun with their sharp mysticism. Afsar is a poet’s poet — a poet in service of all humankind. — Rajiv Mohabir
These are modernist, maybe even post-modernist poems still alive with, or continuous with, the sumptuous pre-modern cultural worlds of the northern Deccan. All of them are couched in that bewitching, musical Telugu, hidden just below the English surface. If you listen well, you will hear it. — David Shulman
The poetic vision offered in this delightful and painful collection is part grief, part teared up feelings of controlled anger and part deep reflection in a poetic sense and bliss. … Afsar’s poetry opens up many festering wounds that I, along with so many other poets and writers all over the world, have suffered. — Cheran Rudhramoorthy
Born in a small village in the South Indian state of Telangana, Afsar Mohammad is now teaching South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Known as a trendsetting poet and literary critic in the post-1980s Telugu literary culture, Afsar has published five volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories and two volumes of literary theory essays. Afsar is also a distinguished scholar of Indian studies and published extensively with various international presses, including Oxford and Cambridge. He is now working on a translation of Sufi poetry from Telugu to English. He can be reached at [email protected]
Shamala Gallagher is a mixed-race Indian American writer, community college teacher, and mother to a preschooler. She is the author of a poetry collection, Late Morning When the World Burns (The Cultural Society, 2019), and her writing has been published in several literary journals, including Poetry, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, and the Missouri Review. She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Athens, Georgia, USA with her family and cats.
