Description
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 afsartelugu@gmail.com.
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.
Reviews
In conversation with Afsar Mohammad in Mpositive.in
“I come from an extremely local rural setting where such Sufi mystical practices openly defined my everyday life. It’s not about the technicalities and theories or institutionalised Sufi schools of their philosophies, this is more about what I learned from my childhood, and its physical surroundings dotted by several hybrid shrines. I’ve described this cultural setting in my 2013 Oxford University Press publication, The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India. This version of Sufism has more to do with everyday life rather than a spiritual domain.”
Epsita Halder in Nidan: International Journal for Indian Studies
Oudarjya Pramanik in The Antonym Online
Here, Mohammad doesn’t just tell a story. Rather, he invites readers to go on a soul-stirring journey of self-discovery. It’s a book that goes around in the mind long after the final page is turned, leaving behind a lingering sense of wonder and awe. In the book, Evening with a Sufi by Afsar Mohammad, translated from Telugu by Afsar Mohammad and Shamala Gallagher, readers were gifted a collection of poems that rebel against conventional expectations associated with Sufi poetry. Rather than focusing solely on spiritual enlightenment, Mohammad’s poems go deep into existential grief, heartbreak, and the complexities of human experience. Through his lyrical verses, Mohammad is often seen struggling with questions of identity, belonging, displacement, and societal injustices, offering readers a poignant reflection on the human condition.
Dr Sutanuka Ghosh Roy in Kitaab.org
Evening with a Sufi translated from Telugu by Afsar Mohammad and Shamala Gallagher is a soul-stirring collection of poems. Gulzar writes “There is a passion of a Sufi and the pains of a common man in his poems”. The structure is neat and compact. The first section introduces us to the formation of the self—the poet’s childhood, understanding, and perception of the world around him. The political context, the tussle between the individual ‘I’ and the yearning for freedom —takes us beyond the ‘I’. The first poem in the collection ‘Name Calling’ sets the ball rolling—there is no romantic wrap of the ‘I’ instead of ‘recognition’ the child faces ‘rejection’. Usman a childhood friend is metamorphosed into a scapegoat.
Gopal Lahiri in Kitaab.org
In his engaging book titled Evening with a Sufi, both Afsar Mohammad and the translator Shamala Gallagher bring the intrinsic nuances of the Telegu poems into the English language and make them a riveting form of expression. The solace the poet offers in these poems is uplifting, rounded, and nostalgic. He expresses so directly as one human being to another and finds his way to write socially conscious poems so adroitly. Even some of the murkiest moments in life are condensed through light.
N Venugopal in South First
Come the 1980s and there was Afsar, of course, as part of a new generation of poets and writers. … His particular significance lies in the fact that he continued the tradition of poetry of politics going on for a hundred years, but also brought in a change from the previous decades in having a sharp focus on form and style, and metaphor and expression.
Sayan Aich Bhowmik in Plato’s Caves Online
Afsar Mohammad leaves no stone unturned to make his subject position clear to the readers. His voice, now a seasoned one, is not one which walks the tender bridges of political correctness. Rather, it is bold, strong and with a timbre that echoes long after one has put the book down for the day. It is a voice that needs to reach as many readers as it can for there are millions in India, in most states, who need a voice like this at a time like this. I would by-pass the cliched descriptions of the poems being breath of fresh air. Because what the poems do is speak of things that others have spoken of before. But its significance lies in the fact that a certain political ideology has been trying to erase, rewrite, silence and supress voices and histories for the last decade or so and would continue to grow stronger lest voices like Mohammad’s are heard.
Basudhara Roy in Borderless Journal
The title, to begin with, itself upholds a strong symbolism. Its ‘evening’ bespeaks the twilight of civilisation, the personal-social moment of the unleashing of despair, and a decadent global landscape thriving on inequity and deprivation. And yet, evening, in these poems, is also the transitional period of awareness, self-reflection, evaluation, and the collective envisioning of an egalitarian dawn. These poems, therefore, become investigations and articulations of both fatigue and rest, of falling apart and re-gathering, and of old failures and new beginnings, leading us to look at the idea of the Sufi or Sufism anew.
Mahua Sen in Saranga Magazine
At its core, Evening with Sufi is a meditation on belonging and rupture. Afsar Mohammed writes like someone standing at the edge of multiple worlds, watching the world from different vantage points, where village and city, past and present, language and silence merges. His poetry is deceptively simple, but each line opens into layers of emotional and historical meaning, evoking a whirlpool of emotions.
Nishi Pulugurtha in Cafe Dissensus Everyday
With illustrations that hark back to the idea of the Sufi in the title of the volume, the volume includes an essay by Shamal Gallagher where she speaks on translating Afsar. An essay by David Schulman refers to the language in the which the poems were written originally pointing out the nuances and melody, the rootedness of the Telugu language that would possibly give a non-Telugu reader an idea of the melody of the language. The interview of Afsar by Rohith also includes personal photographs of the poet, of the poet’s mother who is an important presence in many of the poems. The Afterword by Cheran Rudhramoorthy also speaks of the nuances of translation. Throughout the volume several images of poems and quotations in the Telugu script are presented, thereby focussing on the idea of translation and language.
