Taufiq rafat biography of martin henderson

Poets live beyond the fading of memory and surpass the judgments of prose. It is possible that written things die because they are judgmental, soiled by the temper of times and prejudices of those that live in temporal flux. Our times have been strongly tinged by opinion about things rather than things themselves; the presentation of reality is in fact an iteration of doctrines, dredged from the past or fashioned anew by the exigencies of power.

Opinion is often described as the interpretation of reality that helps us supersede the past and arrive at a new understanding of things. But where Taufiq Rafat lived and wrote poetry in English, opinion pushed us backward rather than forward. His poetry negates the tyranny of opinion. In , when I found myself back in Lahore—without a job after leaving the Foreign Service—I discovered that Taufiq had moved from Rawalpindi to Lahore as well.

He spoke Punjabi, was carefully rustic in his speech and behavior, hiding the mastery he had over English.

The collection contains the administrative records of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse from its founding in to , and documents not only the history of the.

Poetry must have been a very secret activity, something that probably went on as he talked to you in Punjabi, making fun of the new received wisdom about having a small family. That is the memory that is uppermost in my mind perhaps because those were my bad days and Taufiq was generous. I had known him from my time at Government College, when he used to encourage us poetasters not to give up but write in de-orientalized English.

Taufiq told us that poetry, far from being a vague expression, depended on un-frilled precision. I still have a poem of mine that he corrected by hand to make it lean, something that has taken me long years to understand.

Taufiq Rafat was the Pakistani poet, who lived in USA lately.

Kaleem was quick-witted, a little intolerant of our undergrad gushings in verse, but he deferred to Taufiq as il miglior fabbro the better smith and it was a relationship that I looked at with admiration. Both were interested in our not giving up English versification but wielded the scalpel and cruelly eviscerated what was English poetry in the I-fall-on-the-thorns-of-life-I-bleed tradition.

Later, Shuja, Athar and Alamgir were to become well-received practitioners of English verse with books that actually sold at home and were acknowledged abroad.