About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of thirty poems by Syed Ali Haidar Nazm Tabatabai (1852–1933): five *nazms* (poems on a single theme), among them "The Surge of Roses", a satirical *saqi-nama* and the opening stanza of his famous version of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", and twenty-five *ghazals* (lyric poems). The title, *Nazm Tabatabai ka Kalam* ("Poems of Nazm Tabatabai"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the thirty pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026 and marked {{PD-India}}. Wikisource gives only the first stanza of "The Graves of the Strangers" and only a passage of "The Coming Down of Revelation"; they are printed as found.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing has been left out, and the source pages carry no modern editorial matter. The poems are grouped by kind; the ghazals follow the order of the source and are headed by their first line. Two ghazals in the same rhyme, "What use is this sigh without effect" and "Pride in independence is vain", share three couplets in the source; both are printed as found, and the shared couplets are translated in the same words.

Copyright: Nazm Tabatabai died in 1933, so his poems are in the public domain in Pakistan and India. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. The translation keeps each line of verse as a line, and puts accuracy before rhyme. The poet signs his ghazals with either of his two pen names, Nazm and Haidar, and both are kept.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Lucknow, Matiya Burj, Hyderabad, Karbala; Khizr, Moses, Joseph, Jacob, Jesus, David, Solomon, Farhad, Qais (Majnun), Nimrod, Shaddad, Jamshid, Khusrau, Kaiqubad, Rizwan.

Introduction

Syed Ali Haidar Tabatabai, who wrote as Nazm and sometimes as Haidar, was born in Lucknow in 1852 into a family that served the kings of Oudh. When the British deposed the last king, Wajid Ali Shah, in 1856 and sent him to Matiya Burj near Calcutta, the family followed the exiled court, and Nazm grew up in that small, nostalgic copy of Lucknow; his ghazal "Think of me as the memorial of those departed from Lucknow" is its elegy. He later moved to Hyderabad, where he taught at the Nizam College and in the service of the state and, in his last years, at the new Osmania University. He died in Hyderabad in 1933.

Nazm is best known today for two works of scholarship and translation. His commentary on the Urdu *Diwan* of Ghalib was one of the first and most learned; and his *Gor-e-Ghariban* ("The Graves of the Strangers") rendered Gray's "Elegy" into Urdu verse, a landmark in the coming of English poetry into Urdu. Of the latter, only the opening stanza is on Wikisource, and it is printed here.

His own verse is that of a learned Lucknow master: the ghazal with a difficult *radif* (refrain), such as "turned back" or "well, how is that for a saying?", worked through every possible turn; wine, the cupbearer and the ascetic; the sky that grinds the upright. The nazms show other sides of him: a crowded spring scene in "The Surge of Roses"; good-humoured advice in "Joining a Gathering"; a sharp *saqi-nama* on the spread of drinking among English-educated Indians; and a passage, in the manner of a *qasida*, on the first revelation to the Prophet at the age of forty.