Ghalib

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib was born in Agra toward the end of the eighteenth century. He wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian and was also a gifted prose writer. Among the many things that draw readers to him is how exacting he was with his own work. By tradition, he set aside more than half of his Urdu verse, judging it unworthy of keeping.

Those rejected poems lay forgotten for a long time. Only in 1918 were they found again, in the library of the princely state of Bhopal. Three years later, in 1921, they were edited and published as a new Divan-e Ghalib, which gave readers a second Ghalib they had not known.

In Flowers in a Mirror, Mehr Afshan Farooqi builds on the research she began in her earlier book, A Wilderness at My Doorstep. She looks at how Ghalib worked, the world in which he lived and wrote, and the nature of his genius. She chooses 30 ghazals from the set-aside poems, translates them into English, and pairs each with learned, lively commentary. The book argues that marginalized poetry matters and that these lost verses deserve a place in the lives and affections of readers today.