An Elegy by Riyaz Latif
Literary Trails
In his elegy, Riyaz Latif undersores the immense suffering of children in the beleaguered Gaza region A bilingual version.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
As the nation transforms into an eyeless, brainless crowd, so the crowd turns into an institution that sustains the ruling dispensation’s hegemony and falsification says Riyaz Latif with “seething sadness” at this usurpation of agency for thought and compassion”…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The ‘Essay’ has usually occupied a secondary position in the world of literary creations despite its rich history starting with Montaigne down to Borges, Orwell. Chesterton, Nirmal Verma to name a few. Riyaz Latif’s essays that appeared in The Beacon variously, confirm the luminousness of the genre. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Often drawing from Arabic and Persianate cultural traditions, poems by Shafiq Fatima Shera (1930-2012) abound in rich metaphors and textured imagery, the lexical as well as imaginative fabric of her poems tends towards an evident expansiveness. Translated from Urdu by Riyaz Latif.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Sajida Zaidi who passed away in 2011 at the age of 84 was a noted educationist and Urdu poet. Riyaz Latif a bilingual poet offers up fresh translations of her philosophical and reflective verses.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Sara Shagufta, the tragic young poet who took her life in 1984 aged thirty, comes to life in these fresh translations of her Urdu verses by Riyaz Latif …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Stepwells are subterranean water structures – vavs, baulis and so on – that dot India, (especially western India) quite prolifically. The pre-modern vavs (stepwells) in Gujarat, however, are distinctive for their spatial, functional as well as ornamental refinement. Riyaz Latif ruminates on one of these structures, the exquisite stepwell at Adalaj (ca. 1499), in close proximity to Ahmadabad.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Riyaz Latif ruminates on ruins in which the very incompleteness of those architectural fragments, a broken arch, stones released from their regimental composition evokes an entropic materiality reposing in the arms of earth and grass, nourishing itself on its own organic unraveling. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Inflected with ‘environmental sensibilities; Majeed Amjad and Amiq Hanafi offer us poetic visions that should open our eyes and make us think of the world and the ineffable. Both translated from Urdu by Riyaz Latif…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Coping with his existential grief as the virus, ‘malaise and mortality’, enters his home, Riyaz Latif remembers Degas’ sublime, soft lines of his Whirling Nuns. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Ignored in his lifetime by mainstream Urdu poetry movements, Majeed Amjad pointed Urdu lyric in new directions, to nature as threatened life, to Time in the here-and-now. Riyaz Latif translates the poet’s exquisite yet earthy visions. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Riyaz Latif meditates on a cosmogony of the elements and our precarious finitude within it as ‘lost signs’…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet translator and dramatist Mukhtar Siddiqui (1919-1972) shaped modern Urdu literature with innovative lyrical content evident in these poems translated by poet Riyaz Latif…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In a response that is equally intense and provocative, Asif Raza reads Riyaz Latif’s essay on the red-breasted rosy starlings as a prose poem, offering up a text that stands weightily on its own acuity of vision.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
At the window, the eye is fated to register much more than the red-breasted rosy starlings Riyaz Latif waits for. Your vision of linearity sweeps over panoramas of disenchantment. Then the birds arrive, sketching the skies in unison …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Translating his own poems from Urdu, Riyaz Latif offers a poetic vision of an odiferous Wasteland in which metaphor is meaning, Time space, permanence nothingness, and desire is death . …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Raga Malkauns’ aural trajectory becomes an arch, stringing mutually unknown planes into each other. Its sounds and the ghosts it evokes outline the singular ineffable unity of all things finds Riyaz Latif in this tribute.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
With his control over Urdu language and the modernity of his ideas, Sarwat Hussain was one of the most distinguished poets his life tragically cut short by a train accident. Ten poems translated by Riyaz Latif. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Scholar, translator, essayist multilingual poet Riyaz Latif is too modest when he informs the reader that his poem “Transience” that appeared in the original in Urdu in 1994 and which he translated himself might seem dated with its reference to Glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Bosnia. Not for us it isn’t!
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Personal Notes
“At this inevitable parting, how does one invoke reminiscences of that vivacious vitality that was Varis Alvi (Vāriṡ ʿAlavī)? There is a singular incongruity in referring to him in the past tense, for it would be in keeping with him to persevere unwaveringly in our dimension”, says poet Riyaz Latif in his “requiem for a friend.” …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Rihard Eskow visits Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus in the West Bank, now a ghost town after Israeli bombing and discovers a tragically moving nativity space amidst the rubble. …[Read More]…
Why The Beacon? The Beacon is a web-based only feature magazine of writing and reading (long-form essays, fiction and poetry) that believes in confluences more than in consensus. The Beacon …[Read in full]…
Literary Trails
In his lyrical elucidation of the archangel Israfil’s death, Noon Meem Rashid issues an elegiac imperative—weep tears for the death of the bearer of all sounds, for the silence that relegates all into nothingness.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Gujarati poet Yagnesh Dave recalls meeting with the late Varis Alvi at his home and an epiphanous moment when his host puts him in mind of a Rembrandt figure.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
How does one cope with grief and loss, the onset of loneliness? This extract from a novella, Resurgence by Balwant Bhaneja, traces with elements of gothic horror, the journey of its grief-stricken protagonist …[Read More]…