Excerpts from Months and Years of Friendship: Recollections

Abstract

In his 1979 Urdu-language memoir about his time in the Soviet Union, the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84) recounts his extensive travels throughout that nation and his encounters there with luminaries of Soviet and world literature alike, from Ilya Ehrenburg to Jean-Paul Sartre and Nazim Hikmet. Although he published just seven books of poetry during a career spanning over half a century, Faiz is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant modern poets of SouthAsia. Hewas a leading figure of the Progressive Writers’Movement, a leftist group founded in India in 1936 that advocated for a literature responsive to societal ills. A champion of the movement’s call for littérature engagée, Faiz is credited with invigorating the Urdu poetic idiom by infusing it with political meaning: his widely known poem “Freedom’s Dawn (August 1947)” ( صُ ب حِ آ ز ا د ی [“S\uf6e7ubah\uf6e7 -i āzadī”]), for instance, filters the experience of Partition through the traditional metaphors of the Urdu love lyric. Having already earned a reputation as an important poet on his native subcontinent, Faiz was propelled onto the global stage by his imprisonment in the 1950s: he attended the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent in 1958 (Vasilʹeva, Faiz Akhmad Faiz 280) and received the International Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet government in 1962. Faiz’s relationship to the Soviet Union had begun much earlier, when he learned about the October Revolution as a young boy growing up in pre-Partition India (Faiz, Mah o sāl-i āshnā’ī 8), and in 1949 he met Soviet writers for the first time at the second meeting of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Lahore (21). Published by the Progress Publishing House in Moscow,Months and Years of Friendship: Recollections ( م ہ و س ا لِ آ ش ن ا ئ ی : ی ا د و ں ک ا م ج مُ و ع ہ [Mah o sāl-i āshnā’ī: yādon\uf6ba kā majmūʻah]) is a surprisingly understudied document that helps us understand Faiz as a man, political actor, and author. It also contributes to a fuller picture of twentiethcentury literary and cultural exchanges as we seek to expand our