Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, Abbas has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering & computer science from Johns Hopkins University, and a graduate degree in philosophy from Columbia University. He lives with his wife, Margit Oberrauch, and their feline friend, Frederica Krueger, in the small, very beautiful city of Brixen in the Italian Alps. Email: s.abbas.raza.1 [at] gmail.com
A great man and one of the most significant figures in the history of Pakistan has just died. I consider it my great fortune that I came to know him and the idea of a world without him in it is quite unbearable. Here is what I wrote about him more than 10 years ago…
by S. Abbas Raza Some of my nieces and nephews are now at an age where they sometimes call me to ask how to cook simple Pakistani dishes (Pakistani cooking is the same as Northern Indian cooking, while the cuisine of South India is very different) and this gave me the idea of writing a…
3 Quarks Daily asked a number of writers, artists, scientists, scholars, and public intellectuals to give us brief personal reflections on the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe and other places. The following have sent their thoughts and their responses are below in the order in which we received them: Feisal Hussain Naqvi Robert Pinsky Frans…
by S. Abbas Raza I spent a couple of days in Genoa recently and traveled along the coastline by boat to Portofino which is at the extreme lower right in the map below. It was very beautiful. I took some photos. Below the map are some of them without further commentary. [Click map/photos to enlarge…
by S. Abbas Raza No matter how many books we read about how coincidences are to be expected in our lives simply due to the sheer amount of information we are bombarded with every day (and psychological reasons that certain kinds of things become salient to us because of various mental traits we share as…
by S. Abbas Raza Faiz visited Bangladesh after it had seceded from Pakistan and become an independent country following a year of bloody civil war (with the Pakistan army responsible for horrific genocide in what was then still East Pakistan). Then he wrote this. The last line is almost certainly an allusion to the apology…
I was walking in Vahrn a couple of days ago when I passed some strawberry fields covered in plastic sheets that looked like a plastic ocean with waves as it was a very windy day. I stopped for a minute to make this crappy video. (The real thing looked and sounded much more impressive than…
by S. Abbas Raza Like many if not most of you, I'm sure, I spent much of the weekend reading various articles about gun control and signing various petitions about it. By Sunday night I just became depressed: while it is clear to me that the existence and easy availability of hundreds of millions of…
The legendary Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz was in Beirut in 1980 as Israeli helicopter gunships rained fire down upon Palestinian camps there. He wrote this lullaby as a response. I have translated it by listening to it one line at a time using the video given at the end, below, but then I also…
by S. Abbas Raza Once again, I present my own translation of two lovely couplets by Faiz Ahmed Faiz side by side with a translation of the same by the late Agha Shahid Ali. I do this not to criticize Shahid's translation in any way but actually to pay tribute to him as well as…
by S. Abbas Raza This post is dedicated to my wife, Margit Oberrauch. A couple of weeks ago I came upon a Ghalib couplet in Urdu which evoked pangs of recognition in me. Ghalib captures so simply and so well a discomfort that I like to imagine nearly everyone has experienced: that of having to…
by S. Abbas Raza and Morgan Meis Abbas: Some months ago when Morgan told me he was going to come and visit me in Südtirol from Sri Lanka in the first week of June, I stupidly agreed to go on an extended trek through the alps with him for several days. The idea was that…
by S. Abbas Raza David is one of the rare rock stars who continues to innovate and surprise in several artistic fields decades after his rise to fame as lead singer of the Talking Heads in the 1970s. Today, even as he enters his seventh decade he shows no signs of slowing down. Last week…
by S. Abbas Raza This is my English version of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's Urdu rendition of a Turkish poem written by Nâzım Hikmet for his Russian wife Vera. To Vera She said comeShe said staySmile, said sheDie, said she I cameI stayedSmiledAnd died also.
by S. Abbas Raza This post is for 3QD friend and supporter Robert Pinsky. At one pole of the axis representing how literal poetry translations should be are figures like Vladimir Nabokov who believed that poetry must be translated as literally as possible without any interpretive liberties taken or attempts to preserve rhythm or the…
[Satellite photo of Manhattan on 9/11. The red circle is my own location at the time.] by S. Abbas Raza I hated Osama Bin Laden, and I suppose I probably had more personal reasons to hate him than most. When I was just beginning grad school in the philosophy department at Columbia University, I met…
by S. Abbas Raza The Egetmann pageant and parade took place in the South Tyrolean wine-making town of Tramin this past Tuesday, on the day before Ash Wednesday, as it has every odd-numbered year since 1591. I was there and can report that it completely lived up to its reputation for spectacular Alpine zaniness. The…
3 Quarks Daily asked a number of scholars, academics, journalists, writers and others to give us brief reactions to the recent events in Egypt. Their responses are given below in the order in which they were received: Akeel Bilgrami Mohsin Hamid Mark Blyth Frans de Waal Pablo Policzer Ejaz Haider Mona El-Ghobashy Gerald Dworkin Ram…
The first of these spontaneously popped into my mind as I regained consciousness after some recent shoulder surgery. As the effects of anaesthesia wore off and before the pain became a roar which drowned out every other thought, I made up the rest in the ultimately futile attempt at distracting myself: Send not to know…
Learning by Heart He recited a short poem to meWhich he had learned by heartNot to impress or intimidateMe, or anyone else, But just in case one yearSpring might be late in comingAnd he need cheer his friendsSaddened by the dearth of birdsong. Or perhaps for that moment in loveWhen he would be struck speechless,When…