The poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was written by T.S. Eliot in 1915. Despite the poet’s young age — he wrote the majority of the poem when he was 22 — he imagined the confessional monologue of an ageing man wrestling with existential turmoil.

Over a century later, Eliot, the quintessential modernist poet, lives on in Pakistan. Lahore-based poet Anjum Altaf has “transcreated” Eliot’s Prufrock into Urdu verse, indicating how global modernisms resonate across languages and eras.

As critics of modernism, such as Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, note, there has been an “expansion” of modernism. The recent “global turn” seeks to unsettle received ideas of modernism by embracing diverse, multilingual traditions. Altaf’s Prufrock shows such an expansion. It is a Western modernist text replanted in South Asian soil, and it is flourishing there.

Eliot introduces us to a timid, middle-aged man full of psychological complexity and doubt. On the surface, Prufrock frets about simple things such as whether to eat a peach or speak to women. Through these trivialities, we glimpse his deeper anxieties about disturbing the universe and the hells of other people.

He is self-conscious, indecisive and withdrawn, constantly second-guessing himself (“And indeed there will be time/ To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’”). The language of the poem reveals layers. Prufrock’s urbane voice conveys many clues. He compares life to “teacups” and discusses Michelangelo not out of passion but social habit. All of this shows a man alienated by his own modern urban world.

His alienation is mirrored in the poem’s form. Prufrock is written as a loose, collage-like mosaic of fragments and images, not a neat rhyme scheme. It includes disjointed jump-cuts of foggy evenings, yellow smoke and half-glimpsed street scenes. The effect on readers is that they feel Prufrock’s fractured inner life. We piece together a disintegrated personality from scattered, sometimes contradictory, moments. This fragmentary form itself feels like modern city life — isolating, hectic and hard to unify.

Time is another crucial theme. Prufrock feels it slipping away: “There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” He repeats “There will be time” like a prayer, while knowing he does nothing with it, as there is “time yet for a hundred indecisions.” The poem is haunted by waiting and missed opportunities. Images of unshakeable age — carried across to Urdu as “Main boorrha ho raha hoon” — lace the poem with weary pragmatism.

Readers in Pakistan will be able to relate to the poem’s themes of angst, indecision and alienation. Poet and translator Altaf finds Prufrock especially resonant for “teenagers who feel overwhelmed by all the difficult decisions they need to make… [but the poem’s] lines resonate at every point in time.”

Altaf admits lines like “I grow old… I grow old” echo in his mind as he ages. He wryly remarks that Prufrock’s mermaids “never sang to me, although I didn’t see that as a particularly major loss.” Altaf connects with Prufrock’s social fears and wistful dreams, despite living in a very different world from Eliot’s 1910s’ London.

This is a small illustration of the larger phenomenon of global modernisms. Eliot’s imagery and ideas — from despair to the mechanised city — turned out to be relevant to India, Iran, China and, indeed, Pakistan.

The Urdu literary scene was long under “the spell of T.S. Eliot”, as Intizar Husain wrote in Dawn. “No modern poet,” he claimed, “could resist Eliot’s influence and almost every critic saw wisdom in referring to his work.” Urdu writers who were members of the Progressive Writers Association adapted modernist techniques. Even novels such as Husain’s own Basti allude directly to Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land and Hollow Men to link post-Partition alienation with Eliot’s modern doubt. In short, the modernist spirit of breaking past forms and expressing inner turmoil found a home here too.

As for Altaf’s “transcreation” of Prufrock into Urdu, this is a storied translation practice. Transcreations are supple reimaginings that combine fidelity with local colour. The term itself is distinctly South Asian, tracing its lineage from the Indian poet and author P. Lal to the Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder. The latter famously described her extensive translation of her Urdu novel Aag Ka Darya [River of Fire] into English as a “transcreation”, not a word-for-word rendering.

(Hyder herself adapted Eliot’s The Dry Salvages from Four Quartets and The Waste Land’s idea of London as an “unreal city” in Aag Ka Darya.)

Altaf’s Urdu Prufrock similarly refuses dutiful translation; instead, it reshapes images for the context. He weaves in Urdu poetic idioms, echoes of poets Mirza Ghalib, N.M. Rashid, and Josh Malihabadi and local worldviews. For example, he replaces “mermaids” with jal pariyan or water fairies, or recasts “tea and cakes and ices” as chai, kulchay and sharbat. Yet, the poem’s core remains recognisable. Prufrock’s sharam [shame or embarrassment] is very much our sharam when a lady rebukes him, “That is not what I meant at all” or “Mera matlab yeh tau nahin tha.”

In translation theory, Altaf’s method sits between Lawrence Venuti’s foreignisation and domestication extremes, bringing together opacity and innovation. As Venuti notes, translation advances cohesion, as every “domestic inscription” anticipates a new community around the text. In Altaf’s “transgression”, Prufrock is conversant in Urdu, promoting a tight community of Pakistani readers who hear the same anxieties in their mother tongue.

Today, Altaf’s Urdu Prufrock reminds us that modernist poetry isn’t a limited Western affair. It lives on in classrooms, on screens and in the minds of people around the world. Pakistani readers may read Eliot as a fellow mourner for uncertain, fragmented times. Altaf’s translation (or transcreation) gives Prufrock new life. His mixed feelings may seem remote from concerns about surveillance, AI and regime changes in today’s world, but the emotional clarity is the same. Modernism has figured lived experiences widely, whether in steam-era London or Lahore’s present-day universities.

By harmonising Eliot’s lines with Urdu poetry, Altaf proves that an attuned string of the sitar can vibrate with a guitar’s melody. Prufrock’s satire and spontaneity, fear and longing travel across continents. His story of indecision is, as Altaf says, “always there” for readers in our time. The result is a global literary moment. An Anglo-American verse finds new expression in South Asian verse and opens up understandings of modernism.

The columnist is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York in the UK, and author of five books. Bluesky: @clarachambara

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 29th, 2026