South Asian Poetry "Bleg"

A friend of mine is working on an anthology of "contemporary" world poetry (where "contemporary" means from the 1950s on). He's an Indian-American scholar, and he knows the literary traditions of some parts of India well, but obviously not all of them. His particular need here is poetry written in Indian languages.

As a single Punjabi poem to include in the anthology, I gave "Waris Shah Nu" as a suggestion, though my editor friend also indicated he was curious to know what the readers of this blog would suggest:

[A]s my "sphere of influence" in this project is South Asia, I'm trying my hardest to provide as wide and disparate a representation as I can of the many voices in India and in diaspora. I recently realized that my selection, not surprisingly, was skewed toward Indian-English poets and that I was lacking many of the other major languages. Indeed my representation of Bodo, Kashmiri, Manipuri, Konkani, Gujarati, Sindhi, and Punjabi poetry is precipitously low, if even existent (that's not to mention a host of other languages, such as Santali or the Bihari languages, which I'm going to have to give up on I fear). Anyway, I wonder if you could point me to some especially good Punjabi poetry in translation, or the most important poets in said language (or any of the other languages, including ones I didn't mention such as Assamese, Malayalam & Urdu).


Does anyone have a favorite Shiv Kumar poem they could point us to, for example-- with an accompanying translation? (Panini, this means you.) For the purposes of this anthology (since only the translations will be printed), the quality of the English translation is quite important, though I believe the quality of the poem in its original language is paramount.

And needless to say, this goes beyond Punjabi. Above, my friend mentions several other languages as currently deficiently represented. But he does want to keep things "contemporary."

Finally, it would be especially helpful if you could suggest links on the internet, or to previously published translations in English in books. (The project does not have the budget to hire translators of its own. And unfortunately, few scholars working today can compete with the likes of A.K. Ramanujan, who translated many of the poems he included in the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry himself.)

Thanks in advance.