11/08/2026
During a recent online discussion, Salima Hashmi, daughter of the great Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, mentioned that he had written a single English poem, The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl. It was published, amended most likely by Faiz himself, in the book The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl: Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz with original text, edited by Khalid Hasan (1988). The original version was published as Faiz's inaugural column on March 3, 1961 for the Lahore newspaper The Civil and Military Gazette.
Below are both versions of the poem, the first from the book, the second the original in the newspaper. In addition to the new post image are a picture of the poem and the Gazette's front page that day, which announced Faiz's new column in a box at the top right. Interestingly, Faiz described it in both instances as the framework for a short documentary film (which was never made). According to Salima Hashmi, an Italian Director/Producer was in talks with Faiz to make the film at the time. She and her father actually met him in Rome in 1962; his whole family was very musical and his wife was an opera singer, but the idea faded away.
In both versions of the poem we have tried to preserve the original punctuation, capitalization and word layout. The changes are minimal, but interesting. In the earlier version key abstractions – Time, Past, Present, Timelessness, Unicorn, Dancing Girl, City of the Dead, etc. – are capitalized, in the later version they are mostly in lowercase. The biggest cut is that the earlier “ploughing through timeless sands to admit the festival march of life-giving water,” later becomes just “to admit water.” There are a few other small word changes.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the poem is the way Faiz reads the figurine of the dancing girl as a figure who gives life. At the start, she is pure vitality; in the long middle of the poem she is imprisoned, spinning in place despite her energy, trapped by the eager eyes of others; in the end she is released and multiplied, freed in the bodies of newly liberated people. That she can evoke these sentiments in such an important poet across thousands of years is testimony to his imagination, the vigor and presence given to her by the Indus artisan who fashioned her, and – just possibly – the original woman who might have inspired that artist.
With many thanks to The Faiz Foundation Trust.
Read the poem at https://www.harappa.com/blog/unicorn-and-dancing-girl
