The original

What did the original diwan look like?

Rahman is believed to have written his poems in the silt washed up from the Bara river which used to flow through Peshawar. It was his friends who collected his poems into a Diwan (anthology). Most of the oldest copies of the Diwan have no date, so we don’t know which is the oldest one.

A good place to see old copies of the Diwan is at the Pashto Academy in the University of Peshawar.

I visited there today, and noticed several interesting variations in the writing, including Southern Pushto.

Here is one of my favourite versions.

: Can you translate this?

Has anyone found a nicer version?

Read Rahman in English and Pushtu

For the first time the entire works of Rahman Baba have been translated into English and published in this book in both English and Pushtu.

It's 900 pages long, with the classic Pushtu text printed next to the English translation. The result of four years work by Momin Khan, a Pakistani university graduate from the Swat Valley, and Robert Sampson, a former teacher at Edwardes College in Peshawar.

There's also a coffee table version.

The poems are set among beautiful photos of the people of the Peshawar Valley that Rahman Baba knew so well. A conversation piece with a difference.

And a sampler volume of the classic Rahman Baba poems is also available. The best of Rahman Baba.

This slim selection of the great Pushtun poems is one of the fastest ways to get an appreciation of the poet and the people who have responded to him so positively for more than 300 years.