In “The Rebel’s Silhouette,” for example, an untitled Urdu poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz on Page 50 is placed opposite its translation, by the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, on Page 51. Even if you don’t read Urdu, the original is sharply outlined: four lines in two couplets, taking up barely a third of the page. One great charm of a bilingual edition is that you don’t have to give up one for the other, as you would with a translation. You can have both at the same time, and treat language as a Jenga tower, moving its pieces but preserving its structure. Look at the beginning of another untitled poem and you can hear the music of “Passará/tem passado/passa com a sua fina faca” — the time-traveling verb, the echoing sibilants, the alliteration.

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