"Both of us have written a steady stream of love poems," says Manfred, co-author of Poems by Manfred Chobot and Anisur Rahman. The poets, one 60 and the other 40, met each other in an international poetry festival at Columbia, USA. They soon became friends and Anis invited him to try out a collaboration. Anis translated Manfred's work into Bangla, while Anis' poems were translated into German by Manfred. "This was possible through the e-mail and I thought the idea simply great," remarks Manfred. "Our common link was English," explains Anis.

One may question the quality of the translation, Anis points out, as a lot of the nuances and cadences of poetry are difficult to capture in another language. However the two understood the essence of each other's poems," since both knew the language of poetry," as Anis puts it. The 24 lyrics are contained in a small hard-bound book. Anis' work has been translated into 10 different languages and Manfred in numerous European ones.

Manfred, who began writing poems in 1965, has published nine volumes of poems in German (which have been translated into Czech, Ukranian, Polish, Slovakian, French, English, Spanish and Bulgarian, among others). Love is his theme -- with both tragic and optimistic overtures and endings. His favourite writers are the major US poets of the 50s and 60s like Allan Ginsberg and Charles Olson. Manfred's basic training is in engineering. He makes a living like writing radio plays for broadcasting, and has always been a freelancer for Viennese newspapers -- writing travelogues and editing Lyrics from Austria (from 1991 to 2004).

Anis has six books in Bangla (translated into 20 other languages including Japanese, Malay, Mongolian and more) and one done in collaboration with others. He has two books in the pipeline viz, Bangladeshi Shilpacharcha and Abritti.