Lost in the Ghazals

When I first was given the ghazals to read, I knew from the beginning it was going to be a challenge, and challenged I was.  Reading the ghazals proved to be harder then I even imagined them being.  For the most part, the stories trying to be told through the poems were lost in the translation.  I feel that because each couplet, some of the time began a new part of the story, I wasn’t fully able to put the pieces together, and had I read them in the original language, the wording would have been different and probably would have been a smother transition.  For this reason, the easiest and the ones I enjoyed reading the most were the Adrienne Rich ghazals.  She truly takes a modern day approach to her writing while still keeping the tradition ghazal form.  Being that these were the easiest to read they were the poems I appreciated the most.  You could feel the emotion through her choice of words and the way she described the scenes she was trying to portray.  While I did enjoy the writings by Faiz because of the purpose and cause he wrote for, some of the words used in the translation made it feel too formal, and the story was hard to keep up with in certain places.  I felt though, that by him writing for a reason and as a political activist, it made his writing have more passion and emotion then some of the other two traditional writers Mir and Ghalib