Reading Ghazals is more difficult than I imagined, as the form is so different than what I am used to when reading poetry. Even though I know the Ghazal is made up of couplets I am still looking for meaning in the whole piece, not just the couplets. I am slowly training myself to look at each couplet alone, find the meaning and then put it all together to see the result; compared to a more standard type of poem where the lines are meant to be read with another and can not stand alone.
The themes are also harder to understand, again because they are expressed in these short couplets. Most of the Ghazals are about love but even in that field there are countless variations explored by the authors. Mir Taqi Mir writes more of unfulfilled love, mirroring his life of loss and his Ghazals have a slightly darker side to them. Ghalib’s Ghazals are more about real love and passion, which makes them easier to understand as they fit the more standard idea of love in other forms of poetry and verse.
The easiest for me to understand and relate to have been Adrienne Rich’s, as they are the most modern and use examples and ideas I am more familiar with. These Ghazals feel more specific than the older ones which seemed to look at the general ideas of love instead of focusing on specific incidents. This may just be because I do not have the frame of reference from that time period but either way Rich’s work is much easier to understand. She does not follow the exact format of the Ghazal yet I still feel they are true Ghazals as I read them couplet by couplet like I would an older Ghazal and they had that same loose meaning that was tied together by thinking of the couplets as different pages in the same story. I am still struggling to understand the older Ghazals but now that I know how to read them they no longer seem so alien to me.
The ghazal can indeed seem inaccessible in the beginning but persistence eventually pays off! Read Aijaz Ahmand's introduction for help with how the relationship between the part and whole works out in the reading of the ghazal. Ahmad also talks about how when translated literally Urdu verse can end up sounding either archaic or "corny" (as perhaps is evident from K.C Kanda's translations)because of the very different registers on which Urdu and English function. The interpretative, non-literal translations (that Ahmad edits and puts together) should help with conveying the poetic experience of the ghazal. I would suggest set those up along with the ones that from Rich's collection in the "Leaflets". Perhaps you can think of a paper on the modern English ghazal (Adrienne Rich, Mimi Khalvati, Agha Shahid Ali etc.) and think about how the modern poets distill from, build and develop the Urdu Ghazal in English.
ReplyDelete