Ghazals
Ghazals are a distinct form of poetry that originated in the Arabic literary tradition around the seventh century and later flourished in Persian culture during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Characterized by their exploration of themes such as love, loss, and existential anxiety, ghazals are structured as two-line stanzas, or couplets, with a minimum of five and an informal maximum of fifteen couplets. Each ghazal starts with a rhyme scheme and a refrain, with subsequent couplets echoing these elements. Traditional ghazals are noted for their lyrical beauty and the complex emotions they convey within compact verses. While historically rooted in Arabic and Persian, the form has influenced various languages, including Urdu, Hindi, Turkish, and Hebrew. In the twentieth century, ghazals began to be embraced by English-speaking poets, who faced significant challenges in translating the form’s intricate structure and rich meanings. Key figures such as Agha Shahid Ali have contributed to raising awareness of ghazals in the West, while notable translators, like Elizabeth T. Gray, have sought to adapt classical works into English. Through their unique combination of structure, thematic depth, and lyrical elegance, ghazals continue to captivate audiences worldwide.
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Ghazals
Ghazals are poems that focus on themes of love, loss, and existential anxiety. They are noted for their complex treatments of associated emotions and the profound beauty of their lyrical content. The form originated in the Arabic literary tradition and dates to the seventh century. They later became popular in Persia during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Traditionally composed in Arabic, ghazals entered the literary traditions of multiple other Eastern languages, including Hebrew, Hindi, Pashto, Turkish, and Urdu. English-language poets have only begun to make concerted attempts to compose original ghazals in the modern era, as cross-cultural awareness of the form developed during the twentieth century. Experts note major inherent difficulties in translating traditional Arabic and Persian ghazals into English, given the complexities of preserving their formal and lyrical elements across frequently non-compatible languages.
Background
Some experts describe ghazals as the oldest surviving genre of traditional poetry. They originated in an Arabic literary traditions that was marked by blurred boundaries between lyrical poetry and music. Rooted in regional traditions of erotic poetry, the ghazal began to emerge as a distinct form during the seventh century and underwent a gradual but continuous process of evolution that reached its culmination in the thirteenth century. The etymology of the word ghazal is associated with the Arabic word for “spinning,” which carries a figurative meaning associated with courtship, flirtation, and amorous advances toward women.
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ghazal became a popular poetic form in Persian literary culture, with leading practitioners including such figures as Rumi and Hafiz. The ghazal entered the Urdu poetic tradition in the eighteenth century, arising in languages including Hebrew, Hindi, Pashto, and Turkish. Scholars and literary historians widely recognize Mirza Ghalib, who wrote in both the Urdu and Persian languages, as the preeminent nineteenth-century practitioner of the form.
The ghazal was relatively slow to enter the Western literary tradition and remains significantly under-explored as a poetic genre. European figures who made early efforts to adapt the ghazal into the Western canon include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Federico García Lorca. Since the form’s introduction into English-speaking culture in the twentieth century, multiple poets, linguists, and experts have tried to translate the classical ghazals into English. Such efforts have resulted in several noteworthy successes, despite major inherent technical obstacles. Experts note the extreme difficulty involved in maintaining completeness and nuance of meaning while also observing the form’s rigid structural rules.
Overview
Ghazals are composed in two-line stanzas known in poetic terminology as couplets. They must contain a minimum of five couplets, while an informal upper limit of fifteen couplets traditionally defines a ghazal’s maximum length. Ghazals composed in English do not include any formalized metrical requirements, though every line in a ghazal is expected to match a uniform length. The first couplet in a ghazal establishes both a rhyme scheme (qafia) and a refrain (radif). The final line of each subsequent couplet includes the refrain and rhymes its final word with the rhyming couplet introduced in the first stanza. Traditional ghazals conclude with an acknowledgment of authorship, which the poet can deliver in either the first or third person.
In addition to these structural requirements, which are inflexible, ghazals are further defined by common subject matter and themes. Ghazals traditionally focus on romantic love, its actual or potential loss, and the accompanying deluge of emotions, existential doubts, and metaphysical anxieties. The finest examples of classical ghazals succeed in packing dense, complex treatments of these topics into compact and efficient forms with an accomplished and elegant lyrical beauty.
Despite receiving treatments from recognized figures including Goethe and Lorca, ghazals remained an obscure form in Western literary culture until the 1960s. Indian popular culture figures, including Begum Akhtar and Ravi Shankar, introduced musical forms of the ghazal to the Anglophone world, while the Indian-American poet Agha Shahid Ali is widely credited with raising mainstream awareness of its traditional literary counterpart in the United States. Late in his life, Ali also led efforts to catalog English-language renditions of the ghazal form and elevate the genre’s standing in the pantheon of American poetry. To this end, he compiled a work titled Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000), which featured more than one hundred original contributions from leading contemporary poets.
English-language poets working in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have largely modeled their ghazals on translations of Ghalib’s acclaimed Urdu compositions. Literary figures who have written ghazals in English include John Hollander, Maxine Kumin, Heather McHugh, W.S. Merwin, David Ray, Adrienne Rich, and William Stafford, among others.
Of the numerous scholarly efforts to adapt classical ghazals from their original languages into English, experts frequently cite The Green Sea of Heaven (1995) by the Boston-born poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. as ranking among the most successful. Gray’s work includes anglicized versions of fifty ghazals initially written in the fourteenth century by Hafiz. The translations preserve the full complexities of the meaning contained in the original versions but avoid conformity to the genre’s structural conventions, highlighting the extreme difficulties translators have faced in attempting to preserve the nuances of meter, qafia, and radif in adapting traditional ghazals into English.
In a section from one example known as “Ghazal 10,” Gray translates:
Curls disheveled, sweating, laughing, and drunk,
shirt torn, singing ghazals, flask in hand,
his eyes seeing a quarrel, his lips saying, “Alas!”,
last night at midnight he came can sat by my pillow.
He bent his head to my ear and said, sadly,
“O my ancient lover, are you sleeping?”
Bibliography
De Bruijn, J.T.P. Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Persian Poems. Routledge, 2014.
“Gazal.” Encyclopedia Iranica, 1996, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gazal-1-history. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
“Ghazal.” Academy of American Poetry, poets.org/glossary/ghazal. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
“Ghazal.” Poetry Foundation, 2023, www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ghazal. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
Hakeem Grewal, Sara. “The Ghazal as ‘World Poetry:’ Between Worlding and Vernacularization.” Comparative Literature, vol. 74, no. 1, 2022, pp. 25–51, doi.org/10.1215/00104124-9434498. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
“How to Write a Ghazal.” OER Commons, 23 Mar. 2020, oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/64306/overview. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
Rezaei, Parvin. “A Study of Significant Rhetorical and Innovative Techniques in Attar’s Ghazals (Lyric Poems): Rhetoric Complying with Mystical Concepts.” Literary Arts, vol. 13, no. 1, March 2021, pp. 43–58.
“What’s a Ghazal?” Poetry School, 2014, poetryschool.com/theblog/whats-a-ghazal/. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.