Alison wrote:
>>The question of preserving formalities in translation fascinates me as an
impossible problem.<<
It is an impossible problem, but the more I work at translation, and the
more I think about my own decisions, the more I am convinced it is a problem
that cannot be ignored or simply dismissed because of its impossibility. I
wish I had the Agha Shahid Ali book here with me because he gives a
wonderfully succinct explanation of the ghazal form, and I believe is the
Persian version of the form he is talking about. The Urdu version has
slightly different rules. But basically, the form is this in terms of rhyme
scheme, which is about all that can be carried over into English anyway: the
first couplet announces the rhyme; each line in the couplet ends with
exactly the same rhyme. Then, the second line of every succeeding couplet
reproduces that rhyme exactly. This is why you get the repetition in the two
translations I posted, though the repetition is not, as Mark wrote, limited
to the last word. In the Gray translation of Hafez, it is actually the last
three syllables that are repeated--"and she left"--and in Anvar's
translation of Rumi, it is the last four, "begin to dance." (In the ghazal,
one of the challenges is to see how many syllables you can make the rhyme
out of.) This kind of perfect rhyme violates every principle of rhyme I was
ever taught about writing formal poetry in English, where precise repetition
is generally not a good thing. In fact, the only form that I know of in
English that makes use of perfect rhyme, though in a very different way, is
the sestina, and there the order of the words is varied from stanza to
stanza so that the repetition of the words does not grate on the ear--plus
you have the intervening lines between an end word in one stanza and the
same word in the subsequent stanzas. And as I said in one of my earlier
posts, there are connections between the ghazal and the villanelle.
Mark wonders how this repetition Persianizes the English. It certainly does
not do so in terms of syntax or imagery or anything like that, but I would
argue that, to the degree this kind of repetition/perfect rhyme is foreign
to English, working it into a poem is in fact a kind of "foreignization." (I
imagine the same thing was true of the sonnet or any of the other Romance
language verse forms when they were first introduced into English.) At the
very least it increases the formal possibilities of English. I will also say
that when I first read these translations, before I understood the point of
the form, and even when I read Agha Shahid Ali's English ghazals, the
repetition grated on my ears, and it took me a while before I could hear the
music and the poetry in it.
I would also agree that the Campo ghazal is not entirely successful, either
as a poem or a formal exercise, though I also don't find it "ghastly." There
are a couple of reasons for this, I think. First, instead of limiting
himself to rhyming the second line of each couplet with the rhyme announced
in the first couplet, he makes each couplet rhyming, and that is overkill;
it struck me that he was trying to show off. More than that, though, I think
that the repetition of the word "all" does not work because, instead of
writing discrete couplets, as, for example, the Rumi translation is made up
of, he ties all the couplets together into a single narrative, and so the
repetition, rather than building in power and significance--which is the
intent in the translations, whether you think it works or not--become
intrusive and distracting, highlighting the word "all" in ways that do not
necessarily contribute anything. Nonetheless, I think the poem is
interesting for what it tries to do formally, and I think there is something
to learn from the way it fails.
I tried my hand at the ghazal form, and I would like to try it again, once
I've made a more careful study of it. It's fun and it's challenging and it's
often very frustrating. Finding a rhyme that will work within this form in
English is not easy. This is a draft that I have done no additional work on,
so I make no claims for it as anything other than an interesting formal
experiment. I do think it works formally in ways that Campo's does not, but
I think it is also far less ambitious in content. (One more note about the
form. The poet usually uses his own name in the final couplet of the poem.
Also, the way the last line repeats the first line has nothing to do with
the ghazal form; it was just my way of ending this poem.)
Ghazal: A Dream
A woman I desire desires me.
I know it's true. This thought inspires me.
I'm standing naked in the rain. The sun
is waiting. So am I. Waiting tires me.
Last night, I dreamed a poet writing lines
I'd love to claim as mine. He admires me
because I don't, but it's his bat in my hands.
The man who throws the ball retires me,
which means I'm looking for another job,
which means I'm looking for what fires me,
gives me final form before I'm glazed
and put out on the shelf. No one acquires me.
The shelf is not as lonely as I thought.
Sunlight through the window sires me.
In the dream, my son discovered my affair
with song, destroyed my hidden lyres. Me?
I'm here now, a happy and complete Richard:
a woman I desire desires me.
|