Doug,
I wish I had my copy of Call Me Ishmael Tonight here with me--someone has
borrowed it and I haven't gotten it back yet--because he makes a point, I
think, that is interesting to think about; and if I am merely remembering
that he makes this point to give it some sort of authority outside my own
thinking, well, I still think it's interesting to think about. Basically,
the point is this: the emphasis in the West on the mystical, associative,
"drunken and amatory," disunifying, etc. aspects of the ghazal, to the
almost complete exclusion--at least until recently--of the very precise
formal requirements and formal skill necessary to write a successful ghazal
in any of the languages to which the form is native fit very neatly into the
mystical and mystifying stereotypes of the east that are held in the west.
(The kinds of connections between the couplets which Thompson, as you quote
him, says are not there--and, as I read your quote, I think he means even in
the original--are in fact provided by the rhyme and refrain that the ghazal
form contains, and sometimes those connections are even narrative ones.)
Now, this is not to say that the English-language/American ghazal as
characterized by Thompson is any less valid a poetic form; nor is it to
suggest that people who write such ghazals are somehow
racist/imperialist/whatever because they do not write within the ghazal's
formal requirements. But it's interesting to think about in terms of how
poetry "moves" from one language to another, how translation contributes to
that movement, the cultural and political shadings of that movement, and so
on. Most translations of ghazals in English, for example, even by scholars
of Persian poetry, do not follow the formal requirements, and so who can
really blame poets in the West, who I am assuming learned about the form
from such translations, for proceeding as if the formal requirements didn't
exist or were a part of the form that could be "left behind," so to speak.
The end result, of course, is that the English-language ghazal has at least
two variations--one that has the rhyme and refrain and one that doesn't, and
that opening up of the form ultimately results in more possibilities for
poets, which is a good thing. It is also interesting to think about what
would happen to the form in, say, Persian or Urdu, if the freer English
ghazals were translated back into those languages. And who knows, maybe
there are poets in those languages who are playing with the form in such
ways as well.
Richard
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