Very interesting points, Richard, & I'm not sure if Olson says anything
about that or not, but I take your points. I would argue that in some
way the whole form has been 'translated' by those writers in English,
Mark mentioned one, there was Rich, others, certainly including
Thompson, & then Webb who called many of hers anti-ghazals. And I heard
a poet read some last night, more in the 'tradition' of the Canadian
etc versions. So, yeah, perhaps it's become a specific form (or formal
constraint of sorts) min english that in many ways has little to do
with the form in Persian or Urdu. As I say, in a sense these poets were
given their go-ahead by Aijaz Ahmad when he asked them to write
versions of Ghalib & explained what he thought was central to Ghalib's
ghazals, at any rate, & asked them to try for something along those
lines.
Doug
On 9-Feb-05, at 4:09 AM, Richard Jeffrey Newman wrote:
> 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
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Reserved books. Reserved land. Reserved flight.
And still property is theft.
Phyllis Webb
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