Rebecca--

You questioned why I said the rhyme scheme is about the only aspect of the
ghazal that can be carried over into English, offering this elaboration of
my definition of the form: "I thought the formal conventions of the ghazal
were that it be of 5-12, extended in some definitions to 5-15 couplets, and
that each couplet was meant to be a kind of poem in itself and that the
lines were to have the same rhythm?" I was thinking specifically of trying
to carry the Persian meters over into English, which would be very, very
tough since Persian uses quantitative meters--and quite complicated ones at
that, from what I can tell--carried over from Arabic, despite the fact that
Persian is itself an accentual and Indo-European language. One can, of
course, fulfill the rhythmic aspects of the form using English language
meters, which is what Agha Shahid Ali does and what Campo tried to do in his
attempt.

As to your question about my use of the term "perfect rhyme," I don't
remember where I heard that phrase used to mean the kind of repetition you
find in the ghazal, but it may be that I am misremembering or misusing the
term entirely. But if you go back and look, say, at the Hafez ghazal
translated by Gray that I put in one of my previous posts, depending on how
many syllables back from the end of a line one wants to count, you have the
same kind of phenomenon you describe in your other post, where you quote the
Rumi and point out that the repeated final syllable(s) are part of a longer
rhyme that includes several previous syllables. In the Gray translation as
well, if you count back one or two syllables from the repeated phrase, "and
she left," you end up with a similar kind of rhyme. These are just the
endings of the second line of each couplet. (In Persian, by the way, they
are not couplets, but single lines divided into two hemistitches):

...beauty and she left

...take her and she left

...and she left

...that glance and she left

...union and she left

...goodbye and she left

In English, however, we don't hear these as multi-word or multi-syllabic
rhyme--what we tend to hear is the straight repetition; though when I read
the poem out loud the rhyme becomes a little more apparent to me. Still, I
think the way you introduce the notion of repetition into the conversation,
precisely because, in English, we hear this as repetition and not rhyme, is
interesting and useful, especially in terms of the repeated refrain of the
ballad.

Two other things: While the classical ghazal in Persian generally has
between 5 and 12 lines--in English it would be 5 and 12 couplets--Rumi
breaks that limit on more than one occasion--one ghazal in Iraj Anvar's
translation goes to 19 couplets and another has 17--and I think Hafez does
as well, though I am not sure. It is also true that each couplet is
generally supposed to be self-contained, but Rumi and Hafez--this I have
from Anvar--often run a single idea/narrative moment over several couplets.

I am enjoying this conversation immensely, and it is quite helpful to me in
clarifying my own thinking and in pointing out areas where I need to learn
more--which unfortunately will have to wait until the semester is over, but
that's often the way it is.

Thanks, all.

Richard