Marvell: Upon Appleton House.
On replicating forms in translation: the forms are expressions of the
culture that produces them, and acquire a history unique to that culture.
Even within the closely-bound cultures of Europe a sonnet, say, has a
different cultural baggage in Spain, where it refers to their golden age
poets, than it does in England, where it refers to Shakespeare, Milton and
Wordsworth, or in France, where it refers to the Pleiade. In this sense to
replicate the form is to mis-translate. How much moreso in the case of the
ghazal, one would think.
At this point the ghazal as practiced variously in the West, usually as a
set of often unrhymed couplets with no linear connection between them, has
become a form in its own right, no longer particularly referential to the
Persian source. As with sonnets in languages other than Italian, in which
Petrarch is at best a distant rumor.
The same, obviously, could be said of rhyme. In translating a poem from a
language in which simple rhyme is both easy and ubiquitous is one rendering
or distorting the sense of the original by struggling to maintain end-rhyme
in the very different environment of modern English? The question wuld
remain even if by miracle one managed to replicate the rhyme pattern
without sacrificing anything else.
Mark
At 03:21 PM 2/4/2005, you wrote:
>Edmund--
>
> >>part of the skill of the Persian epic poet is in often delighting the
>audience with a huge run of rhymes which double into puns on root-sounds,
>and in using a variation on the metaphors already used.<<
>
>This is the essence of the ghazal. It is a real challenge to write one in
>English. Do you know Agha Shahid Ali's book, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (I
>think that's the title)? It's a book of ghazals in English that adhere, at
>least in terms of rhyme scheme, to the ghazal form. There's also a book that
>I have not yet read through called The Green Sea of Heaven which contains a
>wonderful essay on Persian prosody, rhyme and meter, as it pertains to
>Hafez' ghazals.
>
>It's also really interesting to be at a ghazal reading and hear people--at
>least this is true among Pakistani's--actually respond to the rhymes (they
>call out "bah! bah!," which in Persian signifies delicious) and then call
>out the rhymes when the poet comes to them. Quite different from the very
>staid poetry readings here in the States, where people often don't laugh at
>lines that are very obviously supposed to evoke laughter.
>
> >>I think where Marvell is an interesting point of contact is in his...
>longer reflections on the art of government and on the civil war - in verse
>and prose.<<
>
>Could you point me to some of these, the poetry in particular? Thanks.
>
>
>Richard
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