I have to say that I'm with Mark here. Perhaps because of the english
ghazals I've read (or 'anti-ghazals' as Phyllis Webb puts it (my sign
quote is from one of hers). But also as I took to heart the fascinating
introduction by Aijaz Ahmad in Ahmad, Aijaz, ed. 1971. Ghazals of
Ghalib. New York: Columbia UP, in which he invited a number of American
poets to turn his prose translations into contemporary poems that would
carry the passion etc of the originals though not the exact form. I
recommend his Introduction to anyone interested in the problems of
translation...
Doug
On 4-Feb-05, at 7:01 PM, Richard Jeffrey Newman wrote:
> Thanks, Mark, for the Marvell reference. There are some interesting
> points
> you make:
>
>>> In this sense to replicate the form is to mis-translate. How much
>>> moreso
> in the case of the ghazal, one would think.<<
>
> Yes and no, I think--though of course all translations are
> mistranslations.
> The question, or at least one way of putting the question, is whether
> and to
> what degree you want to translate the aural experience of the form,
> which of
> course means that a reader will have, in the target language, the
> cultural
> associations attached to that form in her or his culture, not the
> culture of
> the original. The example you give of the sonnet is a wonderful
> illustration
> of this. In the case of the ghazal, there is something about the
> repetitive
> rhyme scheme--the last line of each couplet reproduces the same rhyme,
> which
> is set up in the first couplet--and the way it stitches together the
> couplets that do not necessarily have any linear connection that I
> think is
> worth carrying over into English translation when it is possible. The
> few
> examples I have seen--one from Rumi, a couple from Hafez--where the
> translator has been able to do that, or at least to come close it,
> have been
> very effective. (The nearest analogy I can think of for the ghazal is
> the
> villanelle, with its repeating lines, though the villanelle's three
> line
> stanzas, of course, are connected much more linearly than the ghazal's
> couplets.)
>
>>> 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.<<
>
> I think that the ghazal came into the West primarily through its Urdu
> version, rather than through Persian. There is apparently the same
> kinds of
> differences within the ghazal tradition--Persian, Urdu and one other
> language, maybe Arabic, that I can't remember--that there are within
> the
> sonnet. Different cultural contexts, different points of reference,
> etc. But
> one of the interesting things about the way the ghazal has come into
> English
> poetry is the total disregard for its formal constraints, as opposed,
> say,
> to the sonnet, for which the formal constraints, or at least an
> analogous
> set of constraints, were carried over from one language to another.
>
>>> 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.<<
>
> For me, as I said above, the issue is the extent to which the aural
> experience is important. With the ghazal, which I am not translating, I
> think it is, if only because the form is so specific in its
> requirements,
> and it is the rhyme the stitches the couplets together, even if that
> experience ends up having slightly different meanings because of the
> different cultural context of the translation. In my translations of
> Saadi,
> however, I have decided that the aural experience of rhyme is not
> central in
> any way, which is why I am working in blank verse, a form that offers a
> different kind of aural experience that for me is analogous or
> parallel to
> my own experience of hearing Persian-speakers recite poetry.
>
> 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
