Bradford Johnson, Auto Arborescent (Blue). From the portfolio Photographs of Past Paintings, which appeared in issue no. 168 of The Paris Review (Winter 2003).

Everybody likes ghazals. Or they do when they learn what they are: A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere. It is a medieval thing—or what Westerners would call medieval. Many famous Persian poets are famous for their ghazals. Likewise, Arabic poets, Turkish, Urdu … The ready-to-hand comparison is with the Italian sonnet. Ghazals are a lot like that: song length, rhyme heavy, lots of lovey-doveyness, lots of over-the-top cosmic reasoning.

It took forever for modern English-language poets to pick up on the existence of the ghazal, but once the word got out, plenty of smart people started trying to write original ghazals in English, with differing commitments to the formal rules. I’m one of these poets.

This piece is about translation, but it’s also about writing original poetry in one’s own language while following the rules developed for a different language. I want to talk about English ghazals, but (for lots of good reasons) I’m going to start in left field … with haiku.

You know all about it. Three lines, seventeen syllables: five and seven and five. Lots of people, that’s the one thing they know.

But ask the editors of Modern Haiku what they think of that. They will say: naive. And sure enough, open any issue of Modern Haiku or any other high-profile English-language haiku magazine. You won’t find any five-seven-five.

See, people who are serious about the art of haiku all know a Japanese syllable is not equivalent to an English syllable. This is because English absolutely teems with one- and two-syllable words—and words of five or more syllables tend to come off as supercalifragilistic. Meanwhile, five-syllable words in Japanese are perfectly commonplace.

English       Japanese

cuckoo         hototogisu

cricket          kirigirisu

And so on. Or put it this way: An English syllable tends to have more information in it than a Japanese syllable does. This is why, when you translate Japanese haiku word for word into English, you get way fewer syllables, like

you fire burn
good thing will show
snowball

This is why I was taught that, instead of going by the numbers, you should follow the Japanese principle that’s at stake, which is extreme minimalism. If English had been the first language of the people who invented haiku, the rule would have been three-five-three or maybe four-six-four. They would have considered five-seven-five too roomy. The concept behind five-seven-five in Japanese is that it leaves zero space for filler. It forces parataxis.

There are other things that could be said here. The different status of stressed syllables in English compared to Japanese, the smaller palette of vowel sounds in Japanese—and so on. But all to say: These differences matter. The person who translates Bashō into an English five-seven-five is mistranslating. What happens—what has to happen in order to achieve syllabic parity—is they translate the meaning and then add syllables to fill out their five-seven-five. So you get a floobery haiku, which should be a contradiction in terms.

Ghazals—it’s a similar problem.

The rule says: Couplet after couplet should end with the same word or phrase and with a rhyme sound right before the repeated bit. Can this be done in English? Yes. But has no one noticed that it’s an awkward mess when you do it in English? Could it be that the grammar of English differs from the grammar of Urdu and Farsi and Arabic in important ways, making it a bad idea to imitate the formal specifications at the expense of the principle that animates them?

I’ll give an example in a minute, but first I’m going to say something deep and deeply upsetting: Contrary to what you were told by teachers all your life, the formal parameters of poetry are not arbitrary, are not rules for the sake of rules, are not there as barbells for the poet to lift to show how strong she is. No, they are all designed to play to their languages’ strengths. They secure desirable effects—that is their warrant and their glory.

Because of the syntax of English, it is easy/graceful/elegant to start sentence after sentence with the same word, but it is not easy/graceful/elegant to end sentence after sentence on the same word. You wind up ending on some weak prepositional phrase that you would never be tempted to deploy in that way, except for the rule. You get no pleasure writing it; the reader has no pleasure reading it.

It should worry people very much that if you translate Urdu ghazals into, say, English, simply repeating back in English what the Urdu verses say, it is virtually never the case that the words at the end of the Urdu strophes stay at the end in English. What does that tell you?

Look, you don’t have to learn Urdu to see my point. All you need is to look at an Urdu ghazal transliterated into Roman letters. You will see the repeated phrase; you will see the rhymes. Let’s do this.

Here is an authentic ghazal by my favorite twentieth-century Urdu poet, Firaq Gorakhpuri (1896–1982). Unless you speak Urdu, you’re not very likely to have heard of this guy. That’s why I picked him. I’m hoping somebody will do a new translation of his poems. Here is my source text:

Photograph courtesy of Anthony Madrid.

I love that photo. And now here is the ghazal, with the repeated phrase in italics and the rhymes in bold:

Humnawa koi nahin hai woh chaman mujh ko diya,
Hum watan baat na samjhen woh watan mujh ko diya.

Muzhda-e-Kausar-o-Tasneem diya auron ko,
Shukar, sad shukar, ghum-e-Gang-o-Jamun mujh ko diya.

Par farishton ko dieye tu ne, tau kya ghum iska,
Yahi kya kum hai, ke insaan ka chalan mujh ko diya.

Wahdat-e-aashiq-o-maashooq ki tasweer hoon main,
Nal ka eesaar, tau ikhlaas-e-Daman mujh ko diya.

Mil gaya tujhko jamaal-e-rukh-e-rangeen ka chaman,
Dil-e-sozaan ka yeh tapta hua bun mujh ko diya.

Khatam hai mujh pe ghazal-goi-e-daur-e-haazir,
Dene wale ne woh andaaz-e-sakhun mujh ko diya.

Shair-e-asar ki taqdeer na kuchh poochh Firaq,
Jo kahin ka bhi na rakhe woh fun mujh ko diya.

And, now, here is K. C. Kanda’s translation (2000), in every detail identical to the text below; I have altered nothing:

I am given such a grove where fellow-warbler I’ve none,
Such a country is my home when none understands my tongue.

To others you have held the promise of the wine of paradise,
Thank God, to me is given the grief of Ganga and Jamun.

If angels are endowed with wings, I’m unconcerned.
That you have made me man, is my recompense.

The unity of love and beauty lies in me condensed.
I contain the love of Nal as well as the troth of Daman.

To you is given a radiant face, garden-like abloom,
To me is given a barren heart that desert-like doth burn.

I represent the ultimate in the field of modern verse,
The style given to me by God is the envy of everyone.

Ask me not the poet’s fate in the modern age,
Thanks to my poetic gifts,—I have been undone!

I’m not saying that’s a great translation. But anyway, can you identify, in the English version, the phrase that is repeated verbatim at the end of every Urdu couplet (“mujh ko diya”)?

It’s not easy to spot! Let’s see what happens if we feed those three words through Google Translate:

مجھ
mujh = me

کو
ko = to

دیا
diya = given

It translates, roughly, to “to me is given.”

Look at the poem again. Now you can see: it’s part of a verb construction, bound up in a bunch of idioms. No surprise to find it at the end of the line in the original because Urdu is an S-O-V (subject-object-verb) language. English, unfortunately, is S-V-O. Which means: When it goes into English, that V has got to move.

Are you starting to see? If English syntax allowed you to elegantly end sentences with the main verb, you could end your ghazal couplets with a more satisfactory word or phrase. But, in English, satisfactory endings tend to be nouns. And if you end every couplet with the same noun, how are you going to get that ghazal dynamism, where each couplet becomes its own thing, every charm on the charm bracelet different?

I know, I know. I’m overstating. I’m acting like all this is “always” when I should be saying “most of the time.” Also, I’m needing you to trust me that the Firaq poem instantiates a typical phenomenon in Urdu ghazals.

I’ve been gazing at this stuff for twenty years, this whole time trying to figure out how one could follow the spirit of the ghazal form without getting shipwrecked by the IKEA instructions, so to speak. I’ll share a couple ideas. In order to do the rhyme so that it’s subordinated (i.e., not allowed to act like any kind of rhythmic end stop), you could do something I call “hand-off rhyme.” The last word of line 1 (in a couplet) could rhyme with the first word in line 2. Or, if not the first word, almost the first word. The rhyme will still be audible, but it will run by you the way it does in Urdu.

And since the repeat word is so hard to install at the end without messing everything up, what about untying it from the end but making it a very sticky-outty verb or adjective or adverb, such that the reader will be able to experience it as a repetition clear as anything?

Let me see what happens if I retranslate the Firaq, above.

My portion is a stand of trees, and I am the only songbird in it.
The minute I sing, my portion on earth is an uncomprehending stare.

It is for others to drink and to cherish the wine of Paradise.
The paradox is my portion is to drink from these Hindu rivers.

If the angel’s portion is a pair of wings, what is that to me?
You see I’m content that my portion be the shape of a humble man.

… That’s not that bad. I’m stuck with repeating a noun, but the rhymes aren’t forced, and the verbal repetition is not only respected, but made to deliver.

Anyhow, you can cut me some slack; these are improvisations. And if you’re thinking portion sticks out too much, then you really are understanding my point. Firaq did not put a noun in that slot, and maybe by this point you’re starting to see why.

At any rate, these are the questions the writer of an English ghazal should contemplate.

There’ a part of me that longs to quote some choice specimens of original English-language “ghazals” from respected national magazines over these past ten years or so, but that would be like when I show my students examples of rhyming couplets written by beginners. Every other line: godawful awkwardness. Every other line: words and phrases the poet would never have used in a million years, except they had to hustle that rhyme word to the end of the line.

All this is bigger than ghazals, of course. Bigger than haiku. I’m saying we have to graduate from pastiche and mimicry to something higher. We have to stop looking at somebody like Firaq and saying, I must do what he did. We should be saying to ourselves, I must do what he meant.

Firaq! you are bones, you are no more to be found. Yet, listen to my words.
The birds in the trees are asking that all this be forgiven me.

 

Anthony Madrid’s writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Lana Turner Journal, and Poetry. He is the author of three books, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, Try Never, and Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise.