by SHADAB ZEEST HASHMI
The ghazal is distinguished as the most elevated of poetic forms, and considered to be the litmus test of a true poet. I learned about the Urdu ghazal’s formal constraints, and how, in the hands of the masters the form has been known to embody in the elegant brevity of a couplet, a vast range of subjects with depth and precision. All this talk was useful in understanding the craft and reach of the ghazal but it created a chasm of sorts and cut me off from my earliest response to the ghazal—hearing in the ghazal a color or temperature of emotion, and falling under its spell. This loss of connection with the spirit of the form became apparent to me after writing and teaching the ghazal in English and reading the Spanish poet Lorca’s lectures on the Duende.
Before I discuss the ghazal and the duende, here is a brief history of the ghazal and how we have come to know and utilize it in English: The ghazal form originated in pre-Islamic, pre-literate Arabia, spreading across parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe, soon after the Muslim conquests of these regions. The Persians cultivated and refined this form to the extent that it became a defining feature of Persian poetics and was further transmitted to many other literary traditions, including that of Urdu. The Urdu ghazal took root in the court of the Sultanate of Dehli in the thirteenth century. The foremost ghazal poet Amir Khusrau was a famed scholar, Sufi mystic and musician, and was a poet in the court through the rule of seven emperors of Muslim India. His Persian and Hindavi (early dialect of Urdu) ghazals would later have a significant influence on the Urdu ghazal.
While it was the Persian ghazal that inspired Goethe’s German ghazalen, the Arabic ghazal of Al Andalus (Muslim Spain) that inspired Lorca’s twentieth century Spanish gacelas, the ghazal in the USA was inspired by the Urdu ghazals of Ghalib. A literary critic by the name of Aijaz Ahmed involved a few American poets in doing literary translations of the ghazal master Ghalib. After participating in this project, Adrienne Rich wrote the first sequence of original American adaptations of the form and published them in her book Leaflets (1969). In the nineties, the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali rejected these and the rest of the earliest American ghazals as inauthentic. These adaptations, he claimed, were too loose and did not capture the unique effects of the ghazal form. He re-introduced and promoted the form with all its stringent rules. The ghazal, complete with qafia(rhyme), radif (refrain), and the “signature” or poet’s self-address in the maqta (closing couplet) has now become an established, some might even say popular, American form.
Writing and teaching the ghazal in English, I have tried to pinpoint the reasons why the American ghazal often misses the mark despite being true to the template. I found a possible explanation in Lorca’s theory of the duende. There are many parallels between how the ghazal operates and Lorca’s notion of the centrality of the duende in different art forms.
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True to the form, in letter and spirit, are some of my favorite ghazals by Eleanor Wilner, Agha Shahid Ali and Grace Schulman, among others. A few couplets from Wilner’s ghazal:
Risk it? What after all, have you got to lose?
With a time-honored form, you ought to lose.
The gambling fever rises: the wheel, a dervish spins.
Temp fate. You feel too hot to lose.
Is it the Beloved’s dear form, glimpsed in the crowd?
What the heart most desires, you’re taught, to lose.
In all transparent modesty, you drop your name.
For Eleanor is not a lot to lose.
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