In these new English versions of four ghazals, the American poet Andrew McCord gives us a Ghalib by turns expansive and melancholy, teasing and ruminative, passionate and paradoxical. The out-and-in structure of the shers of Ghalib’s preferred ghazal form seems to pierce the mysteries of existence, each new excursion of thought returning by a new path to the root rhyme established in the opening verse by the qafiya (a continuously rhyming syllable) and the radif (a word or phrase repeated at the end of each couplet without any change whatsoever).īut how can such a sophisticated linguistic, prosodic and rhythmical structure be brought over into a language as distant from Urdu as English? The easy (and established) answer has always been to say that it can’t a more pragmatic one might hold that any English translator of Ghalib should be a poet in his or her own right, and pass Ghalib through self and self through Ghalib with a sense of both fidelity and freedom. ABOUT THE POEMS For Urdu and Persian speakers, the language of Ghalib’s verse is a miracle of music and meaning.
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