The elegy and its many faces

Part 6

In my last two columns I discussed some of the ways in which the poetic genre referred to as the elegy came to be articulated in the classical Indian tradition. Today I wish to focus on a different cultural context and how the elegy took on a different shape in the light of a different set of cultural prescriptions informing this poetic genre.

My object of interest today is the ghazal. Poetic forms do not arrive out of the blue; they are not context-less. The ghazal is no exception. It is a genre closely associated with Arab and Persian cultures and flourished in Islamic cultural contexts.

When we talk of ghazals in Sri Lanka we are immediately reminded of Indian popular films in which they at times figure prominently and also radio music. It is indeed true that there is a close and mutually nurturing relationship between music and ghazals.

However, it is important to remind ourselves that ghazals are basically poetic texts and they need to be located within poetic traditions. A ghazal is poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain. the idea of pain and loss are central to their emotional content; that is why I have chosen to discuss ghazals in a general survey of elegies.

The ghazal is a poetic form that originated somewhere in the 6th century in Arabic cultures and later found poignant expression in Persian culture. It is like the Elizabethan sonnet, a highly regularized poetic form; however, as with Elizabethan sonnets, variation is both possible and desirable within this stylized mode of literary expression.

This genre migrated to India around the 12th century and influenced the various indigenous poetic traditions there. Some outstanding work in this form has been produced in India and Pakistan. It is interesting to note that some distinguished Western poets have been deeply impressed by the ghazal.

The German poet Goethe was one such writer. In more modern times, poets such as W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, William Stafford are displayed a strong interest in this poetic form.

To my mind, four of the significant features that define the ghazal form are the following. First, it is a highly musical form. The manipulation of meter, rhythm and rhyme a well as the choice of words is unquestionably guided by this imperative .Second, the ideas of pain and loss are central to the poetic experiences communicated through ghazals.

Third, this leads to a kind of melancholy, and we have discussed the close relationship between the elegy and melancholy in earlier columns. Fourth, the idea of musicality plays a crucial role in ghazals.

All poetic registers are geared to this end. Fifth, an air of mysticism pervades ghazals, and it is hardly surprising that many of the most distinguished writers of ghazals were sufis. Sixth, because of this mystical cast of mind, writers of ghazals, by and large, have displayed a deep interest in metaphysical questions such as being and existence and time.

As in various English literary forms, the notion of unrequited love is inscribed in ghazals. Here I use the term love in its widest sense including forms of divine love as well. Some of the finest ghazals have dealt with the painful experience of separation from God and the inability to reach him..

The manifold nature of love has been a central theme in many ghazals and the following two passages from Rumi who is one of the most celebrated Persian poets illustrate this point. The first is taken from a poem titled, ‘Any Sprig of an Herb’ (the translations are by the American poet Coleman Barks). Learned theologians do not teach love.

Love is nothing but gladness ad kindness.
Ideas of right and wrong
Operate in us until we die.
Love does not have those limits.
When you see a scowling face
It is not a lover’s.
The next passage id from a poem titled, ‘Secret Places.’
Lovers find secret places
Inside this violent world
Where they make transactions
With beauty.
Reason says, nonsense
I have walked and measured the will her.
There are no places like that.
Love says, there are.
Reason sets up a market
And begins doing business
Love has more hidden work
The poet then goes on to say
Lovers feel a truth inside themselves
That rational people keep denying.
And the ghazal concludes with a wonderful trope.
Every day the sun rises
Out of low word-clouds
Into burning silence.

What is interesting about Many of Rumi’s ghazals is the way in which he elegizes love, the presence in absence and absence in presence is a duality he has put into play.

What I plan to do in today’s column is to focus on two poets, who in my judgment, excelled in the art of ghazal-writing and conclude with some brief remarks on possibly the most revered Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. The two poets that I wish to discus are the Persian poet Rumi and the Indian poet Ghalib.

Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) was one of the greatest of classical Persian poets. He wrote over 65,000 verses. One of his central themes was the question of ineffability, indescribability, absence; these indeed are themes that, as we saw earlier, relate very closely to the poetic designs of the elegy. Rumi had a way of introducing moral and metaphysical issues into his musically-charged ghazals.

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing
There is a field I’ll meet you there,

If the whole world
Is covered with the blossoms
You have labored to plant
What do you think will happen

To travel in the world without a foot
And to regard the world as something hidden
And not to see with one’s own seeing eyes.

Rumi was a poet who delighted in symbolism; he made his privileged symbols carry an undue weight of cultural meaning. The sun, the moon, the sea, the rose, the nightingale and wine are some symbols that recur frequently in his poetry.

The sun is often portrayed as a guide and teacher; the moon for beauty and tranquility; the sea for life, the rose for God; the nightingale for the soul.Toe sure, all these symbols are imbued with profound religious connotations.

If one is interested in a deconstructive approach to poetry one would find very intriguing a specific binary in Rumi’s poetry – that between speech and silence. A poet’s primary task is to create an artifact out of language; he or she must be able to control, to modulate language to secure that end.

This is, of course, not an easy task as language has a way of defying and exceeding the preferred reach of the poet. At the same time, he or she has no alternative but to use language. Rumi realizes that there is a kingdom of truth that lies beyond his capabilities with language; hence his valorization of silence.

In many of the ghazals of Rumi we see this preoccupation with silence; He approaches this topic from different vantage points and conceptual heights. These are some of them. The Persian word for silence, ‘khamush’, that he frequently uses is often deployed by Hindustani poets and lyricists - a fact that anyone familiar with Bollywood films would be quick to recognize.

Absence in presence
Music begin
Your silence
Deepens that

Be silent now
Say fewer and fewer praise poems.
Let yourself become living poetry.

Your love has brought us to this silence,
Be secluded in your secret heart-house
That bowl of silence.

Now a silence unweaves
That shroud of words
We have woven.

Let silence be the art
You practice.
Central preoccupations

Declarations such as these that are commonly found in Rumi’s poetry underlines that fact that one of his central preoccupations was the limitations of language and the desire of silence – it id, of course, ironical that e wrote over 65,000 verses to establish the supremacy of silence.

Therefore, when we examine the ghazals of the classical Persian poet Rumi we realize that many of them can be usefully brought under the general rubric of the elegy. What is distinctive about his elegies is the way he represents absence as a metaphysical concept that guides his verbal weaves and invests them with deeper layers of significance.

The elegies of Rumi are of course very different from those of classical Indian poets like Kalidasa that I discussed earlier.

The second writer of gazhals that I wish to discuss briefly is Ghalib (1797- 1869 ). He is a poet who is held in the highest esteem by Indians as well as Pakistanis. Ghalib is his nom de plume; his real name is Mirza Asadullah Beg khan.

He lived and worked in Delhi. Over the years, his poetic style evolved from one of detached, impersonal and pedantic demeanor to one of personal, morally inflected and lucidly elegant posture.

Ghalib lived during a period that was not conspicuously propitious for poetry; Britain had established its dominion over India, and the traditional Indian cultures were coming apart. Clearly, politics was in the air, but Ghalib did not write political poetry as we coventianally parse the term.

However, he dealt with issues of loss and pain that were not totally unrelated to the sufferings of the time; they fed into his ghazals in complex ways. It is for this reason that I have chosen to discuss Ghalib’s ghazals under the general heading of elegies.

As one commentator insightfully remarked, ‘in sensibility, it is a poetry somewhat like Wallace Stevens; meditative, full of reverberations, couched in a language at once sparkling and fastidious, and testifying to a sensibility whose primary virtue was endurance in a world that was growing for him, as for many others of his time and civilization, increasingly unbearable.

The journey from nothingness to a totally human affirmation which is the essential growth of a poet of that tradition – beyond time, beyond the merely spatial relations – was achieved in his case with a necessary and austere urgency related, finally, o the experience of having been possessed. He is a tragic poet.’

Indeed, it is this sense of tragedy that imparts an elegiac temper to Ghalib’s ghazals. Ghalib wrote in Urdu, and it is important have some notion of the distinctiveness of Urdu as a language.

It constituted a blending of a number of medieval languages of north India such as bhasha, kari, boli and languages of the middle east, most notably Persian which was brought to India by the Muslims. It represents an amalgamation of Persian and Prakrit grammatical structures.

It is, of course, evident that the Persian element has had the upper hand, and the entire corpus of Urdu poetics- poetic diction, forms, tropes, prosody – has been shaped by Persian influences. Towards the end of the n nineteenth century, Urdu began to be influenced by English as English became increasingly influential in South Asia,

Wonderful collection

Some years ago, Aijaz Ahmad edited a wonderful collection of Ghalub’s ghazals. They were translated into by such eminent American poets as W.S.Merwin, mark strand, William Stafford, Adrienne Rich on the basis of prose translations that were provided to them. They are all admirers of the ghazal as a poetic form.

What they did was to create refreshingly free and original works based on literal English translations supplied to them, in the case of Meriwin often labouring to condense them. This ghazal is a translation by the current American poet laureate W.S. Merwin about whom I wrote in this column some months ago.

Flame ids not so wonderful nor has the lightning
Such being

Short-tempered and willful
What sort of thing would you call it

When the body was burnt the heart was too
What are you looking for in the ashes?

When I compared this translation with the original literal translation of Ghalib’s ghazal it became evident to me that Merwin has sought to tighten the structure and make it taut.

Translation from an Asian language to a western one is no easy task, and Urdu presents its own share of specific problems. As Aijaz Ahmad has aptly remarked, ‘like Persian, Urdu is also very much a language of abstractions. In this sense, it is very difficult to translate from Urdu into English. The movement in Urdu poetry is always away from concreteness.

Meaning is not expressed or stated; it is signified. Urdu has only the shoddiest tradition of dramatic or descriptive poetry. The main tradition is one of highly condensed, reflective verse, with abundance and variety of lyrical effects, verbal complexity, and metaphorical abstraction.

He then goes on to point out that this penchant for metaphorical abstraction is not merely a characteristic of language; it is also a means of thinking, of reflection upon man’s place in the cosmos, his relationship with others, with the world, with God. Urdu poetry has as its main theme that of love; however, it is for the most part not depicted in terms of specific relations.

Ghalib’s poetry is informed by a deep metaphysical inclination. He raises three intersecting questions. What is the nature and significance of the universe and what place do human beings occupy in it? Second, who is God and how does he impact the human world? Third, how do we understand love? For Ghalib, as evidenced in his ghazals, these three questions feed into each other. As he says in one of hid ghazals

Come out here where the roses have opened
Let soul and world meet.
In Ghalib’s poetry, the rose is often used as a signifier of God.

I propose to characterize many of Ghalib’s ghazals as elegies because there is a pervasive elegiac temper animating his poems. It seems to me that it is this elegiac spirit that serves to unite the couplets which otherwise would have maintained their defiant autonomy. A ghazal is made up of couplets and each couplet maintains its independence by displaying a unity of thought.

However Ghalib is able to combine them and set in motion a flow of imagination through them by the evocation of the elegiac temper I alluded to earlier. This elegiac temper grows out of a certain despondency and sadness. Let me cite three couplets taken from three different ghazals of Ghalib all translated by Adrienne rich.

Our time of awareness is a lightning flash
A blinding interval in which to know and suffer

The dew has polished the sheen of flowering branches
The nights of spring are finished, nightingale
I am neither the loosening of song nor the close drawn tent of music
I’m the sound simply of my own breaking

In these couplets one catches the sense of moral isolationism, the yarning for community and the feeling of barrenness that pervade his poetry.

Complex unity

Another important aspect of Ghalib’s poetry is that the different pieces in the entire corpus relate to each other harmoniously presenting a complex unity. This is because the sense of loneliness configured in one poem is part of a vaster general loneliness captured by the entire body of poems.

This is another reason why his poems expand our notion of the elegy in important ways. For those critics with deconstructive predilections, there is in Ghlaib’s ghazals an ambiguous relationship between the specific and the general, the immediate and the timeless.

For him singularity is a reflection of commonality. Teasing this out can prove extremely challenging to the kind of literary critic who favors a deconstructive approach.

This arises from Ghalib’s understanding of poetry; his is poetry of resonances. It is not the immediate even but its repercussion, its reverberation that is important to him. It is through this move that he is able to put into play an ambiguous relationship between the singular and the universal. The following two couplet translated into English by W,S. Merwin capture most of what I have been saying in this essay.

The drop dies in the river
Of its joy
Pain goes so far it cures itself.

In the spring after the heavy rain the cloud
Disappears
That was nothing but tears.

The ghazals of Rumi and Ghalib, then, open a most interesting window on to the concept of the elegy. They stage the complex ways in which the form, representational registers and vision of the elegy can assume diverse shapes in diverse cultural-worlds.

(To be continued)