The ghazal is made up of a minimum of five structurally, conceptually, and emotionally independent couplets, usually no more than fifteen. Though metre is not required in English, each line of the poem must be the same length. The first couplet sets out the pattern, which consists of a rhyme and a refrain. The refrain is repeated in the second line of each subsequent couplet, which also rhymes the second line with both lines of the opening verse. The concluding couplet commonly contains the poet's own name or a meaning derived from it, together with the poet's signature and a first- or third-person reference to the author.
Information on the Ghazal Form
Ghazals are frequently sung by Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani singers. They typically evoke melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical problems. The form has roots in Arabia from the seventh century, and flourished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a result of Persian writers like Rumi and Hafiz. The ghazal was utilised in the eighteenth century by poets who wrote in Urdu, a synthesis of the old Northern Indian languages, notably Persian. Ghalib is regarded as the foremost poet among them.
The ghazal has also been incorporated into Hindi, Pashto, Turkish, and Hebrew. Both the Spanish poet Federico Garca Lorca and the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe experimented with the genre.
In the 1960s, Indian performers like Begum Akhtar and Ravi Shankar made ghazals popular throughout the English-speaking world. But the poet Agha Shahid Ali is credited with introducing it to Americans in its classical form. Each ghazal couplet, according to Ali, should “shine in that brilliant isolation” like “a stone from a necklace.
Ghazals have been translated from their original language to English by a large number of academics and poets. The endeavour is challenging because it is challenging, if not impossible, to maintain the precise meaning of each poem while still following the rhyme, refrain, and line length. It's intriguing to see how different poets, including Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, William Hunt, David Ray, and W. S. Merwin, used an exact translation of Ghalib's Urdu ghazals to create their own versions of the poems in English. The Green Sea of Heaven by Elizabeth T. Gray, which contains fifty ghazals by Hafiz, delivers an accurate literal translation of the Persian master without regard for style.
