Exile

My days were beckoning waves in the setting sun shining gold as the sea;

this bitter ache for homeland is a tale as immeasurably old as the sea.

The tongue of my fathers was forbidden honey to a child’s salt-cracked lips,

but young then, I would rove with a careless heart, wild and bold as the sea.

I carried their lives with me in histories as omens from the throats of birds, 

their faces lost ghosts fading in the mind as memory grows cold as the sea.

Let me find my land, reach it there just over the horizon, across only one more border,

my ancestry; the tales of my family of such beauty to behold as the sea.

Past paths become foreign to worn feet, the taste of beloved fruit strange;

in its incessant merciless currents, time is as impossible to hold as the sea.

Its sweet echo the raw ruby of my heart, my feet have now lost the way home;

my life, this river, is now only tears retold as the sea.

Ghazal

©Susan Zegarsky 

Quail Bell Magazine

Ghazal غَزَل

The ghazal غَزَل is an ancient form of Arabic poetry about love and beauty that transcends this world, or the divine love of god, ishq-e-haqiqi عشق حقیقی. Ghazals explore all of it, the hopefulness of love, being awestruck by beauty, the heartbreak of separation, the grief and pain of loss. Originally ghazals were meant to be performed in song and this is still popular.

Ghazal is pronounced ghuh-zel, with an Arabic gh غ . One meaning of the word ghazal is a graceful young doe, the origin of gazelle in English. Another meaning is a flirting conversation between a man and a woman, and another is the wail of a wounded deer, linked with the ghazal’s theme of the wounded heart, love and loss.

The Form

There are intricate rules for classical Persian and Arabic ghazals. A ghazal consists of 5-15 couplets called sher شعر in Persian (or bayt  بيت‎ in Arabic, meaning the house). Every line ends with the radif  ردیف‎ , a word or phrase that repeats like a refrain, so every line ends the same. The sher rhyme internally with a word, the qaafiya قافیہ , which comes directly before the radif.  

The lines end in rhyme in this way: AR BR CR DR ER FR and so on, with R being the radif ردیف . The qaafiya قافیہ  , each word rhyming with each other, comes right before the radif ending each line. 

The first sher or couplet in a ghazal is the matla’ مطلع which introduces its rhyming pattern and theme. Both lines of the matla’ couplet must contain the qaafiya قافیہ and radif ردیف‎ .

In the Persian ghazal, each sher, or couplet, should be independent, like a small, separate poem, while they all follow the theme of the ghazal toward a perfect ending. Traditionally there should be an odd number of sher. 

The last couplet, the maqta’ مقطع‎ is the most personal and is the poet’s signature to the ghazal. The poet often creatively includes his takhallus تخلّص a nickname or pen name in the maqta’ to show off his skill as a poet.

And like all traditions, this one gets broken. Many modern poets creatively break tradition and write outside of this form. It's also very difficult to keep the traditional form intact while translating a ghazal, so many poems differ from tradition.

The History

Deeply rooted in Persian and Arab culture, the ghazal originated in 7th century Persian courts, coming from the older pre-Islamic Arabic quasida قصيدة during the Umayyad Khalifate (661-750). The quasida were epic poems, which could run into 100 couplets, performed as court songs. The ghazal became beloved because of its themes and was spread widely by Sufi mystics.

Ghazals are most often written in Urdu, Arabic and Persian. It’s the most popular Urdu form of poetry today and one of the most popular forms in South Asia and the Middle East. Because of its beauty, love for the ghazal has spread across the world. Goethe introduced the form to Germany in the 18th century and Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca experimented with the ghazal in his writing. The ghazal became known in the US when Agha Shahid Ali introduced it there in the 1960s.

Today there's a popular form of performance in India call Ghazal Gayaki. Gayaki means the performer's vocal style, the emotional expression and vocal ornamentation.  Large cultural events called Mushaira are popular in South Asia, especially in Pakistan and Northern India. Poets perform their ghazals and other poetry, and often the audience calls out the radif along with the Shayar. A Shayar is someone who writes and performs ghazals, named from the lines of poetry called sher. 

Familiar and popular classical ghazal writers are the Persian poets Rumi (1207-1273) Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī جلال‌الدین محمد رومی‎ and Hafiz (1315-1390) Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī خواجه شمس‌‌الدین محمد حافظ شیرازی‎ and the father of classical Persian literature Rudaki (858-941) Abū 'Abd Allāh Ja'far ibn Muḥammad al-Rūdhakī ابوعبدالله جعفر بن محمد رودکی ‎

Layla and Majnun

The most famous qasida, Layla and Majnun لیلی و مجنون‎ (or مجنون ليلى‎ Majnun Layla in Arabic) was an ancient Arab tale passed down orally in many versions but made popular by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi نظامی گنجوی‎ Jamal ad-Dīn Abū Muḥammad Ilyās ibn-Yūsuf ibn-Zakkī (1141-1209). Using my poetic license, my retelling of the tale is a bit romantic.

Layla and Majnun tells of a Bedouin boy named Qais who fell in love with his best friend during their childhood, the beautiful Layla, and she with him. They played as children together, and later Qais spent his days writing poems and singing them to Layla every evening, Qais becoming an admired poet as he grew to be a man. Layla's father ran a very strict, reputable household, so the songs of Qais were her only comfort and their childhood adventures her only joys. 

Though they had grown up together and Layla loved only Qais, her father refused his permission for her to marry a modest poet and instead secretly married her to a rich man in another land to enrich his own empire. He sent Layla away in secret. Heartbroken, Qais wandered the desert searching for Layla, still writing love poems to her and singing them to anyone who would listen or to nothing but the wind when no one would. People began to call him Majnun, meaning crazy madman مجنون .

Far away, Layla never loved her husband and pined away for Qais, dreaming that one day he would come for her when he found out what her father had done. With no way to escape her guards, she listened at her window every evening for the sound of Qais singing his ghazals like he used to sing to her every evening when they were young. When Qais never came, Layla died of a broken heart thinking he'd forgotten her. 

But Qais never stopped searching for his childhood love, his dear Layla. Crossing desert after desert on foot, Majnun finally found his Layla already in her grave, far too late for them to be reunited, to escape together to freedom. Qais himself died of grief lying on Layla's grave; he never stopping singing to her until the end, just as he did in their childhood. The best friends were together at last, immortalized in the ghazal’s eternal, beloved theme of true love and heartbreak.

a brief condensed excerpt from On the Beautiful Ghazal by Susan Zegarsky

©Susan Zegarsky