Form without a Home: On Translating the Indo-Persian Radīf

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Acknowledgment

This essay is adapted from the introduction to After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in Fall 2015, which includes fifty of Ḥasan’s ghazals organized by radīf.

Notes

1. Letter to Agha Shahid Ali, cited in his introduction to Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, 3.

2. I use distich and couplet interchangeably here to refer to the bayt, which is the basic unit of Persian and Arabic verse and consists of two miṣrā’s, or hemistichs. While the bayt is not fixed with respect to meter or syllable length, the key requirement is that both of its components are identical in structure.

3. Waṭwāṭ, Ḥadā’iq al-siḥr fī daqā’iq al-shi’r, 315.

4. For these details, see Heinrichs, “Radīf,” 8: 368.

5. Crozier, “Dreaming the Ghazal into Being,” 66.

6. Jones, Grammar of the Persian Language, 232

7. See, for example, A. J. Arberry, “Orient Pearls at Random Strung.”

8. Bausani, “The Development of Form in Persian Lyrics,” 145.

9. Lewis, “The Rise and Fall of a Persian Refrain,” 201.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. For a masterful study of this process of adaptation and appropriation, see Losensky, Welcoming Fighani: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal.

13. This is not to imply that Iranian poets did not also pioneer the radīf. On the radīf as cultivated by poets based in Iran, see, for example, Losensky, “‘Demand, Ask, Seek.’”

14. The fullest treatment of the ghazal’s global circulation to date are the volumes edited by Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth, Ghazal as World Literature.

15. For the interface of these two discourses, see Ingenito, “Tabrizis in Shiraz Are Worth Less than a Dog,” esp. 102.

16. Although Borah (“The Life and Works of Amir Hasan Dihlavi,” 1) asserts that Hasan was born in Delhi, Salomatshoeva cites a verse, missing from the edition of Nargīs Jahān, in which the poet states that he was born in Badaun, 200 kilometers southeast of Delhi. See the introduction to her edition of Hasan’s Divan, 6.

17. Borah argues that the other name by which the poet was known, Sanjarī, was a scribal error for Sistānī (“The Life and Works” 1, no. 1).

18. Borah, “The Life and Works,” 5, citing from Hasan’s prose preface to his divan.

19. Sharma and Losensky, “Introduction,” xxiv.

20. For Amir Khusrow’s use of Indian languages, see his Nuh sipihr, 147–201.

21. For a detailed discussion of this work, see Gould, “Persian Love in an Indian Environment.”

22. Major studies of this literary device include Losensky “Linguistic and Rhetorical Aspects of the Signature Verse (takhalluṣ) in the Persian Ghazal,” and de Bruijn, “The Name of the Poet in Persian Poetry.”

23. Lewis, “Reading, Writing, and Recitation,” 98.

24. For another engagement with Khāqānī, this time in the form of a qaṣīda rather than a ghazal, see Dīvān-i Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī Dihlavī, 611. Also see Gould, “The Geographies of ‘Ajam,” for the reception of Khāqānī in Indo-Persian poetry generally.

25. This poem is included in my translations of Ḥasan’s ghazals: After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi.

26. Hammer-Purgstall’s translation is discussed in Shamel, “Persian Ear Rings and ‘Fragments of a Vessel,’” 31.

27. For the Laylī Majnūn story in Persian literature, see Seyed-Gohrab, Laylī and Majnūn, and Krachkovskii, Izbrannye sochineniia, 2: 588–632 (Persian translation in Laylī va Majnūn: pazhūhishī dar rīshah’hā-yi tārīkhī va ijtimā’ī-i dāstān: bih inz̤imām-i talkhīṣ va sharḥ-i Laylī va Majnūn-i Niẓāmī [Tehran: Zavvār, 1997]).

28. Auden, “Writing [1932],” 308.

29. See Crozier, “Dreaming the Ghazal into Being,” 62. Bausani more diplomatically refers to the ghazal as one of Iranian civilization’s “hermetic forms” (“The Development of Form in Persian Lyrics,” 152).

30. Suleri Goodyear, “Ideas of Order in an Afterword,” in Ravishing DisUnities, 180.

31. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 41.

32. Suleri Goodyear, “Ideas of Order in an Afterword,” 180–181.

33. Crozier, “Dreaming the Ghazal into Being,” 64.

34. Ibid.

35. For the dating of this terminology, see de Bruijn, “The Name of the Poet in Classical Persian Poetry,” 56.

36. Suleri Goodyear, “Ideas of Order in an Afterword,” 179.

37. Wimsatt, “One Relation of Rhyme and Reason,” 327.

38. Ibid., 328.

39. Letter to Agha Shahid Ali, cited in his introduction to Ravishing DisUnities, 7–8.

40. Agha Shahid Ali, introduction to Ravishing DisUnities, 11. Other recent Anglophone ghazal experiments include Khalvati, The Meanest Flower, and Sedarat, Ghazal Games.

41. Agha Shahid Ali, introduction to Ravishing DisUnities, 11.

42. Bausani, “The Development of Form in Persian Lyrics,” 150.

43. Wimsatt, “One Relation of Rhyme and Reason,” 324. For criticism of Wimsatt’s distinction as “problematic” (with no reason given), see Brogan and Gerber, “Homoeoteleuton,” 640.

44. These ideas are explored in greater detail in Gould, “Inimitability versus Translatability.”

45. Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” 4: 20.

46. Ibid. 4: 10; my translation.

47. For this quotation, see Bausani, “The Development of Form in Persian Lyrics,” 152.

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Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould works on Persian and Islamic literatures in a comparative context. She is the author of After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press), Georgian Notes on the Caucasus: Three Stories by Aleksandre Qazbegi (Central European University Press), and the forthcoming The Literatures of Anticolonial Insurgency: Aesthetics and Violence in the Caucasus (Yale University Press). She teaches literature at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.