The Ghazal Is a Set of Unrelated Rooms

A ghazal is not a corridor. It is a house of rooms with no corridor between them, and you are let in one door at a time.

The rooms below all belong to one house: Ghalib's ghazal that opens hazāroñ ḳhvāhisheñ aisī, as given on rekhta.org. The house has nine rooms. Three are visited here.

The threshold#

Before going in, look at the doorframe, because it is the only thing every room shares.

Each couplet, or sher, is two lines. Every sher in this house ends on the same word, nikle, which means something like "came out," "turned out," "emerged." That fixed ending is the radif. Just before it sits a short word that rhymes and changes each time: dam, kam, ham, qalam. That is the qafiya. The first sher has the frame on both lines; the rest have it only on the second. All of them share one meter. The anatomy is laid out slowly in What Is a Sher.

That is the whole of the shared architecture. No plot runs through the house. No character walks from room to room.

The first room#

ہزاروں خواہشیں ایسی کہ ہر خواہش پہ دم نکلے بہت نکلے مرے ارمان لیکن پھر بھی کم نکلے

hazāroñ ḳhvāhisheñ aisī ki har ḳhvāhish pe dam nikle bahut nikle mire armān lekin phir bhī kam nikle

A thousand longings, each one enough to end a life; many came true, and still, too few.

A room about appetite. The doorframe is used twice, and differently each time: dam nikle, the breath goes out, one dies; kam nikle, they came out few, they turned out not enough. The same verb carries a death and a disappointment, and the room is furnished entirely with that difference.

Nothing here prepares the next room. Nothing needs to.

The second room#

مگر لکھوائے کوئی اس کو خط تو ہم سے لکھوائے ہوئی صبح اور گھر سے کان پر رکھ کر قلم نکلے

magar likhvā.e koī us ko ḳhat to ham se likhvā.e huī sub.h aur ghar se kaan par rakh kar qalam nikle

If anyone wants a letter written to her, let them have me write it; morning came, and I was out of the house with a pen behind my ear.

Step through and the light changes completely. The longing of the first room is gone. This is comedy: a lover so desperate for any contact with the beloved that he hires himself out as a scribe, leaving home at dawn with his pen tucked behind his ear like a clerk, hoping someone, anyone, will want to write to her.

The doorframe is the same: qalam nikle, out I went with a pen. But nikle that meant dying in the first room means setting off for work in this one.

If these two rooms were stanzas of an English poem, a reader would look for the bridge. Did the thousand longings lead to the letter-writing? Is the pen one of the longings? The ghazal does not say, because the question does not arise. Each room is lit from inside.

The third room#

کہاں مے خانہ کا دروازہ غالبؔ اور کہاں واعظ پر اتنا جانتے ہیں کل وہ جاتا تھا کہ ہم نکلے

kahāñ mai-ḳhāne kā darvāza 'ġhālib' aur kahāñ vaa.iz par itnā jānte haiñ kal vo jaatā thā ki ham nikle

The tavern door, Ghalib, and the preacher: what could be further apart? Yet this much I know: yesterday he was going in as I came out.

The last room, signed with the poet's name. It is a different genre again: satire, a sly piece of gossip. The preacher who thunders against wine was seen at the tavern door, going in just as the poet was leaving. ham nikle: I came out. The verb that meant dying, and then setting off, now means walking out of a wine-shop with a story.

Three rooms, three moods: anguish, farce, a wink at hypocrisy. One frame.

The doorframes#

Stand back and the frame starts to look less like a constraint and more like a dare. The poet has agreed, before writing a word of the middle couplets, that every one of them will end on -am nikle. Inside that agreement anything goes. The ear, arriving at nikle for the fifth or sixth time, does not hear repetition. It hears the same word return wearing a different meaning, and the small shock of recognition is the pleasure.

This is why a ghazal can be pious in one sher and profane in the next, address the beloved and then God and then a drinking companion, without any sense of contradiction. Contradiction would need a single speaker developing a single argument. The ghazal has neither. It has a frame, and a series of people stepping through it.

A room from another house#

The same architecture shows up across Persian. Two lines from a quatrain long attributed to Rumi (strictly a rubā'ī, not a ghazal, and attributed by some to Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Khayr), whose refrain does the same work:

باز آ باز آ هر آنچه هستی باز آ گر کافر و گبر و بت‌پرستی باز آ

bāz ā bāz ā har ānchi hastī bāz ā gar kāfir u gabr u but-parastī bāz ā

Come back, come back, whoever you are, come back; unbeliever, fire-worshipper, idolater, still come back.

The refrain is bāz ā, "come back." Every kind of person named arrives at the same door. Here the form is the theology: nobody is asked to make the same journey, only to arrive at the same threshold.

What the translator builds#

The English habit, faced with a house like this, is to knock through the walls. Translations quietly add the connectives the original never had: and then, but later, so, after all this. Each one is small and each one is reasonable. Together they turn a house of rooms into a long hallway with a story painted along it. The result reads smoothly, and it is no longer a ghazal.

The other habit is to drop the frame. Without the refrain, the couplets become a sequence of short epigrams, sharp and unrelated, but nothing calls them home. The English ghazals that work keep both the walls and the frame: they let each couplet stand alone, and they make every one of them end on the same word.

The way out#

There is no last room that explains the others. The maqta, with the poet's name in it, is a signature on the door, not a key to the house.

You leave a ghazal the way you leave a building you have wandered through in a dream: the rooms do not add up, and the doorframe is the one thing you remember touching every time.