- Basudhara Roy
Jalsaghar
Ghazal
By Steffen Horstmann
Partridge India, 2016
ISBN (Hardcover) 978-1-4828-8623-8
Pp 126 | Price ₹ 1,350.00
“A hush. Silence is now the world’s prayer.
From God’s hand stars fall like grains tonight.”
(Steffen Horstmann, Ghazal of Restoration)
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| Steffen Horstmann |
The ghazal has for long, in its universal
aesthetic appeal and wide thematic range, made its mark as one of the most flexible
and adaptable poetic forms, suited highly to literary innovation. Originating
in 7th century Arabia and drawing inspiration from the deeply
emotive section called ‘nasib’ that opened the pre-Islamic qasidah whose
purpose was to stimulate poetic inspiration and to strike the right empathetic
note with the audience, the ghazal gradually dissociated itself from the
qasidah and made its emergence as a distinct literary form in its own right. Following
the qasidah, however, the ghazal was expected to conform strictly to a definite
verse structure wherein each line of equal metrical length would be constituted
of two metrical hemistitches ending on the same rhyme called the qafiya. Making
its way via trade and imperial encounters from Arabia to Africa, Spain and
Persia, the ghazal found itself being mapped on new cultural contexts and
expressed in entirely new linguistic registers such as that of Hebrew, Spanish,
Persian and that of several West-African languages, absorbing and accommodating
variations till the Persian writers of the late eleventh century imparted to it
by their own poetic practice, technical features that have permanently become a
signature of the form. Doing away with enjambment between the hemistitches and
constituting them in the form of a couplet, the Persians introduced also the
practice of using the rhyme or qafiya in both of the hemistitches, especially
and often in the case of the first couplet. They also made the ‘radif’ or
refrain (constituting of either a word or a phrase) and appearing after the
qafia in every rhyming line of the piece, a compulsory feature of the ghazal. Allowing
greater independence and autonomy to couplets and the inclusion, in the final
couplet, of the ‘takhallus’ to stand for an authorial signature were other
important characteristics of the Persian mode of ghazal-writing.
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| Basudhara Roy |
The Persian ghazal was popularized in
India through the advent of the Mughal rulers and though Amir Khusrau is widely
regarded as the first Indian poet in this genre, the early Indian ghazal was
nourished under Mughal patronage in royal courts in South rather than in North India
and was eagerly taken up by practitioners of the Urdu language, notably Ghalib,
whose excellence and lofty accomplishments in it led to such fame and lasting
enthusiastic popularity of the form that today ghazals continue to be written
in virtually every regional language of India, though Urdu has perennially
remained its unsurpassed forte. In Europe, the form made its entry in the early
nineteenth century through the translations of Persian ghazals undertaken
notably by Goethe and other German poets like Friedrich Ruckert and August Graf
von Platen and was embraced with warm inspiration and affection. The form, in
America, received impetus particularly through the efforts of the critic Aijaz
Ahmad who attempted on the occasion of Ghalib’s death centenary in the year
1969, to produce a translation of a selection of his poems. Very interestingly,
Ahmad prepared prose translations of thirty-seven of Ghalib’s ghazals, reducing
them to five couplets each and offered them without any footnotes or
explanations to seven of the best and most well-known American poets of the
time - W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford,
David Ray, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Strand, and William Hunt, inviting
them to translate or transcreate whichever pieces inspired them best. The
resulting work Ghazals of Ghalib (1971)
emerges as a rich creative collaboration between two entirely different poetic
traditions and though the resultant ghazals do not actually translate Ghalib’s
thoughts, they explore their diverse and enticing creative pathways under the
influence of his overpowering inspiration. It is following this intensely
impressionable creative engagement with Ghalib that Adrienne Rich composed in
the late 1960’s her free-verse attempts in the form - Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib) and Blue
Ghazals that constitute the first ever ghazal sequences to have been
written by an American poet.
However, it is with the publication of Agha Shahid Ali’s Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English in the year 2000 that the practice of writing ghazals took a formal turn in America. Ali, in the Introduction to this edited volume argued that with the ghazal as a poetic form having being largely misunderstood by Americans so far, the time was ripe on grounds of form for form’s sake, to “impose stringent, formally tight disunities on the form” rather than to allow it to flourish via rules that poets had been arbitrarily calling to their practice. (3) Harping on the need for corresponding to the correctness of form, Ali offers a working simplification of the regulations of the ghazal:
the
opening couplet (called matla) sets up a scheme (of rhyme called qafia, and
refrain called radif) by having it occur in both lines – the rhyme immediately
preceding the refrain – and then this scheme occurs only in the second line of
each succeeding couplet. That is, once a poet establishes the scheme – with
total freedom… he or she becomes its slave. What results in the rest of the
poem is the alluring tension of a slave trying to master the master. (3)
Agha
Shahid Ali’s own ghazals testify to his mastery over the form and he offers in Ravishing Disunities specimens of the
‘real ghazal’ in English by over sixty poets which have gone a long way in
promoting ghazal writing in America and in establishing the rules and standards
of the ghazal form in English.
In
the poetic practice of American poet, Steffen Horstmann, one discerns a similar
Shahidean obsession with formal correctness and in his meticulous approach to
the techniques of ghazal writing, Horstmann does absolute credit to the biographical
fact of having been a student of Agha Shahid Ali in his sophomore year at the
University of Arizona. Having always been drawn towards classical poetic forms,
Horstmann’s introduction to and subsequent interest in the form of the ghazal,
came about almost entirely as a result of his association with Agha Shahid Ali.
In his conversation with Sunil Sharma, the poet says:
The
technical requirements of the form can seem intimidating, even for an
experienced poet. But in working with the ghazal there is the lure of a kind of
freedom that no other poetry form provides. Since each couplet is considered
autonomous, an independent poem, one is able to engage different issues and
themes from one couplet to the next. So I was particularly attracted to that element
of the form, the ability to move from one topic to the next very quickly, which
creates a certain intensity that I believe is unique in English.
A
gifted poet, Horstmann has written more than two hundred ghazals so far which
have culled serious critical acclaim with their appearance in prestigious
literary magazines all over the world such as the Baltimore Review, Free State Review, Istanbul
Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Oyez Review, Texas Poetry Journal, and
Tiferet. Jalsaghar (2016) is his first book of ghazals closely followed by
his second book Ujjain (2017).
“The presence of Jalsaghar in the world seems like a kind of miracle to me,”
states Horstmann in his interview with Sunil Sharma, explaining:
It
was in 2001 that I decided in earnest to write a book of ghazals and there have
been many stops and starts along the way. Working extensively with the ghazal
form can be a humbling experience; initially I had to fight off a constant
sense of self doubt. I reached a point where I decided that I simply wanted to
enjoy the process of writing these poems and not worry about fulfilling any
kind of ambitions that I had in the beginning. And it was at that point I began
making real progress, when I began writing poems that I felt good about, poems
that I thought were good.
The
title of the book, ‘Jalsaghar’ with its performative connotations, places the
volume very aptly within a dialogic framework, for the ghazal, however its
enunciation or practice may vary across cultures and languages, remains in its
essence a fluid performative dialogue between the poet and the audience/
readers. Throwing light on his title,
Horstmann states, “Jalsaghar means ‘The Music Room’ in Bengali. In my book of
ghazals Begum Akhtar becomes a supernatural being whose singing transforms the
world into a luminous realm. Jalsaghar is the world that has become Begum
Akhtar's music room.” The volume, divided into four sections, contains a total
of seventy-eight ghazals which draw their theme, content and inspiration from a
wide, globalized range of historical and contemporary sources and span an
astounding breadth of spatio-temporal landscapes. Here, jostling and rubbing
shoulders with each other in inspired and harmonious camaraderie are metaphors,
images and symbols drawn from both the Oriental and Occidental philosophical
and literary traditions and fused by a creative and empathetic imagination to
offer an utopic vision of life and humanity beyond borders and beyond needless
grounds of difference. Illuminating upon his own poetic practice in his essay ‘My
World and Words’, Horstmann writes:
when I am asked what my poems are
about, I describe my writing as a poetry of discontinuities, of lyrical
couplets that speculate on the spiritual world, or the world of spirits, or
that may convey imagery which can be like stills from a movie: ice-glazed
mountains that are seen through heat waves rippling over a hot road, the image
of Shiva meditating in clouds that flow above a mountain of light, the metallic
ticking of Dali's melting clocks, Layla embracing Majnoon in an oasis garden;
or that meditate on the slaughter of a herd of elephants in 6th century
Kashmir, or the sound of echoing thunder that is like the rushing chariot
cavalries from an ancient war (which also refers to the wars of our time). So
while my ghazals explore the complexities of earlier eras as well as those of
the twenty-first century, a longing for a time of peace is at the heart of
their inspiration, a hope that the generations of the future will remember us
with gratitude.
Horstmann’s
ghazals, in attempting to offer the charms and emotive consonances of the
Persian and Urdu tradition of the form in English, aspire to wed images from a
staggering range of cultural and linguistic registers. Acutely perceptive of
the ghazal’s fertility, Horstmann adroitly exploits the form’s associative
freedom to conjure that familiar atmosphere of absence and deep longing that
has always watermarked the oriental tradition of the ghazal. Conscious that the
ghazal form in English is yet to evolve the shared context of cultural intimacy
between poet and reader, Horstmann tries to weave in his ghazals multiple
disjunctive images that, with terse poetic skill find their place in a marvellous
emotional whole. In this sense, Horstmann’s ghazals may best be described as
emotive composites that attempt, through the traversing of widely fragmented
cultural terrains, to arrive at an intended emotional unity. Thus, in ‘The
Manikarnika Ghat’, the existential yet commonplace merging of life and death
and the complex weavings of tradition, religion, beauty and futility, along
with their inherent connotatations of universality and timelessness, are
strikingly brought out through eight well-toned couplets that offer
intersecting visions of the ghat as both a spatio-temporal location and as
timeless symbol. Horstmann, in his literary and physical familiarity with
Indian culture and landscape is both the insider and outsider playing upon
images that thematically transcend each other in rapid succession weaving a
rich, latticed aura of longing that is as seductive as it is compounded. Here,
by using the rhyme in the first line of his couplets and employing the entire
second line of each couplet as the refrain, Horstmann attempts, as in many
other poems in this collection, an interesting variation on the traditional
ghazal form.
In the breathtakingly beautiful piece ‘Ghazal of the Elephants’, written in unparalleled formal perfection, time and history are made to telescope through extremely evocative imagery to summon to the present the poignant pain of a dark, forgotten past. The ghazal bases itself on an episode described in Kalhana’s Rajatarangini wherein in the sixth century A.D the cruel and barbarous Hun invader of Kashmir, Mihirkula ordered a hundred mighty elephants to be forcibly thrown off a cliff because the painful sound of the trumpeting of a tusker who had accidentally fallen off a cliff had filled him with delight and excitement. In Horstmann’s poem, there is an intense desire to undo the pain of history and to offer it cathartic hope through the innocent image of “a child, on paper, scrawling elephants” but realist as he is, the poet knows that the past shall eternally haunt the present with the mourning “winds crossing distances, calling elephants”.
In
this as in many of his ghazals in this volume, Horstmann evinces a keen
ecological consciousness. In ‘Paper’, for instance, a ghazal in which he
retains the refrain while doing away with the rhyme altogether, the couplets play
on the various connotations of paper – prosaic, poetic and ecological to evoke
a sense of futility towards the enterprise of not just writing but also of
communication. The opening couplet marks a lament for a banished semantic –
“words are exiled from a country of paper,/are burned in books, in the debris
of paper” and each succeeding couplet proceeds to intensify this lament by
evoking as in the second couplet the inefficacy of paper from which “notes of
music” must be liberated to blossom into sound, or the tragedy of paper which
must cause forests to fall and mountains to be full of stumps in order to be
begotten - “Saws are buzzing like steel insects,/ Turning – in seconds – a tree
to paper” - till the final couplet brings the poem back full circle - “This poem was crumpled and discarded,
lifted/by the wind to swirl in a sea of paper.”
In
several of his ghazals, Horstmann while using both rhyme and refrain, attempts
a variation by not using them in the first hemistitch of the first couplet as
is characteristic in a conventional ghazal. In ‘The Diva of Jalsaghar’,
Horstmann following this practice, ambitiously weaves a ghazal of more than
seventy couplets, stretching the technical aspects of the form to its limits
and justifying Agha Shahid Ali’s observation that technically a ghazal has no end,
no closure and can, therefore, go on forever. Here, he dispenses with rhyme or
qafia as such and while in some couplets he clearly uses ‘Begum Akhtar’ as
refrain, in most others, the second hemistitch of the couplets ends in an
innovative rhyme of this chosen refrain, the rhyme mostly corresponding to
geographical names with the result that a host of places whose nomenclature
ends in ‘ar’ are evoked – Zemar, Zaccar, Khobar, Kashgar, Srinagar, Kathiawar,
Ahaggar, Dhankar, Qarqar, etc. and the landscape of the ghazal, in
incorporating all these echoes from different geographies, cultures,
philosophical systems, and historical periods, becomes a cosmopolitan space
with Begum Akhtar at its illumined centre, symbolic of the Muse’s universality
and unchallenged potency.
In
her article ‘Ghazal Cosmopolitan’, Shadab Zeest Hashmi makes a valid case for
the ghazal as a cosmopolitan literary form citing its ancient origins, its
extensive travels across historical periods, countries and cultures, and its
plasticity in accommodating different variations and influences. She writes:
An
aspect of cosmopolitanism is the availability of a rich lexicon as well as a
network of idioms and metaphors yielded by a literary heritage that is built on
cultural exchange, among other things. Historically speaking, such a standard
is met by languages that have had imperial privilege. Arabic, Persian, English,
and to a large extent Urdu are among such languages.
Horstmann
may be seen to have seized in his practice of ghazal writing the cosmopolitan
potential of this form in English. His ghazals traverse an astonishing range of
epistemologies drawing their inspiration from multiple literary traditions as
he attempts thematic variations on poems by other poets, creating in his
ghazals a dialogic space for existential exploration. In ‘Ghazal of the
Beloved’ for instance, the poem taking off from an extract by Wallace Stevens,
becomes an intense and searching exploration of the figure of the beloved that
evokes echoes both Eastern and Western, physical and spiritual, earthly and
cosmic. In poems like ‘Ghazal of Restoration’, ‘The World Your Word Kept
Between Us’, ‘Broken Ghazal’ and ‘Whom We Call Ishmael’ – ghazals that focus on
the theme of human relationships with its entire kaliedoscope of things said
and unsaid, Horstmann rises to a distinct and undeniable Shahidean perfection, setting
up, in the words of Agha Shahid Ali “an immensely seductive tension” between
couplets and compounding meaning through
understatement and epigrammatic terseness while at the same time firing the
imagination through the astonishing wealth of his fluid images. Couplets like
“I
stand like an exclamation mark in a cemetery of snow,
Envisioning
the shrine of words I’ll place within it. (Broken Ghazal)
or
“You
were comforted by the evening star, shining
Like
a brilliant coin in the sacred well tonight.” (Whom We Call Ishmael)
testify
to the brilliance that Horstmann, on inspiration, is capable of rising to. These
last poems of the volume gathered under the section ‘Whom We Call Ishmael’,
constitute a worthy tribute to the memory of his teacher Agha Shahid Ali in manifesting,
as they do, a remarkable philosophical acuity, an infectious empathy and a luxurious
languor of movement that echo the engaging oeuvre of Ali while at the same time
retaining their distinct individuality of style and expression.
In
these latter ghazals, Horstmann offers fresh hope both for the ghazal in
English and for the American tradition of the ghazal and imparts to both a
linguistic, metaphoric and philosophical vigour that reasserts the form’s
strength and its firm claim to cultural cosmopolitanism. In a globalizing world
order marked as much by collapsing boundaries as by new strategies of identity
assertion and rampant xenophobia, art emerges as the most powerful means of
evoking empathetic engagement with people, countries and cultures. Horstmann’s
ghazals, in engaging with diverse literary and philosophical traditions, attempt
to perform just this – to act as conduits of human connection, urgently
claiming space for a humanity which though frail and flawed, remains undeniably
heroic and utterly noble.
Works Cited:
Ali, Agha Shahid (ed.) Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English. Connecticut:
Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
Hashmi, Shadab Zeest. ‘Ghazal Cosmopolitan’. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2017/may/ghazal-cosmopolitan-shadab-zeest-hashmi
Horstmann, Steffen. Jalsaghar. New Delhi: Partridge India, 2016.
Jalajel, David. ‘A Short History of the Ghazal’. http://www.ghazalpage.net/prose/notes/short_history_of_the_ghazal.html
Sharma, Sunil. ‘In Conversation with Steffen
Horstmann’. https://journals.flinders.edu.au/index.php/wic/article/view/9
Basudhara Roy (b. 1986)
is the author of two books, a monograph, Migrations of Hope: A Study of the
Short Fiction of Three Indian American Writers (New Delhi: Atlantic
Publishers, 2019) and a collection of poems, Moon in my Teacup (Kolkata:
Writer’s Workshop, 2019). As a creative writer, she has featured in magazines
like Muse India, Shabdadguchha, Cerebration,
Rupkatha, The Challenge, I-mantra, The
Volcano, Gnosis, Daath Voyage, Das Literarisch, Reviews,
Triveni, Setu, Hans India and on
the Zee Literature Festival Blog. She teaches English at Karim City
College, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand and can be reached at basudhara.roy@gmail.com.
It's like a phd thesis. dense and sharp.
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