ModuleIv.pptxGhalib’s Poetry & This Week’s Approach
We’re staying with poetry this week as we move from Haiku to Ghalib as a central poetic figure.
This week I want us to ask these questions
Why Poetry & How Poetry?
What do I mean?
Why do people read and write poetry?
How does poetry work and how does it work upon us as readers?
This week’s goal
This week we will compare a few of Ghalib’s poems to one other poet of your choice in the textbook (see a partial list on the discussion board, and see the table of contents in the textbook for a complete list).
My hope is that through a comparison of poets you may be able to answer the questions on the previous slides for yourselves.
But first…
…let me share why I like poetry with a specific example.
The British Romantic poet, Wordsworth coined a phrase “spots of time” in his poem The Prelude.
So within his poem, he explains where his poetry comes from—these “spots of time” are the most powerful memories of his life that he finds himself dwelling on time and again.
These are often moments that he appreciated later in life, but did not particularly notice when they happened.
Wordsworth continued…
I cover Wordsworth in-depth in my British Lit course, so I will just summarize here.
In The Prelude, Wordsworth writes about waiting to go home for Christmas to see his dad and siblings (his mom passed when he was young).
Wordsworth continued…
He was so excited to go home and see everyone that he climbed a rocky hillside where he could look down into the valley and stare at the forked-road and watch for the coach that would come to take him home.
Wordsworth continued…
He sat on this rocky hillside projection (a “crag”), and a lone sheep wandered near him, a bush was at his side, and the rocky wall of the hilly crag echoed with the sound of condensing mist running down the rock. A stormy-looking sky threatened, but he waited in happy anticipation for that ride home.
Wordsworth continued…
Not 10 days after he returned home, his father died suddenly.
This left Wordsworth without parents and with the realization that the Christmas he had just experienced would be his last family Christmas with his father.
He wrote later that the memory of waiting for that coach to come down the road would become one his most powerful “spots of time.”
He did not know it then, but it was the last time he would ever feel that way about going home—that sense of radiant anticipation.
Wordsworth continued…
For Wordsworth, dwelling on his spots of time inspires his poetry.
For me, reading about his “spots of time” has made me more mindful of such potential moments while I am in the middle of living them.
Both of my grandparents passed away just 12 days apart, two weeks after Christmas back in 2001. I was in graduate school about to study Wordsworth at that time…
Wordsworth continued…
…and when we got to this poem just a few months later and I read it and the class analyzed the poem, I was blown away.
Here was this guy Wordsworth who died 125 years before I was born, and he had described EXACTLY a feeling I had just experienced regarding a memory of my own grandparents, and he had named it for me (spots of time).
Nothing I have ever read has so closely captured a personal, cognitive experience like that for me.
Wordsworth continued…
Everyone reading this slideshow probably has a favorite memory that bubbles to the surface of the mind frequently.
I appreciate Wordsworth for naming that concept and for helping me to slow down and appreciate more of life’s moments, moments that may become more essential than I can possibly know while those moments are unfolding.
Wordsworth a final word…
Many people think of Wordsworth as the poet of memory (what would Ghalib be the poet of?).
I gave you my favorite poet’s reason for writing poetry as a way into this week’s poems. I told you why one poet is inspired to write poetry and how that poetry works on me.
When you read Ghalib this week along side of one other poet, ask: How does the poetry of each poet work upon me? Why does each poet seem to write poems?
(If you want to read the Wordsworth selection I mentioned, here is a link to The Prelude (some of his other poems are in your textbook, but this one is not): http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww298.html
See Lines 208-225 & Lines 287-335 for more on “spots of time.”
Now on to Ghalib!
Read the intro in your text on Ghalib. Here are some key highlights:
He and his wife had seven children who all died by 15 months of age!
He adopted his wife’s nephew ‘Arif as his own son, but ‘Arif and his wife both died from tuberculosis (this disease also killed poet John Keats and many in his family. He’s in your book on page 608, by the way).
The poem “It Was Essential” on page 628 is Ghalib’s elegy for his nephew, ‘Arif.
Ghalib Continued
Poetry is challenging to translate, and masterful poets are exceedingly challenging to translate (for example, No Fear Shakespeare rewrites of Hamlet make the text easier to read, but they erase much of the nuance and that is just an English-to-more-modern-English translation).
Translating Ghalib is like that…turn to page 624…
“I’ve made my home next door to you”
This poem’s double-meaning / double-theme is untranslatable as a single poem in English.
We had to translate it TWICE: once as a poem about love between a man and a woman, and once as a poem about love between God and human beings.
If you could read the Urdu language, then you’d only need one poem to convey both of those ideas.
And the cool thing is that if you could read the Urdu version, you would see both themes happening at once…
…kind of like this image which is at once both an old woman and also younger woman looking away from the viewer.
Language—with the denotation and connotation of words, with synonyms, and with words with multiple meanings—can work like this image…
…however, it can be hard to translate such subtleties to another language.
“Petition: My Salary”
This poem is interesting—Ghalib is writing to the emperor (!) who happens to also be his patron and his poetry student.
What does Ghalib want?
How would you describe the tone?
See footnote #3 on page 632. Do you think Ghalib had any idea that those lines would catch on and persist in India today?
The Couplets
These poems are pieces of longer poems called ghazals, which have a particularly fixed way to begin and a particular way to end. However, in the middle of a ghazal are several couplets that can function like Haiku.
See these on pages 625-628
(That’s what Urdu looks like in the image below, by the way).
So this week on the discussion board…
…I’m asking you to choose a poem or two by Ghalib and just sort of discuss what you get out of it (see the bullet points on the discussion board to started).
…then, I want you to chose any other poet in the book and discuss one or two of his/her poems as well.
There’s no right or wrong answer as long as you read and form your OWN opinion; just tell me and tell the class what a few poems mean to you as you understand them.
Email me if you need clarification on a line or something.
More Context in Course Content
In course content, I’ve posted PowerPoints on some of the other poets, but not all (hey, I have to do laundry and walk my dog some times, so I could not do PPTs for all the poets in the book, but the introductory material in the book will help you out if you lack a PowerPoint. Plus, you have my email if you need me to explain more).
“What does pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis mean professor H?“
Oh…(/pretends to already know while opening Google)…oh that old word? Pffft, that’s a just lung disease that you catch from a volcano. I totally knew that.
