My experience with the ghazal, as both a translator from the classical Persian as well as an Iranian-American poet writing in the form in English), gets me thinking comparatively, both in terms of time and space. New translations of any great writing will always appear, in part because literary styles change along with a reading audience. Thinking about how this form reaches from the 13th and 14th centuries to today, even as it spans regions (from Iran to America), continues to offer a kind of intercultural space for some postmodern funkiness.
I didn’t think, out of all the things in the world to blog about, that I’d find myself here, but to make it worthwhile, I want to focus on form in relation to theme. If I remember correctly, T.S. Eliot has that great metaphor about theme or meaning in a poem as analogous to the meat the burglar throws the guard dog as he sneaks into the home for the jewels (the style). To a great extent, the “beloved” in the ghazal has served as the desired object, especially for Persians, who adapted the longing for the divine into such a sensual and tangible form, wherein the beloved becomes the material manifestation of divine presence. As a result, writers like Hafez began juxtaposing the high and the low, esoteric theological matters with full red lips, long before rock n’ roll was invented, let alone rap or hip hop.
Of course, some of these depictions do not safely fall under the rubric of political correctness. This makes the current writing of the form that much interesting, when considering a Persian writer like Simin Behbahani who, while honoring the form of the ghazal , inverts the gender of the beloved, a politicized/feminist statement on the centuries old tradition.
For all their erudition, readers then and now are still dogs, regardless of the desired object, so I thought if only to satisfy my own hunger, I’d throw out contemporary manifestations of the beloved—objects of transcending desire—as they surface in different kinds of writing. Again, it’s not like these have direct relevance to the form, but they do capture something of the spirit of longing for the beloved, albeit within the context of the culture in which they are written. Here’s a little list arising from a survey of some favorites. They are off the top of my head—lines to and for various beloveds—and admittedly they tend to get too male/chauvinistic. I really would like to see collective posts here, various lists from men and women:
Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims
And strap your hands across my engines
--Bruce Springsteen
“Pray and play, play and pray.”
Miles Davis
“I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too.”
--Wicked Witch of the West, Wizard of Oz
“In this country first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman.”
--Tony Montana
“Oh, wait’ll I get dat wabbit!”
--Elmer Fudd
“Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think, I think you're the most attractive of all my parents' friends. I mean that.”
--Benjamin (from The Graduate)
“What am I living for, if not for you?”
--Fred Jay and Art Harris (Song)
“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”
--Vince Lombardi
“I put her on my plate, then I do the dishes.”
--Lil’ Wayne
“Hello cowgirl in the sand…”
--Neil Young
“Ah beer, the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.”
--Homer Simpson
“God it’s so painful when something is so close, but still so far out of reach.”
--Tom Petty
“Hey Mr. DJ, I just wanna’ hear, some rhythm and blues music…on the radio”
--Van Morrison
“I eat men like air.”
--Sylvia Plath
“See that look in their eyes, Rock? You gotta get that
look back, Rock. Eye of the tiger, man.”
--Apollo Creed, Rocky III
“The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”
--Bob Dylan
“COOKIES!!! UMM-NUM-NUM-NUM-NUM”
--Cookie Monster
“What they want, I don’t know, they’re all revved up and ready to go.”
--Ramones
