Adrienne Rich's Ghazals and the Persian Poetic Tradition: a Study of Ambiguity and the Quest for a Common Language

This research project centres on the influence of the Persian classical poetic form the ghazal on the poems composed by the feminist North American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It addresses the feature of ambiguity in the ghazal and its effectiveness to the development of Rich’s feminist language. It argues that the ambiguity which characterizes the Persian and Urdu ghazal offered the North American poet a model that helped her to create a hybrid, or border-crossing poetic language or, in her own words, ‘a common language.’ In the 1960s and 70s, amidst the scene of revolts and riots in North American society, a number of poets, including Adrienne Rich, struggled to reverse their socio-political and literary system by trying new modes of writing. They were committed to learning new poetic forms by acquaintance with foreign poetry. They saw translation as both a strategy of resistance, and an opportunity to open their way to other cultures and literatures. As a result, they engaged themselves in translation of foreign poetry, thus absorbing new images, themes, and forms into their writing. Rich, as a pioneer of feminism in North America, was in search of a poetic language that could both express her newly acquired consciousness of gender identity and combine gender issues with socio-political matters. In 1968, along with a group of other North American poets, she accepted Aijaz Ahmad’s invitation to translate the ghazals written by the 19th century Indian poet Mirza Ghalib. A Pakistani Marxist literary theorist, Aijaz Ahmad, asked these poets to produce English poetical versions of a selection of Ghalib’s ghazals, written in Urdu. As a mediator between the Urdu ghazals of Ghalib and the North American poets, Ahmad provided them with literal translations of the ghazals in English and also explanations. The outcome of this project was later published in the form of a book edited by Aijaz Ahmad, entitled Ghazals of Ghalib (1971). By translating or re-writing Ghalib’s ghazals, Rich played an important cultural role. Unlike the majority of the poet-translators in the group who domesticated the original text, Rich chose a foreignizing method by maintaining the symbolic words and cultural images of Ghalib’s poetry and keeping the names, allusions, and stylistic features belonging to the tradition of Persian and Urdu poetry. In fact, her translation stood as a hybrid text between two literary traditions to make possible the transition of linguistic and cultural elements. Soon after this project, Rich started writing her own English ghazals. Her two collections written in this form were entitled “Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib,” published in her book of poems Leaflets (1969), and “The Blue Ghazals” in The Will to Change (1971). Her poems in these volumes are political but at the same time deal with women and gender issues. In these ghazals, Rich uses the most private images of the body and sex to speak of her society and politics. It was the ghazal’s erotic-mystic ambiguity, inherent in the Islamic tradition of poetry that paved the way for Rich to combine the personal and the political and to use collective images as well as to express common desires. Islamic mysticism (Sufism) gave Persian love poetry, the ghazal, a mystic significance. Therefore, it could be interpreted both erotically and mystically. Moreover, its gender ambiguity, which derives from the use of genderless pronouns in the Persian and Urdu languages and the fragmented description of the body in the ghazal added to this ambiguity by leaving the gender of the beloved concealed. In her poems, Rich replaces the ghazal’s erotic-mystical and gender ambiguity by an erotic-political ambiguity and an androgynous identity. She applies the ghazal’s ambiguity or duality to the relation between the carnal and the political in order to speak not only of women but all marginal groups such as the African-Americans. Overall, the ghazal’s ambiguity was effective in the development of her feminist project. It enabled her to question the issue of gender hierarchy, to break the taboos that were imprisoning women in her society, to shatter the patriarchal law of bodily integrity, to question, reject, and contradict political powers and patriarchy, and to create a new language that could provide new spaces for women to write of themselves and therefore to bring about a change in their situation. By translating Ghalib’s ghazals, Rich succeeded in attaining the techniques that were both linguistic and cultural. Translation for Rich was a contact zone that made possible the transference of new forms, images, and themes into her poetry. In her ghazals, Rich adapted the methods used in Ghalib’s poems to her purposes. Her poems stood as re-visions and functioned as hybrid texts that embraced the cultural and linguistic elements of both North American and Persian/Urdu culture and tradition. Rich performed the act of re-vision by looking back to the poetry of an Indian male poet from another time and place and saw it with fresh eyes. In this manner, she succeeded in applying the techniques used in the ghazal to her feminist language. It can be concluded that, the new self elaborated by Rich and the images, concepts, and forms applied in her ghazals mirrored those of Ghalib. The ambiguity offered by the ghazal, and the possibility it offered as a means of rejecting the taboos and speaking of human beings on an equal level without distinguishing between sexes was so powerful that it served the purposes of a male Muslim Indian poet of the 19th century as well as those of the contemporary North American poet Adrienne Rich.