By: Rishi Janakiraman
Maybe it starts with the silence between verses—the way it pulls, stretches out like an open wound. Gushing with each couplet, the spaces between words becoming as important as the words themselves. It’s a form that fractures—each couplet a broken line of thought, held at a distance from the next, as though the poem itself knows that nothing is truly continuous. Yet, for all its fragmentation, the ghazal somehow insists on cohesion. Its threads—delicate like spider silk—pull it together in a way that resists the neatness of closure, allowing instead for the open wound to linger, unhealed and necessary. And as poets, as writers raised on free verse, Modernism, and the influx of contemporary poetry, we are seduced by this fragmentation, this freedom within form, how each rhyme is torn away from the next.
We want that break. We love that break. But when we step into the space of the ghazal, a form with roots deep in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu poetry, we have to ask ourselves: what does it mean to adopt a form that comes from a language we don’t speak, a history we don’t know, a tradition we’ve never lived? I don’t know Arabic (nor Persian, nor Urdu). But still, I want to write in its bones. And isn't that the allure? To touch something ancient, something sacred, to inhabit a voice that isn't ours—but might be?
The ghazal, in its original context, isn’t simply a poetic form; it is a conversation with centuries of tradition, with the divine, with the personal and the profoundly collective. It occupies a linguistic home: a ghazal, originally, is inseparable from its home language. It is built on the syntax, on the syntactic texture, more narrowly, of these linguistic communities. Arabic operates on a different plane than English, where meaning folds into sound, and sound folds into meaning. The ghazal, in its Arabic form, plays on the fluidity of language itself—its roots, its inflections, its ability to hold multiplicity in a single world. Arabic is a Semitic language, which means it relies heavily on root patterns, where consonants form the core meaning and vowels shift that meaning, creating a web of associations.
The root word for love (ḥ-b-b) in Arabic, for instance, can be inflected to mean affection, seeds, or even God’s love depending on its grammatical form. In this way, the same word can carry a metaphysical weight in one context and a deeply personal meaning in another. The ghazal, which is often centered on love—both human and divine—relies heavily on this kind of semantic richness.
The ghazal, as I’ve come to learn, also comes from a place of longing. It speaks to the unspeakable—of love, of loss, of God, the universe, and the gap between what we desire and what we can never have. Each couplet a jagged slice of that longing, a tear in the fabric of what it means to live. But here's where it gets tricky: how do we—poets steeped in English, a language that often paves over nuance for utility—attempt to hold the same pain, the same prayer?
It feels almost audacious. Ghazals were once recited in the courts of emperors, after all. They held power, politics, devotion. Can we, detached from that history, write a poem that resonates the same way? And more linguistically, can we write a poem in a language that’s so far from Arabic that it’s practically a different form altogether? In English, our words tend to stand rigid, each one holding a singular, often fixed meaning. So when we write a ghazal in English, we are already contending with a loss, a kind of fracture that is differentiated from the intended rupture of the form. It’s a fracture of language itself—a gap between what the ghazal was and what it becomes in our hands.
There is, of course, a long tradition of poets borrowing forms from other cultures. Poetry is theft—Eliot said that, right? The sonnet, once an Italian invention, found its way into the English language through poets like Shakespeare and Donne. The haiku, too, has traveled across languages and continents, taking root in places far from its Japanese origins. But the question remains: what do we lose when we borrow a form without the context that shaped it? The ghazal’s repetition and refrain echo the structure of call and response, the circular nature of longing that reflects not just human love, but love for the divine. This movement is inseparable from the script itself. When we write a ghazal in English, we are not just translating words—we are translating an entire way of thinking, of being in the world.
But perhaps that’s where the beauty of the ghazal lies—its ability to resist. The ghazal, even in English, holds its shape, its form. It insists on its own fragmentation, its own refusal to resolve. And in this way, it speaks to something universal, something that transcends the boundaries of language and culture. The themes of the ghazal—love, loss, longing, separation—are not confined to one culture or tradition. They are human themes, and as poets, we are always attempting to articulate the unresolvable, the gaps between what we want and what we have, between what we say and what we mean.
Yet, we cannot ignore the fact that the ghazal, as it exists in Arabic or Persian or Urdu, is more than just a container for universal themes. It is a form that is deeply tied to its linguistic and cultural origins, a form that carries with it a history of colonialism, of migration, of displacement. To write a ghazal in English is to participate in a form that has already traveled across borders, across languages, across centuries. But it is also to engage with a form that has been shaped by the very histories of power and displacement that complicate its adoption into English. We have to ask ourselves: are we honoring that tradition, or are we simply borrowing its shape, its aesthetic, without acknowledging the history that gave it meaning?
There is no simple answer to this question. To write a ghazal in English is, in many ways, to write in translation. But translation is not just a matter of substituting one word for another. It is an act of interpretation, of transformation. When we write a ghazal in English, we are not simply mimicking the form—we are engaging in an act of translation that involves not just language, but culture, history, and tradition. And in this act of translation, something is always lost. The ghazal in English can never fully capture the rhythm, the music, or the depth of meaning it holds in its original language. But that does not mean it is without value. The ghazal, even in translation, offers us a way of thinking about the relationship between form and meaning. It challenges us to think about what it means to write in a language that is not our own, to engage with a form that carries with it a history we may not fully understand.
So, can we really write a ghazal if we know nothing about Arabic or Persian or Urdu? The answer, I think, is both yes and no. Yes, we can write a ghazal in English. We can adopt its form, its structure, its insistence on fragmentation and repetition. But no, we are not writing the same ghazal that exists in Arabic or Persian or Urdu. We are writing a ghazal that is shaped by our own language, our own culture, our own history. And perhaps that is enough. Perhaps the ghazal, like all forms of poetry, is meant to evolve, to change as it moves transculturally. But we must be aware of what we are doing when we write a ghazal in English. We must acknowledge the loss, the gaps, the fractures that exist in our own version of the form.
The ghazal, after all, is what allows us to grapple with that loss. It is a form that insists on the possibility of translation, even as it acknowledges the impossibility of ever fully translating a life, a culture, a history into language. And maybe that’s where the real beauty of the ghazal lies—not in its answers, but in its refusal to give them.
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Image 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi
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