What qualities make a ghazal good?
Soul dripping lyrics, strong enough to drive your thoughts to feelings undiscovered.
Music with the ability to meld the lyrics to your mind.
In my opinion, ghazals are the Blues of India. So, a ghazal has to sound great at night. Me, with my eyes closed, listening. Absorbing the words floating in the music.
Lyrics are the soul of a ghazal. I have been translating ghazals over the years. I have an affinity for Bahadur Shah Zafar ghazals. I will take the opportunity this blog provides to post them here.
“The translation is not of comparable literary value as the original ghazal, and serves the mere purpose of providing those, who find Urdu an alien tongue, a coarse outline of the poet's creation.”
I strongly believe in this. Native bengali speakers who have read Tagore will aver that the English translations do not hold a candle to the original Bengali versions. I have read a few Tagore poems in English and I found them to be sublime. So I can not even imagine the feelings that the original evokes in people who can understand.
Translating a ghazal helps me absorb the ghazal into my conscience. I am not a Urdu scholar. I take the help of online urdu dictionaries and the quest for a meaning of a Urdu word has taken me all over the net. It feels like a treasure hunt - to decipher the meaning, to wonder what the poet means and hoping you are getting it correct. Not for an audience, but for my own understanding. For me, to feel the real sentiments in the poem.
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