Ghayn: divagations on a letter in motion.

Beard, Michael

Fascination with the alphabet as an aesthetic construct begins with children, but sometimes it expires with them too. If adult readers remember the hypnotic appeal which the letters once exerted, their sounds and their shapes, the alphabet can become a means to access the aesthetic traditions of a culture, a device to put the eyes close to the text, to trace the verbal texture of a poetic tradition. The letter ghayn, as an example, allows an entry into the specific aesthetic shapes of Arabic and Persian, Turkish and Urdu, through the key words which remain constant as poetic traditions pass through one language community after another. Words that begin with ghayn allow a contemplation of change--both terms for change and terms for the objects of change. Imagery of transformation and metamorphosis, always at the heart of poetic traditions, helps us sketch a phenomenology of poetry, which in many of the traditions using Arabic letters is synonymous with that ghayn-initiated word, ghazal (love poetry).

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If the alphabet could talk, what would it say to us? It serves long stretches of its time mute, unobtrusive, passively attending to the meanings of the people who use it. We know it is there, but once we have mastered it we also learn to ignore it. It carries our messages for us and beyond that we take it for granted, but like unobtrusive servants noticed only by newcomers or by children, the letters are still there, and right in the foreground. Sometimes a calligrapher makes us notice them again. Perhaps all this time they are mumbling among themselves. (Ouch, that ragged-edged reed pen hurts. Oh great, there's that dull pencil again. Be careful where you put those dots.) And different alphabets might have different things to say.

Here is a cunning shape--open to the right like a lower-case c in English, dotted. Drawn with a reed pen, it undergoes a subtle thickening as the arc descends past the midpoint. Inside a word the same letter pulls tight like a knot with two sharp shoulders, the dot still floating above unchanged. It shouldn't be hard for us to follow its tracks, shadow it like a photographer stalking a celebrity, or the narrator of a novel tracking a character as it goes about its work, listening to hear what it is saying. Perhaps it too will tell us stories. And stories lead us inevitably to the story of stories, The Arabian Nights.

Ghazala

For those of us who feel that the Thousand and One Nights is more than a collection of stories, indeed that it is the ultimate narrative template, the master text we can consult to find out what narrative really is, all we need to do to make our case is read the first story Shahrazad tells. This is the story about the merchant who angers an `ifrft. It combines all the elements that will recur so charmingly in the later stories--the speed and sense of mystery which draw the reader in and the feeling of suspense, combined with unexpected transitions, that give it a surreal atmosphere.

The merchant sits down to have his lunch under a tree--an opening scene that we could freeze-frame and discuss at length. The self-sufficiency of the individual alone on the road, reaching into the pack where his lunch is packed, throwing the date pits happily behind him, is already compelling. When the `ifrit appears, huge and menacing, to say the merchant must die, it is enough of a disruption to be horrifying, but sudden and unpredictable enough to be funny too. The `ifrit explains that the flying date pit has killed his son, a fact so marvelously discordant (we know that sons don't always resemble their fathers, but this seems an extreme case) that we know we aren't going to be very frightened by what follows.

As a spoken story it draws us in. As a written text it allows us to skip from one episode to another, to speed things up and slow them down. Such is the advantage the alphabet gives us over a listener like Shahzaman. From our vantage point we can notice the real world peeking in at the next scene. Indeed, a whole social universe opens up when the merchant asks for a grace period to settle his affairs and promises to show up at the same spot at the beginning of the new year. His hyperbolic trustworthiness is perhaps as funny as the date pit which kills the ogre's son, since first both parties agree to the arrangement (the `ifrit trusts merchants) and then the merchant actually shows up (thus demonstrating that we're expected to trust merchants as well.)

Another advantage we have over Shahzaman as consumers of the narrative is that most of us know the sequel: while the merchant is waiting to be executed an old man will walk by (the kind of respected mature individual referred to as a shaykh) leading a ghayn-initiated word, a ghazala (she-gazelle) on a chain. Later there will follow two additional shaykhs, one with two dogs, one with a she-mule, but it is the ghazala we remember.

We remember her for more than one reason. For one the ghazala led by the shaykh fits into the plot like a key in a lock. She is, in fact, the shaykh's wife, transformed by magic. But this information cannot come to us immediately because the shaykh uses it to bargain with. He enters a contract with the `ifrit to entertain him with the story for the price of one third of the merchant's blood. (Yes, in answer to the inevitable question of those who are unfamiliar with the story, the other two shaykhs will bargain for the other two thirds. Three stories will add up to one merchant.) The shock of the metamorphosis--that what seems an animal is in fact a human--is the initial emphasis in the shaykh's story. In Burton's translation:

 Know O Jinni! That this gazelle is the daughter of my paternal uncle, my
 own flesh and blood, and I married her when she was a young maid, and I
 lived with her well-nigh thirty years, yet was I not blessed with issue by
 her. So I took me a concubine, who brought to me the boon of a male child
 fair as the full moon ... (Burton, The Book of The Thousand Nights and
 Night 1.33)

The ghazala is the sinister figure of the piece, a sorceress who has initiated the process by transforming the concubine and the son into a heifer and a calf. The heifer/concubine is passed on to a butcher and disposed of but the calf/son is saved through the intervention of a third woman. The savior figure is the neighbor's daughter, who turns out to be a benevolent sorceress. She recognizes the calf as a human transformed, turns him back into the merchant's son and claims him in marriage. She is the one who restores the moral balance by transforming the wife into a ghazala.

We remember the ghazala for other reasons, at best incidental to the plot. First, a ghazala is synonymous with beauty. It is also a beautiful word both in its Arabic form and in its guise as the English loan word, gazelle. An anglophone writer is more likely to use the gazelle to invoke elegance of motion, but the Arabic writer tends to focus in on the beloved's face. Edgar Allan Poe pays homage to the Arab imagery when the narrator of "Ligeia" describes his fascination with the title character's eyes: "They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad" (Poe I.251). The esthetic of oversized eyes is a powerful one. Cartoon figures and stuffed animals meant to appeal to our sentiments are often portrayed with oversized eyes. The size of the gazelle's eyes is the first item Ahmad Amin lists in his dictionary of Egyptian colloquial terms under the entry al-ghazal. It's an image of beauty as old as The Iliad, though when Homer turns to an animal for comparison it is the cow rather than the ghazal, making the epithet for Hera--boopis potnia Here, the queen with ox eyes--a problem for English translators.

Ghul

Shahrazad uses the ghazala as beautiful women are often employed in traditional narrative, as Circean forces who transform those around them. If she were instead reciting poetry, we might expect only a hint of narrative, and the woman would be the only one transformed. Michael Sells, in an article on erotic imagery in early Arabic poetry, finds reiterated metamorphoses of women on two levels, both guided by ghayn words. The first is ghul, which he discusses in a famous panegyric to the Prophet entitled "Banat Su`ad," by Ka`b ibn Zuhayr, a contemporary of the Prophet. His Su`ad, in a crucial pair of ghayn analogies, is a ghul and a ghirbal:

 Fa ma tadamu `ala halin taktinu bi-ha
 Kama talawwanu fi athwabiha l-ghulu
 Wa ma tamassaku bi l-wasli l-ladhi za `amat
 Illa kama tumsiku l-ma`a l-gharabilu

 [From form to form, she turns and changes,
 like a ghoul slipping through her guises.
 She makes a vow, then holds it
 like a linen sieve holds water. (Sells 138-39)]

The ghirbal, sieve (pl., gharabil), is a cunning ghayn-initiated word to show faithlessness--a porous surface through which statements of loyalty pass unchanged. (A sieve shows a kind of solidity but it doesn't hold water--"tumsiku l'ma'a.") To call a woman a ghal evokes a more threatening ghayn-initiated word, though it is today an insult of a different kind that it was in Ka`b's time. Sells makes a particular point that the post-history of the word has made the poem harder to read:

 The ghul of classical Arabic poetry should be distinguished from the ghul
 of later Arabic folklore, the latter of which is usually portrayed as male
 and easier to please than the poetic ghul, and becomes identified with
 spirit inhabiting and feeding on graves. This creature is similar to the
 European ogre and becomes the referent for the loan-word from Arabic,
 "ghoul." (161-62)

The word "ghoul" arrives in Europe in the eighteenth century. (The earliest OED citation is in Beckford's gothic novel Vathek, published in French in 1786). In a Latin form, however, it was available much earlier. Ghtil is the word that was applied by Arab astronomers, in a cross-cultural act of naming, to one of the scariest women in European myth, the figure of Medusa whose appearance turned observers to stone. (Her Greek epithet gorge, [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "monstrous," almost seems a ghayn-sounding word.) She's so scary that she isn't even allowed into a narrative until Perseus comes to kill her. Her most famous representation in renaissance sculpture is Cellini's masterpiece in Florence in the alcove behind the Uffizi, where she lies already defeated, her trunk spurting bronze blood, beneath Perseus's feet and with her detached head in his hand (his eyes averted). The Arabic Medusa is memorialized in the star we call Algol, short for the Arabic phrase ra`s al-ghul, "the ghoul's head." Beside "gazelle," ghoul/Algol is one of the rare ghayn words to migrate into English. Algol, or [beta] Persei, is appropriately one of that class of stars called variable, whose magnitude vacillates between 2.3 and 3.5 over a cycle of sixty-nine hours (Allen 332).

Ka`b ibn Zuhayr's ghul, by contrast, is--in Sells' words--"a female subspecies of the jinni that would bewilder the desert traveler or the would-be lover through constant change of form (tallawun), thus becoming known as dhatu alwanin or dhu lawnayni: `she-with-many-guises' or `the double-guised'" (139-40). So what makes Su`hd in Ka`b's poem like a ghul (or like the star Algol) is that both represent changeability. Both undergo taghyir. Sells focuses particularly on imagery of change which conveys intensity of emotion, particularly emotion at such a pitch that it seems less about the woman than about the language used to describe her. Readers of Petrarchan poetry in Europe will recognize the style in question. And it is the ghul image which confirms it: "we encounter a moment of textual self-reference. By this I mean that the image evoked refers not only to a theme within the poem (the ghul), or symbolically, the changing loyalty of the beloved, but to the poem's own process of signification, the dissembling simile. What it speaks about is momentarily identical with what it speaks through." (Sells 139). Sells is discussing a very specific early tradition of poetry, but I think it is reasonable to add that the confusion of subject with style passes through one cultural era to another like water through a ghirbal (sieve). It is a habit of speech which will pass through the erotic poetry of the later Islamic cultures and will penetrate right into the tradition of European love poetry, famously in Petrarch, and through Petrarch's influence in the renaissance, which is still a powerful thread of western esthetics. The paradoxes of metamorphosis, the way patterns of change once perceived can seem static, like waterfalls holding a molded shape in place, have given every culture its greatest philosophical dilemmas. (That never seems to change.) Perhaps taghyir, "change," is the dominant scene-setting ghayn word.

Gharb

The Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of the most influential critics of the Shah's regime in the 1960s, devised a ghayn word to describe still another mode of transformation, a shift of consciousness and of values that simply didn't have a word to grasp it. The book in which it appeared was so powerful it couldn't be printed legally for years. The word he devised, the title of the monograph, was Gharb-zadegi, "struck by the West," on an analogy with a series of words in which the common participle suffix -zadeh, stricken or hit, the past participle of zadan, suggests a physical affliction. Gharb means "west"; -zadeh here means "afflicted."

 I say that Gharb-zadegi [Weststruckness] is like cholera. If this seems
 distasteful, I could say it's like heatstroke or frostbite. But no. It's at
 least as bad as sawflies in the wheat fields. Have you ever seen how they
 infest wheat? From within. There's a healthy skin in place, but it's only a
 skin, just like the shell of a cicada on a tree. In any case, we're talking
 about a disease. A disease that comes from without, fostered in an
 environment made for breeding diseases. (Al-e Ahmad 21/Gharbzadegi
 [Weststruckness] 11)

The process he sets out to describe, whereby one culture meets another and subtly changes its values and tastes, is harder to grasp than it may seem. Twenty-one years after Edward Said's Orientalism (a powerful act of naming with a point of view complementary to Al-e Ahmad's), I still fear we haven't really visualized the process with sufficient precision. As Hamid Dabashi has pointed out, Al-e Ahmad can't avoid, even as he develops the implications of his own term, giving it a deeply western infusion. The more he posits western influence and Shi'ite culture as polar opposites, the greater risk of reducing his norm to the same level as the outside influence: "The mere juxtaposition of `Islam,' which could not be an `ideology' in its own sacred self-understanding, and `Ideology,' which, by definition is a postreligious proposition, `false' in its Marxist stipulation, belies the contradiction" (Dabashi 75). Al-e Ahmad locates his position between two ghayn words, gharb on the one hand and the authority of the gha`eb, the "unseen" or hidden twelfth imam (gha`eb since the second/ninth century, in the theological event called al-Ghayba al-kubra, usually translated as "The Greater Occultation").

The analogy between cultural contact and disease which opens the book suggests that cultural change is most threatening and fearsome when it is gha`eb. Comparisons between cultural processes and biological ones, like Spengler's analogy of cultures to mortal organisms which flower and decay, should always be suspect. (Cultures may use conscious images of organic growth to describe themselves, but their actual development unfolds according to other principles. Why logically would a culture imitate a physical organism?). On the other hand, Al-e Ahmad's analogy is not completely fanciful. The evolution of cultures often does seem to follow the blind patterns of the physical world, making useful a class of scientists like Jared Diamond or L. L. Cavalli-Sforza whose work spans multiple disciplines, bio-chemistry or population biology, archaeology and linguistics. Students of evolution or even just readers of popular accounts of social development (like Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel), may feel as a source of real horror the way human life can take right angle turns and small, arbitrary differences between societies can launch a small population into dominance over its neighbors, like an epidemic invisibly taking hold. And sometimes the cultural taghyirat (changes) are not figurative. In the most notorious example, the case of European colonialism in the New World, the mechanism of dominance is, simply enough, a disease; the threat is simply premature death to great numbers. The indigenous population of twenty million which could be found in the Americas, before the arrival of those creaky European sailboats in the fifteenth century, was reduced to one million primarily by an unplanned environmental accident, that the density of population in European urban centers had allowed germs to develop (Diamond 211). The consequent immunities in the European population in turn allowed them to bring with them diseases for which the less densely settled communities were vulnerable. In other words, even if Columbus had made his voyage for charitable purposes--a kinder, gentler colonialism--the result would have been disastrous regardless. The immunities Europeans brought as invisible shields to the New World were of no particular advantage to them in their dealings with the Islamic communities, whose urban centers, with their consequent immunities, had been established very early, but technologies, literary styles, alphabets can have the same sneaky power as germs.

Ghazal

If we look hard at the ghazala in the story of the merchant and the `ifrit it can be a key to the way narrative works--a mysterious and compelling object that creates suspense and thrusts us into the events of the story--but it is at the same time one of the emblems of the lyric voice. In its simplest form the verbal stem gh-z-l means to spin wool, and not unrelatedly to woo or court. Ghazl means spinning or thread; with an extra vowel ghazal means flirtation but also erotic poetry. As ghazal migrates into Persian the semantic field narrows drastically and it becomes the word for a very strict generic design. As it continues its migration from Persian laterally into Turkish to the west and Urdu to the east, its consistency just solidifies.

The great moments of modernist poetry in Arabic turn on metamorphoses. In an extraordinary and powerful poem, Khalil Hawi imagines himself turned into a cave.

Wa ghadawtu kahfan fi kuhuf al-shatt

[And I've become a cave among the caves on shore--Hawi 14, 15]

A ghayn verb effects the transition to a speaking landscape, a massive entity which is both a being and an absence. Adonis, in the 1962 prose poem which opens his manifesto of a new poetry (Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi), describes his alter ego "The Knight of Strange words" entering the scene with the shapelessness of two resonant ghayn words ghaba and ghaym, forest and cloud, entities of epic size but porous:

 Yuqbilu a`zala ka-l-ghabati wa ka-l-ghaymi la yuraddu, wa amsi hamala
 qarratan wa naqala l-bahra min makanihi. (13)

 [He arrives unarmed. Like the forest (al-ghaba), like the cloud
 (ka-l-ghaymi) he cannot be warded off. Yesterday he lifted a continent and
 moved the sea from its place.]

Both poems, all three ghayn words, sketch a transforming protagonist, which in turn embodies a change in the poetic tradition (change both inside and outside the poem), and ultimately make an argument for the constant evolution of forms. With the ghazal, however, we are in another realm, a poetic space where the protagonist is plastered into a seemingly static scene.

Looking at the mysterious persistence of the ghazal form it is not immediately obvious to us what paradigm of change to apply. Once it takes root in Persian it keeps its shape for centuries. It becomes synonymous with lyric poetry--the only accepted form for lyric expression. Something in our western training wants to call it calcified, predictable, unnatural, a monument in the negative sense, an imported form which drives out the competitions like the cane toad in Australia, kudzu in the rivers of the southern U.S., or American films abroad. But there is something troubling about blaming a genre in itself. (The novel chokes out the indigenous prose forms when it overflows the European boundaries and starts up in Japan, the Middle East, Africa, India and Central America, and yet it mutates in those cultures, sometimes producing idiosyncratic masterpieces that compensate for the loss of local literary styles.) We could also just call the ghazal one of the real winners in literary history.

To follow the ghazal from its Arabic roots to the ghustun which branch out and wind through Persian, Turkish and Urdu, tracing the ghonche where it blossoms, requires a kind of attention that fits uneasily into an anglophone anthology. It's not that the formal requirements are difficult. A definition of the physical ghazal could be pretty short. (Not that the ghazal hasn't launched a few full-scale essays. In the Encyclopaedia of Islam it takes ten pages and three major critics to make their sketch.) We can sum it up briefly enough as a short poem (the dictionaries will sometimes name a number of lines--Shipley's Dictionary of Worm Literature specifies from 4 to 14 bayts) in monorhyme whose formal specifications are like a horny shell to protect the intimate emotion it expresses. By contrast, the ghazal we see translated in the anthologies is a vulnerable and unprotected creature, just the statement of an emotion without the armor (We're back at Adonis's image.) Western students coming to the poetry of the Middle East ought to be told that the bayt is a bivalved line of poetry which breaks into equal halves, and the ghazal is an abbreviation of the qasida form which retains the qasida's comb-like shape, in which the first two halves rhyme (this makes opening verses recognizable), that the rhyme, the poem's backbone, runs down the left-hand side of the page. Arabic, we need to tell our students, is sufficiently rich in rhymes that a qasida can run a regular marathon of lyric energy. Persian, like Turkish and Urdu, have fewer rhymes and can run a monorhyme course only in sprints. The process by which elements from an older tradition are retrofitted in the new one is not really accessible in translation. It is up to teachers, once they have explained what the qasida sounds like, to show (or at least to tell) how the ghazal, formally speaking, is made of bricks from the larger edifice. The ghazal takes the same knight's move of rhymes for a shorter ride, and develops an increasingly stylized thematic center as it passes from one Islamic culture to another.

The translator is on firmer ground discussing the characteristic subjects of the ghazal, since the thematic elements are almost all that survive the passage into English. The student sees quickly enough that ghazals are about intensity--the beloved has qualities in the extreme. "The most common form of the praise used in the ghazals," says Skalmowski, "consists in mentioning or describing some generally accepted upper limit of a positive quality and stating at the same time that the Friend depasses [sic] it by far" (273). A next step would be to add that the images come in twos--nightingale and rose, parrot and sugar, harvest and fire, lover and love object, all stretched out on a frame where the opposed images space themselves out. The frame is an intersubjective relation (or should we call it a threatened intersubjective relation): the separation between a lover and a love object.

Gham

One ghayn word which seems to recur with unusual force is gham, "sadness," from Arabic ghamm, which functions as a pivot between the opposites, as in the opening bayts of this Persian ghazal by Sa`di (1184-1291):

 An-ra ke ghami nist chun gham-e man che danad
 kaz shawq tawam dideh che shab mi-gozaranad

 Vaqt-at ke az pgi dar ayam ke hameh `omr
 Bari na-keshidam ke be hojran-e to manad. (489)

 He who has not sorrow like mine, how could he know
 How my eyes treasured your image all through the
 long night.

 Now must I be defeated, for all my life
 I have never borne such sadness. (Zonis [musical
 record])

We like to associate music with the lyric (for etymological reasons--since lurikos derives from the word for lyre. Pedagogically speaking, it is easier than a teacher might guess to introduce the ghazal as a song. In Arabic singing is after all a ghayn word, the verbal noun (masdar) of the second form of gh-n-y, ghina. The great collection of poets' biographies is the 10-century Kitab al-aghani (The Book of Songs) by Abu-l-Faraj al-Isfahani. Ghazals are still sung. Indeed any anglophone student can appreciate the passage from Sa'di quickly enough by listening to the performance by the great Iranian singer Khatereh Parvaneh in the second volume of an old Folkways record called The Classical Music of Iran: Dastgah Systems. It is one of those moments when a widely available artifact makes Iranian culture tangible to us, and much more usefully than watching a film like Not without my Daughter or a spectacle like Andr6 Aggasi playing tennis. It is not just because we can hear a singer doing an improvisation with all the power of a Bessie Smith or an Aretha Franklin in American culture (and with a shatteringly powerful tar accompaniment), also because the editor of the record, Ella Zonis, adds an artful translation. It is a sensitive translation, though it passes over the repetitive insistence of ghami nist chun gham-e man "[he has] no sorrow like my sorrow," makes the word "sorrow"/gham more clearly the real subject of the poem, the marker that sets the narrator apart. It gives a name to the emotion, a handle by which to pick it up conceptually. Gham is the ticket of admission, the tint that colors the world inside the poem and separates it from the outside world. The student will encounter a series of words which designate a common emotion. Besides gham, "sorrow," there are hojran or joda`i, "separation," or the other ghayn word ghossa (as in Hafez's "Dush vaqt-e sahar az ghossa najat-am dadand"/"Last night at dawn I was saved from sorrow"). Ghayra (Persian ghayrat), "jealousy" (from the same stem as ghayyara and ghayr) is often the source of gham; sometimes it is ghorur--the loved one's pride. Sometimes the only communication between the poet and love object is the ghobar (dust) in front of their door. (As Hafez asks the breeze in a famous ghazal, "Agar chonan ke dar an hazrat-at na bashad bar/bardye dideh biavar ghobari az dar-e dust"; "If you are not allowed in,/just bring for my eyes some dust for the friend's door.") And since the emphasis is on separation, the realm of the invisible, the ghayb becomes a characteristic term for the other half of the moeity, the place one tries to access. But a glance through the concordances reveals that it is gham which dominates.

Gham works to set the speaker apart, but it does it so regularly, in poem after poem, that it becomes a universal emotion too. Thus the term gham-e zamana, the sorrow of passing time, or perhaps just Weltschmerz, as in the opening of another poem by Hafez (1319-1390).

Gham-e zamana ke hich-ash karan na-mibinam dava-sh joz may-e chun arghawin na-mibinam. (Correale, ed. 350)

[For the unbounded sorrow of zamana I see no cure except scarlet wine (Saberi, trans. 358)]

Even in a celebratory poem gham still lurks as a background presence, defining the mood by its absence, or perhaps just distance:

 Resid mozhdeh keh ayyam-e gham na-khahad mand Chenin na-bud-o chenin ham
 na-khahad mand (Correale, ed. 176)

 [The glad tidings came that the days of sorrow will not remain./As they did
 not before, nor will they remain now. (Saberi, trans. 179)]

The ghazal may be a small edifice, but over the course of generations those little containers have come to be piled atop one another in a dizzying tower. It is during a ghayn dynasty, the Ghaznavids (whose capital Ghazna is now a truck stop on the road from Qandahar to Kabul), that the ghazal took root in Persian, as a celebration of court life between the tenth to the twelfth centuries. The great age of the ghazal will continue in Iran until the seventeenth Century, migrating from courts to the east and west--the city of Shiraz sheltering two major poets in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Moghul courts in India attracting them in the sixteenth and seventeenth.

Gham is a vein which will not give out any time soon. It is still going strong in the fifteenth/sixteenth-century poet Fighani, in the opening of a tour de force with a particularly difficult rhyme. Gham-farsada is a compound meaning "worn down with gham":

 Ta be kay khirqa bandam jism-e gham-farsada?
 (Losensky 364)

 [How long will I cloak this body, worn with grief?
 (Losensky 298)]

And when the ghazal passes into third and fourth languages gham continues to provide the dominant note. The first poem in the University of Texas anthology of Ottoman ghazals, by the poet Nesimi (d. ca. 1404) ends:

 Mudde'i yanar dimi [??] gamda Nesimi bell
 Gamda yanan yari yar cunki sever yanaram. (Andrews 271)

 [Those who speak ill say Nesimi is burning with grief
 [gamda], it's true/For he who bums with grief, the
 beloved loves him deeply--so deeply I bum. (Andrews
 27]

Gamda is the Turkish version of our word with a prepositional suffix, still recognizable and still a basic word in Turkish. (G.L. Lewis's grammar uses gain as its example of a g- word. Though in contemporary Turkish that is an English G rather than the ghayn sound, we recognize it as the same semantic building block.) Yanmak, the verb to burn, is the dominant image, but gam, the emotional kindling, is repeated to anchor Nesimi's emotion in the ghazal tradition. Even early in the history of the Turkish ghazal the paradox is already in place which makes the negative experience positive: the pain of separation becomes itself an intermediary with the absent love object.

Ghalib

Two prominent poets have taken the ghayn epithet Ghalib, "the victorious one," for a pen name, and two have particularly important roles in post-Persian traditions. One of them is the Turkish poet generally thought to be the last great Ottoman master, Mehmed Es`ad (1757-1799), the author of the famous mystical allegory called Husn wa `Ishq, (Beauty and Love). He was optimistic enough about his mystical powers to describe himself in a ghazal eulogizing the Sufi martyr Mansur al-Hallaj as a tour-guide of the ghayb, the unseen, "Reh-dan-1 gaybam" (Andrews 304). The other Ghalib is Mirza Asadullah Khan (1797-1869), who holds roughly the same reputation among speakers of Urdu in India and Pakistan as Hafez among speakers of Persian. The melancholy of his poems is in part the stylized melancholy built into the ghazal edifice, in part the lived melancholy of court patronage (not to mention the complex emotions of living through a crisis of colonial authority).

 Nuktah-chin hai gham-e dil us ko suna`e nah bane kya bane bat jahan bat
 bana`e nah bane (188)

 [(The beloved) is a nit-picker: the grief of the heart (gham-e dil) would
 not be able to be told to him/her how would anyone's work get done, where
 excuses/ explanations would not be able to be made? (Trans. with the help
 of Frances Pritchett and Farooq Hamid)]

One feels that the beloved is a little like a critical reader. The vertiginous layers of meaning in a Ghalebian verse almost seems to be the subject of the line. The gham which is so hard to fathom is at least familiar as the key word in Persian and Turkish, though transcription in Roman letters requires a dot over the G to distinguish it from the aspirated G (a G plus an H) so familiar in Urdu and its relative Hindi.

A recent article by the poet Agha Shahid Ali attempts to usher the ghazal into the anglophone world. He cites a 1990 ghazal by John Hollander, to show that an English poem is possible which transcends vague exoticism and follows with some accuracy the formal constraints of the original form. He opens with a warning against the vague exoticism which sets a combative tone:

 First, to be teasingly petty, the pronunciation: It is pronounced
 ghuzzle, the gh sounding like a cousin of the French r, the sound excavated
 near unnoticeably from deep in the throat. So imagine me at a writers'
 conference where a woman kept saying to me, "Oh, I just love ghazaals, I'm
 gonna write a lot of g`zaals ..." (Ali 86)

He surmises that it has developed its standard pronunciation, ghazal, with the accent on the second syllable, on the model of French--like those people one sometimes hears in the line at Starbucks who pronounce the Italian word latte (a trochee) as if it were latte. He's right about Urdu. Like Turkish, it puts the accent on the first syllable. When Turkish speakers say it, it sounds slightly like the English word "guzzle." In Persian, however, where (as Ali acknowledges) the form takes its distinctive shape, the accent migrates to the last syllable like a nightingale to a rose. Ghazaal is pretty much exactly what a Persian speaker says, if not "g'zaal." Ali's testy opening move could keep a reader from pressing further into his article, but there's a moral here. It demonstrates how each culture in absorbing the ghazal loses track of the previous ones. The full structure the genre has traced across history seems invisible from inside.

In defense of Agfa Shahid Ali's position Urdu is today the language in which the ghazal form most flourishes. If it is an antiquarian form in Persian, revived from time to time, and if since 1928 it has been a suspect form in Turkish, a reminder of an oppressive cultural past, in Urdu or even Hindi popular poetry and song lyrics are still commonly in ghazal form. (A web page on ghazals points out which popular songs, such as a film song called "Manzile apani jagah hai," are in ghazal form.) The ghazal is most alive where it extended furthest east.

Ghurba

The ghayn-initiated word gharb, first half of gharb-zadegi, overflows its function into a complex of images. First of course it means "west," but in the form Maghrib it means specifically western North Africa, the edge of the Islamic world before Islam became an important force in Europe and the United States. The edge has extended further north across the straits of Gibraltar at one time even further than Gharnata, the capital we know as Granada. Ghurub means the setting sun, giving the term the same melancholy that it conveys in European tradition. The transition from west to just strange is no particular jump. And so the adjective form gharib simply means strange, foreign or alien. (In the Turkish form Garip it is the title of a monumental 1941 collection of poems by the modernist poet Orhan Vali.) A Persian variant, Gharibeh, is the title of Rahmat Mostafavi's Persian translation of Camus's L'Etranger. Ghurba is in our era a word of particular significance in the Arab world because it means exile and homesickness. But gharib and ghorbat were already key words in the ghazal.

The constellation we know as Corvus, between Virgo and Hydra, Koraks in Greek, is in western tradition the crow or raven, in Arabic al-ghurab. The ghurab in Islamic tradition is the bird which taught Qabil how to bury his brother Habil (Qur'an 5.34). Richard Hinckley Allen suggested that it had suggestions going further back into Mesopotamian myth connecting it with the monstrous Tifimat, out of whose body the universe was carved, "one of the monster ravens of the brood of Tiamat" (181). We can imagine reasons that ghurab, as a bird of bad omens, could be connected with the root gh-r-b. The Persian equivalent of ghurab is kolagh. The ghayn is in a different place, but they all seem a bit like their Latin and Greek counterparts, perhaps molded by an onomatopoeia approximating the sound it makes.

Ghayn

Ghayn, along with qaf and its visual twin `ayn comprise the guttural class of letters that have a bad name in anglophone popular culture. Formal Arabic lacks G (as it lacks a ch-), so that Chicago is transliterated on maps of the United States as [ARABIC TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Shikaghu. Moving in one direction ghayn is simply the closest approximation for our G. For some reason when anglophone readers hear Arabic or the other languages of the Arabic alphabet they put a judgmental apparatus in place whereby the gutturals are uncivilized, too deep for normal communication. The Diane Keaton character in Woody Allen's film Manhattan pronounces Van Gogh in the Dutch fashion, and when he comments that "she sounds like an Arab" the audience is evidently expected to react with laughter. The same attitude seems to have predated Woody Allen, even among speakers of Arabic. Wright's 1859 translation of Caspari's grammar of Arabic describes it with what sounds like distaste. "[ARABIC TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] a guttural g, accompanied by a grating or rattling sound, as in gargling, of which we have no equivalent in English," though "the g of the modern Greeks, the Northumbrian r, and the French grasseye, are approximations to it" (6). When we hear a French r the usual response is to consider it elegant. (The language that gets the reputation among anglophones of being "guttural" is, surprisingly, German.) No sound is intrinsically beautiful or not, but I think we would be right to say that in the context of Persian or Arabic, and no doubt the other languages, the effect of ghayn can be both beautiful and elegant.

The phenomenology of ghayn words might start with the feeling of saying them. Ghayn is a gentle sound: when words issue from it they seem to go forth from the interior to the outside world. Linguists tell us that ghayn is a voiced postvelar, sometimes uvular fricative (the voiced equivalent of unvoiced kha), and one consequence is that it is a prolonged sound for which we open our mouths further than with qaf or kaf. Gham, consequently, feels a self-contained unit, since saying ghayn opens the phonological apparatus and saying mim closes it. To say the word ghazal, whether in an Arabic, Persian or Turkish context, is to feel the sound zigzag. The Z is focused at the front of the mouth, the L sound diffused into a broader sound, located further back and upward. It is like skipping rocks.

There may be a phenomenology of position whereby ghayn creates a different effect depending on where it pops up. Words that end with ghayn feel conclusive, perhaps because they are traveling back into the interior of the sound-making apparatus: bagh, garden, cheragh, lamp, tigh, blade. They all feel, I would argue, as if they were concepts with sharp outlines. Or is it a visual effect that makes garden and lamp seem enclosed, the blade seem to stop abruptly in its motion, as the terminal ghayn curls back around itself with the leftward swoop? Internal ghayn visually seems to shrink to a pair of tiny edges. Spoken, the Turkish ghayn tends to disappear, as in [u.sup.a]ur, "good luck/which comes out like a single prolonged syllable, "oor," or the title [a.sup.a]a (spelled with a qaf in Persian), which feels almost like two alifs standing side by side. The orthography stays to remind us of the letter which is gha`eb, like a conversation we might carry on with a friend two years after he has died.

Perhaps the best way to conclude an inconclusive divagation on a traveling ghayn is to print the many forms of the letter as it is written in different scripts that were developed over centuries by calligraphers and masters of penmanship.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Works Cited

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Michael Beard is a co-editor of Edebiyat: A Journal of Middle Eastern Literature. His most recent book is a translation of poems by the Iranian poet Esmail Khoi, Outlandia: Songs of Exile (in collaboration with Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak). He teaches Literature at the University of North Dakota.

Anna Boghiguian is an established artist who has been exhibiting consistently over the past twenty years in Egypt, Canada, Greece, and France. Her work is represented in several collections including the Institut du Monde arabe in Paris. Boghiguian is a graduate of the American University in Cairo and has a B.A. in art and music from Concordia University in Canada. Her experiences include both designing book covers and illustrating works by Naguib Mahfouz, Constantine Cavafy and Tom Lamont, among others.