18 October, 3:00PM-5:00PM
105 Wilson Hall
Moderator: Prashant Keshavmurthy
About
We will spend this afternoon tracing the journeys of the ghazal from Persian and Urdu into English, taking this as an occasion to explore issues of the politics and poetics of translation in the contexts of 18th century British Orientalism and the politics of recognition in 20th century North America; the importance of the non-European lyric in translation to new moods, new forms and new themes in Anglo-American poetic modernism; the family resemblances between the earliest poetry in an Italianate vernacular, that of 13th century Sicily, and the Arabic poetry of foregoing Umayyad and Norman Sicily. This workshop assumes no prior familiarity with the ghazal or languages and literatures other than English and will thus serve as an introduction to the ghazal to those seeking it, especially as it entered English literary consciousness.Â
