SOURCE: "The Ghazal Itself: Translating Ghalib," in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1992, pp. 219-32.

In the following essay, Nairn discusses five couplets belonging to a ghazal Ghalib wrote before he was nineteen, providing both the transcripted Urdu and free prose translation. The ghazal is considered a typical Ghalibean one and, in the earliest manuscript, an autograph.

For centuries, the ghazal has been a major genre of poetry in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu. A ghazal usually consists of five or more couplets, sharing meter and rhyme. The rhyme itself may be in two parts: the qawāfi¹ (sing., qāfiya), which are structurally similar words with rhyming final syllables, followed by the radīf which form a fixed rhyme consisting of one or more words. Not every ghazal contains a radīf, but every ghazal must have a unifying set of qawāfi. The opening couplet...