A Travel of the Ghazal : Introduction to Mirza Ghalib’s Urdu Ghazals

This paper introduces Mirza Ghalib and explicates his three Urdu ghazals, translated into Korean with the assistance of Google Translate and an Urdu native student, by referring to Aijaz Ahmad’s literal translations, notes, and general explanations. Often, it is believed that an outsider with little knowledge of the source language cannot successfully translate the original text due to lexical, historical, and cultural limitations. Even if one manages to do so, such translations are often viewed with suspicion of containing errors. However, I have already addressed this issue in my previous paper, where I examined Ezra Pound’s translation of Li Bai’s poems from Ernest Fenollosa’s cribs and argued that a translation is another original, reflecting a translator’s creative imaginations and original expressions generated through a dialogue with the original author. In this respect I am to challenge the skeptics by translating Ghalib’s three ghazals into Korean, just as Adrienne Rich did: I too maintained the translation principles provided by Ahmad in the 1960s, who encouraged her to create ‘poetry’ instead of ‘academic translations’ by using his literal translations as base texts. Since Ghalib is unfamiliar to most Koreans, I begin this paper by providing brief biographical information about him and my own view on the uniqueness of Ghalib’s Urdu Ghazal. Then, with the acknowledgment of my limitations, I offer my Korean translations of three ghazals, followed by my explications. In doing so, I try to contextualize Ghalib in the history of British colonization. While I do not intend to argue for any direct British influence on Ghalib, I make a suggestion that his ghazals may offer new, interesting layers of interpretation when hyper-connected to British Romantic poets.