Abstract
Cultural and literary crossing-over has been going on since ancient times. However, as the pace of globalization increased in the twentieth century, literary forms and genres peculiar to one tradition paved their way into numerous others. Just as the Urdu novel imbibed narrative techniques from the Euro-American fictional genre, many poets from the western hemisphere too have inter-textualized Urdu-Hindi generic forms. Of all such inter-textual influences, perhaps the most intriguing is the case of the ghaẓal and its adaptations by a number of American poets. Initially only translations of Urdu ghaẓals of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Faiz Ahmad Faiz were introduced on the American literary landscape. Gradually, many poets started experimenting with the form in English writings. Writers like Adrienne Rich, Judith Wright, Jim Harrison, John Thompson, D. G. Jones, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour, and Max Plater among others emulated the ghaẓal form. However, coupled with the lack of understanding of the original form and of the native culture in which it evolved, the ghaẓal, it seems, remained an enigma for American writers. The breakthrough came with the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (19492001) in 1990. Ali’s greatest contribution to modern American poetry was his untiring effort to introduce the essence of the ghaẓal and to establish a permanent place for this genre in modern American poetry.
Dr. Muhammad Safeer Awan. (2016) Reception and Experimentation of the Urdu Literary Form: The Case of the Ghaẓal in America, Bunyad, Vol 7, Issue 1 .
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