Mimi Khalvati (born April 28, 1944) is an Iranian-born British poet. She has published six collections with Carcanet Press, including Selected Poems (2000) and The Chine (2002).
She is the founder of The Poetry School, where she teaches. She is also co-editor of the Poetry School’s three anthologies of new writing published by Enitharmon Press, including I am twenty people! (2007), co-edited with Stephen Knight.
Her most recent collection, The Meanest Flower (Carcanet 2007), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a Financial Times Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. In 2006, she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Ghazal: IN SILENCE
Mimi Khalvati
Let them be, the battles you fought, in silence.
Bury your shame, the worst you thought, in silence.
At last my Beloved has haggled with death.
‘One more day’ was the pearl she bought in silence.
At night she heard the blacksmith hammering chains,
at dawn the saw, the fretwork wrought in silence.
‘The only wrong I’ve done is to live too long,’
my Beloved’s eyes tell the court in silence.
She’s as young as the month of Ordibehesht,
month of my birth, spring’s mid-leap caught in silence.
My Beloved, under the shade of a palm,
was the girl, the mother I sought in silence.
Loneliness is innumerate. Days slip by,
suns rise that daylight moons distort in silence.
The bell on her wrist was silent, her fingers
ice cold as the julep she brought in silence.
‘Mimijune! Mimijune!’ My Beloved’s voice
climbs three steep notes for tears to thwart in silence.
Three syllables of equal weight, equal stress,
dropped in a well, keep falling short in silence.
____
I wrote this poem as an elegy for my mother who died suddenly at the age of 92, after a night and a day in hospital. Living in England, I had been separated from her since childhood, but after the Iranian revolution my mother left Iran and settled in London, where we became very close. This is the first ghazal in which I have tried to observe, along with the requisite rhyme and refrain (qafia and radif), the disjunctive nature of the couplets. The suffix june/jan is commonly used as a term of endearment in Farsi, meaning dear, dearest, darling, but also life or soul.
=====
Ghazal: TO HOLD ME
Mimi Khalvati
I want to be held. I want somebody dear to hold me
in the wind and the rain when nobody’s near to hold me.
I want to be touched as the tree touches sky
and sky touches earth so horizons appear to hold me.
I want to strike out as a flock strikes for home
and home is now this, now that, warm hemisphere to hold me.
I want to uncoil a long river of hair,
my beloved to sleep, to cross sleep’s frontier to hold me.
I want all that has been denied me. And more.
Much more than God in some lonely stratosphere to hold me.
I want hand and eye, sweet roving things, and land
for grazing, praising, and the last pioneer to hold me.
I want my ship to come in, hopes to run high
before my back’s so bowed even children fear to hold me.
I want to die being held. Hearing my name
thrown, thrown like a rope from a very old pier to hold me.
I want to catch the last echoes, reel them in
like a curing-song in the creel of my ear to hold me.
I want Rodolfo to sing, flooding the gods,
Ah Mimi! as if I were her and he, here, to hold me.
__
Englishing the Ghazal: Agha Shahid Ali, the late Kashmiri-American poet who did so much to familiarize American poets with the ghazal, asked himself, while translating Faiz, if he ‘could make English behave outside its aesthetic habits’. Faced with the same question, I am particularly challenged by the very aspects of the canonical ghazal which seem to contradict our aesthetic criteria for writing poetry.
The form itself is difficult enough: the monorhyme (qafiya), the refrain (radif) and, most alarmingly, the final ‘signature couplet’ which requires the author to mention him/herself by name or pseudonym. But how to use the form without the stratagems of disguise we expect in contemporary formal poetry? Using strict and fully audible rhyme; gratifying the reader’s expectation instead of subverting it; employing a syntax that invites the audience to ‘join in’ the refrain, much like the ‘hook’ in song lyrics; avoiding, in the absence of enjambment, metrical monotony – these are some of the technical challenges.
But thematically, there is the ‘disunity’ of the ghazal, in which couplets move around on a lateral plane – from the personal to the political, the meditative to the satiric – rather than in a linear, sequential line of logic, with only the rhyme and refrain to act as binding. This is still beyond me. Then there is the perilous question of cliché. Translating an aesthetic in which images are relished less for their quiddity
than for their emblematic power, using a diction that is colloquial but also aphoristic or rhapsodic – how can I do this in English without being corny? More dubious still, how can I, a woman poet, address the Beloved from a submissive, even subservient, position, without irony, and call myself a feminist?
I remember a very old and well-thumbed copy of Hafez an Iranian friend showed me, interleaved with countless post-it notes in varying shades of yellow. These, she explained, marked the many occasions in her life when she had consulted Hafez, as one would the I Ching, on their auspices. Her life and Hafez’s ghazals were forever inextricably linked. Mine, without my mother tongue, forever diminished. I long to english the ghazal and do what I might do if I were writing in my first language.