See Syllabus
The Ghazal is one of the most culturally cherished and celebrated poetic genres for the expressions of love, beauty, and spirituality in Persian (as well as Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, and Pashto). We will read, discuss, translate, and enjoy Persian Ghazals by Rumi (d. 1273), Saʿdi (d. 1291), and Hafiz (d. 1390), towering figures whose verse has inspired global audiences well beyond the Persian language and the time periods and cultural geographies to which they belonged. The aesthetic norms and sensibilities cultivated by Persian-using poets in the course of a thousand years were not native to any single culture or locale; they were part of a transregional (and now transnational) literary culture. Together, we will unpack their poems linguistically and rhetorically, translate them into English, and discuss their approaches to beauty, love, and spirituality. Persian 455 is taught as a content-based language course, meaning we study Persian in order to better understand a specific topic— in this case Ghazal poetry.
A majles of ghazal recitation as rendered by ChatGPT (with some Orientalist overtones, thanks tech bros)