St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies 51 Panel Two. Written Traditions, Literature and Folklore of Afghanistan... of Afghanistan’s cultural history that stretches beyond national boundaries and accounts for the historical networks linking Afghanistan with the rest of South Asia. Ekaterina Pischurnikova (Faculty of Asian and African Studies, St Petersburg State University, St Petersburg, Russia) Composition Structure of Hamid Momand’s Ghazals The report is devoted to the principles of the compositional organization of ghazals that are part of the poetic collection of the Afghan classical poet of the end of the 17th — the first third of the 18th century ‘Abd al-Hamid Momand. In Hamid’s divan, polythematic and monothematic ghazals are represented in approximately equal proportions. For the majority of polytematic ghazals, the semantic isolation of the beits included in it is typical, with the absence of an obvious logical connection between them. The integrity of such works is provided by associative links, series of related images, and also due to the structural elements of the form: meter, rhyme system, epiphraph (redif), the repetition of lexical and grammatical structures. From this point of view, Hamid’s poly-thematical ghazal is interesting. “So I’m immersed in the thought of my beloved...” Each its beit is semantically autonomous, and the structural unity of the work is supported not only by the redif ḍūb (‘submerged’, ‘drowned’), but also due to a number of images associated with the water element — tears, a source of living water, waves, ocean, the Gulf of Oman, a ship, etc. Hamid Mohmand’s poetry is also characterized by polytypical ghazals, which break up into composition-semantic fragments, including two or more beits. The transition from one fragment to another in such ghazals also occurs at the level of associative links. So, in the love ghazal, “My unreasonableness corrected the wry cause of love...” with the redif kaj (‘crooked’, ‘curve’), we can distinguish three composition-semantic fragments, the first of which is the beginning of the ghazal and which is devoted to the theme of love. In the third beitt the poet makes a transition to the theme “love — reason”, which he develps in the next three couplets. In the seventh and eighth beits Hamid addresses the themes of the whims of fate and non-covetousness, and the ninth again is devoted to the theme of love. Examples of this kind of internal division of ghazals into compositional and semantic fragments are numerous in Hamid’s, they are characteristic for both love and instructive lyrics of the poet. For monothematic ghazals, several basic types of structural organization are characteristic. One of the most common ways is linking text units using keywords, with a keyword repeated in the redif. So, in the edifying ghazal by Hamid “Neither I nor you own this world...” the redif includes the theme phrase — “... this world”,