Turdi Farog‘iy: ghazals and muxammas

A muxammas is a poem made of five-line stanzas: in the first stanza all five lines rhyme, and in later stanzas the first four lines have their own rhyme and the fifth returns to the first stanza’s rhyme. In the muxammas in the textbook Turdi gives an autobiographical picture: he recalls “good times” past and feasts in the circles of free spirits, but now lives in exile, relatives have turned away, and he lives with pain and grief. The faithlessness of fate and time, that lack of worldly wealth has lowered his worth, that one whose word was once law is now an outcast – all are given through painful contrast. In one stanza the poet turns to the Creator for help. The last stanza speaks of the cunning of the Qirq clan’s chiefs and of his being forced to submit to the ruler of Jizzakh; the textbook stresses that the cause of the muxammas’ events is not strangers but his own people’s disunity and the chiefs’ self-importance. The muxammas has many devices such as metaphor, antithesis, simile and enumeration.