Trans­la­ting Clas­si­cal Per­sian Poetry: Farid al-Din Attar’s “Ilahi-Nama”

December 28th, 2009 § 1

One of eight major works that can reliably be asc­ri­bed to Attar, Ilahi-Nama (Book of God or, some­ti­mes, Divine Book) has, accor­ding to Encyc­lo­pe­dia Ira­nica, been trans­la­ted once into English, by John A. Boyle in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani in 1961. Four of Attar’s eight works—Ilahi-Nama is part of this sub­set — are mys­ti­cal narra­ti­ves, each one dea­ling with a dif­fe­rent aspect of Sufi thought and expe­rience. Ilahi-Nama’s sub­ject is zuhd, or asce­ti­cism, which Sufis unders­tand to mean a dis­ci­pli­ned stance of detach­ment and indif­fe­rence towards one’s desi­res so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the inte­rior world of human emo­tion dif­fe­ren­tia­tes Ilahi-Nama from the other of Attar’s poems with which it is often com­pa­red, Man­teq al-tayr (Con­fe­rence of the Birds), his best known work in English. The two poems are simi­lar in form (they are each frame sto­ries) and mes­sage (the key to enligh­ten­ment exists within each human being, not in the exter­nal world), but the fra­ming narra­tive of Man­teq al-tayr, an alle­gory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essen­tially a cri­ti­que of people’s need to find a mas­ter who will lead them on the path to true unders­tan­ding. Ilahi-Nama, on the other hand, is about lear­ning to mas­ter oneself.

The fra­ming narra­tive of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daugh­ter of the king of the peris (fae­ries); the second wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desi­res Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the sec­rets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son covets the ring Solo­mon used to con­trol demons; and the sixth son wants to mas­ter alchemy. As each son gives his ans­wer, the father tells sto­ries to illus­trate, first, how sha­llow and mate­ria­lis­tic the son is for wan­ting what he wants and, second, how the son should unders­tand his desire so he can use it on the path to enligh­ten­ment. None of the sons, howe­ver, accept their father’s les­sons at face value, arguing that he has misun­ders­tood their desi­res and that the les­sons he wants them to learn, the­re­fore, are mis­gui­ded. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Mar­juma,” for exam­ple — about a beau­ti­ful and righ­teous woman who, after her hus­band lea­ves on pil­gri­mage to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so over­come with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at nothing to have her — the son accu­ses his father of wan­ting to eli­mi­nate sex. “God for­bid[!]” the father replies, explai­ning that “The Tale of Mar­juma” illus­tra­tes how sex, pro­perly com­prehen­ded and ente­red into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achie­ves apotheo­sis,
sex gives birth to a love without limits;
and when this love is pushed by pas­sion to the edge
of its strength, spi­ri­tual love emer­ges; and when
spi­ri­tual love can grow no further, your soul
will vanish into the Beloved’s end­less­ness. (My translation)

Given that the sur­face of the narra­tive in “The Tale of Mar­juma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depra­ved and debauched men get their comeup­pance than one about the spi­ri­tual nature of sexua­lity, the son’s mis­rea­ding of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a rea­ding, howe­ver, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to pos­sess the woman give in to their desi­res without a strug­gle. They are, in other words, neither evil nor merely sla­ves to their desi­res; they are human and fla­wed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and willing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has punished them with a paraly­sis from which — in an irony that is at the core of the story’s mea­ning — they can be hea­led only by con­fes­sing to the woman everything they did to her. » Read the rest of this entry «

Thin­king About Con­doms for the First Time in a Long Time — 2

November 1st, 2009 § 0

Where I lived in the early 1970s, sixth grade was when boys got to see the movie – or maybe it was a narra­ted film strip with line dra­wings – about erec­tions, noc­tur­nal emis­sions, mens­trual periods and such (girls got to see it in fifth grade).1 Seventh grade, if I remem­ber correctly, was when they star­ted teaching about sex itself, which I assume would have inc­lu­ded a dis­cus­sion of birth con­trol, though I am not sure, since a paper­work mix-up pla­ced me in the health class that did not inc­lude sex edu­ca­tion. So I know I did not learn about birth con­trol there; nor, I am equally sure, did I learn about it in the yeshiva I star­ted atten­ding when I was in eighth grade, where the only classroom-based “sex edu­ca­tion” I remem­ber recei­ving was in Rabbi W’s all-boy gemara class. He would preach at us week after week about the evils of co-ed dan­cing – it was the sea­son of sweet 16 par­ties for the girls – and explain how it ine­vi­tably lead to unwan­ted tee­nage preg­nancy. (The boys and girls watch each other dan­cing, you see, and then they want to slow dance, and so they are touching each other, and then one thing leads to another and, soo­ner or later they find some­place dark, and before you know it, her belly is big and both their lives are rui­ned.) My class­ma­tes and I tal­ked about sex, of course, but since none of us were even thin­king about actually having it, what we tal­ked about ten­ded to be theo­re­ti­cal and had little do with prac­ti­ca­li­ties like pre­ven­ting an unwan­ted preg­nancy. Three inci­dents of such tal­king stand out in my memory, from 8th, 9th and 10th gra­des respectively.

I first lear­ned about the baseball-diamond-as-metaphor-for-sex in 8th grade, because the big ques­tion was whether or not, at someone’s bar mitz­vah to which I had not been invi­ted, Robert “got to second” with Sha­ron over or under the shirt. “Over or under,” of course, was a huge ques­tion, one that my class­ma­tes pon­de­red at great length, won­de­ring why she would let him get that far, how cool it was that he could get her to let him get that far; or maybe he didn’t have to do all that much per­sua­ding, maybe under­neath the “good girl” image that Sha­ron so care­fully cul­ti­va­ted was a whole other per­son that those of us who knew her only in school had never met; and did this make her a “slut,” and how, pre­ci­sely, did get­ting that far, did her let­ting him get that far, obli­gate him to her in terms of com­mit­ment; and what the hell – some peo­ple were smart enough to ask – did com­mit­ment mean in ninth grade anyway?

I could not ima­gine why what Robert and Sha­ron did or did not do with each other was anyone else’s busi­ness, nor did I think that the ques­tion of when a girl step­ped over the line and became a “slut” was anything other than stu­pid, but I was new to the school, though, which meant no one thought my opi­nion mat­te­red very much, and so I was almost never inc­lu­ded in these con­ver­sa­tions. Still, I do remem­ber one time that I spoke up, asking – in res­ponse to I don’t remem­ber what – some far-less-articulate ver­sion of the follo­wing ques­tions: The whole point of touching a girl’s breasts is to bring her plea­sure, right? What is wrong with Sha­ron wan­ting that plea­sure or with Robert wan­ting to give it to her? And why are we tal­king about it like Robert was run­ning bases and Sha­ron was pla­ying (inef­fec­tive) defense? You make it sound like sex is a com­pe­ti­tion that the girl has to pre­tend to lose, just a little bit at a time, in order for both peo­ple to get what they want.

I was not naïve. I knew that boys did in fact put “notches on their bed­posts” depen­ding on how far they got with any par­ti­cu­lar girl, and I unders­tood that girls who went too far put that hard-to-pin-down thing called their repu­ta­tion at great risk. I knew these things, howe­ver, as facts, and while I accep­ted them as infor­ma­tion I nee­ded to know about how the world wor­ked, I did not really unders­tand them, and, more to the point, I did not like them. Any­way, no one said anything when I was finished tal­king. All I have is a pic­ture of my class­ma­tes’ faces tur­ned towards me in a momen­tary, non-comprehending stare, and then they tur­ned back towards each other and con­ti­nued tal­king in the terms that were rele­vant to them. » Read the rest of this entry «

  1. I have moved this post over from my other blog. (Click for Part One.) This way, when I finally get around to wri­ting Parts 3 and 4, they will all be in the same place. I see each post in this series as one sec­tion of a sin­gle piece of wri­ting, not as a disc­rete essay unto itself. As a result, while each sec­tion may con­tain its own argu­ment, it is not really pos­si­ble to know whether an issue that you feel is impor­tant will or will not be left out of the argu­ment made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. I cer­tainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an ino­cu­la­tion against cri­ti­que, but given the modu­lar nature of pos­ting to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find your­self won­de­ring, and com­men­ting on, why I have not addres­sed something you feel needs to be addres­sed. Thanks. Also, to pro­tect the pri­vacy of the indi­vi­duals invol­ved, some names have been chan­ged and some iden­tif­ying details have been fic­tio­na­li­zed.

Thin­king About Con­doms for the First Time in a Long Time — 1

October 27th, 2009 § 3

Recent events in my life1 have star­ted me thin­king deeply, for the first time in many years, about con­doms and what it means to use them. Not that I have fai­led to take con­doms seriously. I have worn them when I nee­ded to, refu­sed to have inter­course when they were not avai­la­ble, and I have a ten-year-old son who knows what con­doms are and why, all else being equal, ever­yone who has sex should use them. I am, though, also old enough to remem­ber (and boy does it feel strange to use that expres­sion) when safe sex was pretty much exc­lu­si­vely about birth con­trol. I might have lear­ned that using con­doms would help keep me from catching or trans­mit­ting gonorrhea or syphi­lis, the only two STDs I knew about at the time, but I’m not sure. Ins­tead, the focus in my sexual edu­ca­tion when I reached puberty was on the need for a young cou­ple plan­ning to have non-procreational sex to do everything they could to pre­vent the woman from beco­ming preg­nant, and that meant, for men, being willing to wear a con­dom unless the woman was on the pill, using a diaph­ragm or had an IUD.

It did not occur to me that there might be more to pre-AIDS male hete­ro­se­xual res­pon­si­bi­lity than simply kee­ping a barrier bet­ween my semen and the body of the woman in whom I would other­wise have left it until I was having sex regu­larly with a woman I thought I was falling in love with – we were each in our early 20s and using only con­doms – and I rea­li­zed I did not know what she would do, or even what she thought she would do, if she became preg­nant. Con­doms, after all, do fail. I was as cer­tain as I could be that I did not want to become a father, but I was also cer­tain that the ulti­mate choice of what to do if she did become preg­nant was hers. So, if a con­dom did fail, it sud­denly occu­rred to me, and she deci­ded not to have an abor­tion, I would be a father whether I wan­ted to or not. I knew I’d do my best to live up to the res­pon­si­bi­li­ties that fatherhood would bring with it, but I did not think my rela­tionship with that woman would sur­vive. Not only would I have resen­ted her for having made the deci­sion that made me a father, but I did not yet know if the love I was begin­ning to feel for her was, as they say, a love that would last, and having to be parents to a child – for­get whether or not we would have, or could have, got­ten married – was not the cir­cums­tance under which I wan­ted to find out.

I will not retell here the story of what hap­pe­ned when I tried to talk to my girl­friend about my con­cerns, except to say that I was com­ple­tely unpre­pa­red for her to tell me she had no idea what she would do if she got preg­nant. It wasn’t that I expec­ted her to know with 100% cer­tainty what action she would take, or that I was loo­king for some kind of con­trac­tual agree­ment that would insu­late me if she at first said she would have an abor­tion and then chan­ged her mind; nor was I thin­king that the only ans­wer accep­ta­ble to me was the one I hoped she would give, i.e., that she would have an abor­tion. What I wan­ted, first and fore­most, was that we should talk, openly and honestly, and then, once each of us knew where the other stood, we could make a deci­sion about what we should do in res­ponse. It had never ente­red my mind, though, that the per­son who would be preg­nant if preg­nancy hap­pe­ned would even think about star­ting to have sex without some sense of what she would do.

Given that my girl­friend had not thought about this, or at the very least was unwi­lling to tell me what she thought about this, I did not see how we could con­ti­nue having sex, or, to be more pre­cise, how I could con­ti­nue having sex, kno­wing first that our fuc­king put me at risk of beco­ming an unwi­lling father and, second, that if I did become an unwi­lling father, it would pro­bably mean the end of our rela­tionship. I’d been very happy with the sex we were having before we star­ted fuc­king; I assu­med my girl­friend felt the same way; and I saw nothing wrong with rolling things back to our pre-intercourse days until we were able to talk about this. I wan­ted to be with her, plain and sim­ple, and that desire far out­weighed for me the plea­su­res of put­ting my latex-covered penis in her vagina. So, more or less – at my insis­tence, not hers – we stop­ped fuc­king. » Read the rest of this entry «

  1. I have moved this post over from my other blog, and I will even­tually move Part 2 here as well. This way, when I finally get around to wri­ting Parts 3 and 4, they will all be in the same place. I see each post in this series as one sec­tion of a sin­gle piece of wri­ting, not as a disc­rete essay unto itself. As a result, while each sec­tion may con­tain its own argu­ment, it is not really pos­si­ble to know whether an issue that you feel is impor­tant will or will not be left out of the argu­ment made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. I cer­tainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an ino­cu­la­tion against cri­ti­que, but given the modu­lar nature of pos­ting to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find your­self won­de­ring, and com­men­ting on, why I have not addres­sed something you feel needs to be addres­sed. Thanks. Also, to pro­tect the pri­vacy of the indi­vi­duals invol­ved, some names have been chan­ged and some iden­tif­ying details have been fic­tio­na­li­zed.

Repost: A Per­so­nal Story About Rape

September 25th, 2009 § 2

I ori­gi­nally pos­ted this in res­ponse to a con­ver­sa­tion about rape that was hap­pe­ning over at Alas, A Blog about rape, spe­ci­fi­cally about why some women have a hard time recog­ni­zing rape as rape. Something about that con­ver­sa­tion – I don’t remem­ber what, and I don’t really feel the need to go back and read through the entire thread – made me think of the first time I had sex and how coming to terms with that expe­rience rai­sed for me some really inte­res­ting ques­tions that, while abso­lu­tely derai­ling in a thread about women and rape, were nonethe­less impor­tant to think about. This has been, con­sis­tently, the most popu­lar post on the older ver­sion of It’s All Con­nec­ted, and so I am repos­ting it, with some small edits, here.

I lost my vir­gi­nity when I was six­teen with the eighteen-year-old girl who lived on the first floor of the buil­ding next to my grandmother’s. As soon as our rela­tionship star­ted to become phy­si­cal — and this was my first sexual rela­tionship ever — I asked her if she was a vir­gin. She told me yes. I told her I was as well and that I wan­ted to stay that way. My posi­tion had nothing to do with morals. I knew myself, and I knew that I was not ready for the level of inti­macy or the risk of unwan­ted preg­nancy that inter­course repre­sen­ted. She told me that she felt the same way, and so our phy­si­cal rela­tionship con­sis­ted of all the things you can do without losing your vir­gi­nity. One time, howe­ver, as she was making love to me, she clim­bed on top of me, and by the time I unders­tood what was hap­pe­ning, I was inside her and both the power of the phy­si­cal sen­sa­tion, which was overwhel­ming, and my own con­fu­sion, which was overwhel­ming as well, made it impos­si­ble for me to find a place within myself from which to tell her to stop or to push her off me.

I did not like how empty I felt when we were finished, and I told her so. I had thought – assu­ming we’d deci­ded that we wan­ted to be each other’s first – that we would plan the loss of our vir­gi­ni­ties, and so I figu­red that the sex had hap­pe­ned because we’d each, sepa­ra­tely, got­ten carried away in the moment. I knew that nothing in the way I’d beha­ved would have sig­ni­fied to her anything other than my enthu­sias­tic par­ti­ci­pa­tion, so I was not trying to accuse her of anything. Still, I was disap­poin­ted that my first expe­rience of inter­course was one I had not wan­ted to take place. I told her this as well, assu­ming that since she too was a vir­gin, she would at least unders­tand how I felt, even if she did not feel quite the same way. What I wan­ted, in other words, was to talk about what had hap­pe­ned, to make sense of it in a way that would bridge the gap that, to me at least, had ope­ned bet­ween us. My friend, howe­ver, res­pon­ded in a way that shut that pos­si­bi­lity down pretty much com­ple­tely. If I hadn’t wan­ted to have sex, she told me, I should have told her to stop. Besi­des, who did I think I was kid­ding? I was no dif­fe­rent from any other guy. The only rea­son I’d said I didn’t want to have sex was that I was afraid I wouldn’t know how to do it right. » Read the rest of this entry «

Where Am I?

You are currently browsing the Masculinity category at Richard Jeffrey Newman.