Zahra’s Para­dise. Here’s the first page:

Only chap­ter one is up so far, but it looks like it’s going to be a very good book. Go check it out.

Wri­ting in this past Thursday’s issue of The New York Times (February 4^th), Michael Kim­mel­man com­pa­res the Euro­pean tour on which the govern­ment of Mah­moud Ahma­di­ne­jad sent the Teh­ran Symphony Orches­tra to simi­lar tours on which the for­mer Soviet Union would send its own world-class per­for­mers, such Svia­tos­lav Rich­ter.¹ The con­certs these per­for­mers gave ser­ved both to dis­tract Wes­tern audien­ces from the dis­si­dents the Soviet govern­ment was exi­ling to the gulags and to force those audien­ces into “the moral com­pro­mise [that] atten­ding such pro­pa­ganda events” would require. Given that the Ira­nian symphony’s tour took place “around the time the Ira­nian govern­ment exe­cu­ted two more poli­ti­cal pri­so­ners, char­ging nine others with waging war against God, a capi­tal offense,“² it is likely that the Isla­mic Repu­blic was trying to imple­ment a simi­lar stra­tegy. Indeed, the title of the music the orches­tra per­for­med, “Peace and Friendship Symphony,” by Majid Ente­zami, would seem to make that stra­tegy expli­cit. Kim­mel­man, howe­ver, does not have kind words for the music, calling it “a four-movement jere­miad of mar­tial bom­bast and almost unfatho­ma­ble incom­pe­tence and silli­ness, ori­gi­nally per­for­med, accor­ding to Teh­ran Times, last February in Iran to cele­brate the 30^th anni­ver­sary of the revo­lu­tion [and] retit­led for this occasion.”

What struck me most about Kimmelman’s article, though, was not what he had to say about the simi­la­ri­ties bet­ween what Teh­ran was trying to do last month and what Mos­cow did during the Cold War, but rather what he had to say about the differences:

The dif­fe­rence now isn’t just that the Teh­ran orches­tra pla­ying a pathe­tic Peace and Friendship Symphony is such a far cry from Emil Gilels pla­ying Beethoven’s Empe­ror con­certo. More fun­da­men­tally, it’s that a tour by an anoin­ted symphony orches­tra from the other side barely regis­ters in the Wes­tern poli­ti­cal cons­cious­ness. In an Inter­net age when everyone’s sup­po­sedly savvy to crude pro­pa­ganda, the pre­sump­tion seems to be that the Ira­nian tour doesn’t even rise to the threshold of newsworthiness.

But this pre­sump­tion is a result of what the Ame­ri­can musi­co­lo­gist Richard Tarus­kin calls a com­mon fallacy. The fallacy, he has writ­ten, con­sists in tur­ning “a blind eye on the morally or poli­ti­cally dubious aspects of serious music,” as if “the only legi­ti­mate object of praise or cen­sure in art” is whether it’s good or not.

“Art is not bla­me­less,” Mr. Tarus­kin wri­tes. “Art can inflict harm.”

We take the blame-worthiness of art for gran­ted when it comes to popu­lar cul­ture, cri­ti­ci­zing Ava­tar, for exam­ple, for being yet one more movie about a white guy who saves a nature-loving peo­ple of color or the wri­ters of a show like Battle Star Galac­tica for how they write rape into the show’s narra­tive; but it is good to be remin­ded that no art, not even clas­si­cal music, is without poli­ti­cal sig­ni­fi­cance, that it too can be used as pro­pa­ganda, to rein­force, or to sub­vert, the sta­tus quo.

In the conc­lu­sion to his review, Kim­mel­man quo­tes an Ira­nian busi­ness­man living in Geneva. This man was angry because he kept “seeing Ahmadinejad’s face in the music.” He said, howe­ver, that his heart “goes out to the musi­cians. They’re vic­tims like the rest of us.“

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This is my cons­tant refrain these days when it comes to current events in Iran: I wish I had time to do more than write this little bit and link to a cou­ple of blog posts and artic­les worth rea­ding, but I’ve got too much else on my plate right now. Mas­soud Ali­moham­madi, from everything I have been able to gather, was a nuc­lear scien­tist who sup­por­ted the oppo­si­tion in Iran. The Ira­nian govern­ment has cons­truc­ted a narra­tive in which Ali­moham­madi was a sup­por­ter of the régime and he was killed by a car bomb that was plan­ted by the Mujahedin-e Khalq with the help of, of course, Israel and the Uni­ted Sta­tes. Here are links to a few pla­ces that have more infor­ma­tion, analy­sis and more links to further details:

• Gary Sick at Gary’s Choi­ces: Assas­si­na­tion in Tehran
• Homy­la­fa­yette: Teh­ran Uni­ver­sity Pro­fes­sor Mas­soud Ali­moham­madi Assas­si­na­ted: Fact and Fiction
• Frontline|Tehran Bureau: Bomb Kills Iran Nuc­lear Phy­si­cist Tied to Mousavi

I have been wor­king on a long post dea­ling with the poli­tics of Holo­caust ima­gery in lite­ra­ture and the Jewish com­mu­nity. It should be done soon. I’m hoping to write something more in depth about Iran when I am done with that.

Farid Al-Din Attar is one of the most impor­tant wri­ters in the Per­sian canon. Not only is he a major poet in his own right, but his work offers cru­cial insight into Sufi thought and expe­rience, while pre­fi­gu­ring other impor­tant poets like Rumi, Saadi and Hafez. As well, once trans­la­tions of clas­si­cal Per­sian lite­ra­ture began to appear in English in the 18^th and 19^th cen­tu­ries, Attar’s work — along with, among others, that of the three poets I just men­tio­ned — pla­yed an impor­tant role both in hel­ping the English-speaking world of the time unders­tand Per­sian and Isla­mic cul­ture and in brin­ging into English lite­ra­ture an influence felt by the likes of Matthew Arnold and Lord Byron, and that con­tem­po­rary wri­ters like Robert Bly con­ti­nue to find impor­tant. It is both iro­nic and a shame, the­re­fore, that only one of Attar’s major works, Man­teq al-Tayr, exists in a con­tem­po­rary trans­la­tion for a gene­ral English-language rea­dership, The Con­fe­rence of the Birds, published in 1984 by Afkham Dar­bandi and Dick Davis. Rea­da­ble, enjo­ya­ble and poe­ti­cally power­ful, The Con­fe­rence of the Birds is the kind of trans­la­tion we deserve of a lite­ra­ture that has influen­ced ours in such sig­ni­fi­cant ways. Unfor­tu­na­tely, wha­te­ver its merits on scho­larly grounds, the same can­not be said — at least not with the same enthu­siasm — for John Andrew Boyle’s out-of-print trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama, The Ilahi-Nama or Book of God, published by the Uni­ver­sity of Manches­ter Press in 1976.

In an essay called “Repre­sen­ta­tions of Attar in the West and in the East,” Chris­topher Shac­kle cri­ti­ci­zes Mar­ga­ret Smith’s 1932 trans­la­tion of Man­teq al-Tayr for being writ­ten “in a prose whose archaisms, inc­lu­ding bibli­cal ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, cover Attar’s stu­diously clear style with a patina of reve­rence….” (187). Boyle’s Ilahi-Nama suf­fers from the same weak­ness. Here, for exam­ple, is his ren­de­ring of the pas­sage in “The Tale of Mar­juma” where the woman bera­tes her brother-in-law for trying to have his way with her:

She said to him: “Art thou not asha­med before God? Dost thou thus show res­pect to thy brother?
Is this thy reli­gion and thy pro­bity? Dost thou thus keep trust for thy brother?
Go, repent, return to God, and eschew this wic­ked thought.”

That man said to the woman: “It is no use; thou must satisfy me at once,
Other­wise I will cease to con­cern myself about thee, I will expose thee to shame, I will slight thee.
Straigh­ta­way now I shall cast thee to des­truc­tion, I shall cast thee into a fear­ful plight.” (32)

As well, Boyle too often relies on a lite­ral­ness that ends up being unin­ten­tio­nally comic and/or almost impos­si­ble to com­prehend. The first line of the final sec­tion of the “Exor­dium,” in which Attar prai­ses and medi­ta­tes upon the great­ness of God — “Come, musk of the soul, open thy musk-bladder, for thou art the deputy of the Vicar of God” (27) — is an exam­ple of the for­mer. In “The Tale of Mar­juma,” to give an exam­ple of the lat­ter, when the female pro­ta­go­nist is on a ship at sea, about to be raped by the entire crew, she prays to God to save her. This is Boyle’s ren­de­ring of that scene:

When the woman lear­ned of these wic­ked men’s fee­lings, she saw the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood.
She ope­ned her mouth [and said]: “O Kno­wer of Sec­rets, pre­serve me from the evil of these wic­ked men.” (38)

The phrase “the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood” clearly rela­tes to the idea in Per­sian cul­ture that the liver, not the heart, is the seat of emo­tion, but what the phrase means, except in the vaguest of sen­ses, is far from clear. By way of com­pa­ri­son, here is my ver­sion of those lines:

When she lear­ned
what the men inten­ded, she tur­ned
and saw in the sea surroun­ding her,
filled with her heart’s blood, a liver
wide enough to hold all she felt.
Her mouth fell open. She knelt,
pra­yed: “Pro­tect me, Kno­wer of Sec­rets!
Save me from this wickedness.”

I make no claim that this is great poetry, or that there is no bet­ter solu­tion to the “heart’s-blood-liver” metaphor; and I am very aware that whether or not my trans­la­tion will endure is a ques­tion that only time and rea­ders will ans­wer, but the value of brin­ging Ilahi-Nama into 21^st cen­tury Ame­ri­can English poetry is not only, and not even pri­ma­rily, that it might be suc­cess­ful in these terms. Rather, the value lies in the sus­tai­ned enga­ge­ment trans­la­tion is — both in the wri­ting and the rea­ding — with another culture.

On the one hand, the value of such enga­ge­ment is, or ought to be, self-evident, requi­ring no further jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. On the other hand, howe­ver, given the current natio­nal and inter­na­tio­nal poli­ti­cal moment, it is, or ought to be, impos­si­ble to talk about trans­la­ting Per­sian lite­ra­ture without also tal­king about both the state of rela­tions bet­ween Iran and the Uni­ted Sta­tes and the poli­ti­cal unrest that has focu­sed world atten­tion on Iran since the con­tes­ted pre­si­den­tial elec­tions there in June 2009. Each of those dyna­mics demands that the peo­ple of the Uni­ted Sta­tes learn as much about the Ira­nian peo­ple, their cul­ture and their his­tory, as we pos­sibly can, espe­cially since our collec­tive igno­rance about Iran has been pro­found since diplo­ma­tic rela­tions bet­ween our two coun­tries ended after the Isla­mic Revo­lu­tion in 1979 – 80. Boyle’s trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama is not a text to which peo­ple are likely to go for that kind of lear­ning, most imme­dia­tely because it is out of print, but also because its archaic dic­tion and bibli­cal style is more likely than not to alie­nate them.

I am neither naïve nor arro­gant enough to assume that my trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama will by itself effect any change, large or small, in US-Iran rela­tions or that it will alter even one reader’s notions about Iran and/or Islam. I do know, howe­ver, that each trans­la­ted book made avai­la­ble to a rea­ding public inc­rea­ses the like­lihood of such change taking place. At the very least because it offers a radi­cally dif­fe­rent view of Islam from the ver­sion prac­ti­ced and pro­mul­ga­ted by the current Ira­nian govern­ment and can the­re­fore help to com­bat the anti-Muslim ste­reoty­pes currently in fashion, but even more sig­ni­fi­cantly because it is a great work of lite­ra­ture writ­ten by one of the world’s grea­test poets, whom we in the Uni­ted Sta­tes deserve to know bet­ter than we do, a new lite­rary trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama should be among the books making such change possible.

Sour­ces

ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. The Ilāhī-Nāma Or Book of God of Farīd Al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār. Trans. John Andrew Boyle. Per­sian Heri­tage Series, Vol. 29 Manches­ter: Manches­ter Uni­ver­sity Press, 1976.

Shac­kle, Chris­topher. “Repre­sen­ta­tions of Attar in the West and in the East: Trans­la­tions of the Man­tiq Al-Tayr and the Tale of Shaykh Ṣanʻān.” Attar and the Per­sian Sufi Tra­di­tion: The Art of Spi­ri­tual Flight. Eds. Leo­nard Lewi­sohn, and Chris­topher Shac­kle. Lon­don: I. B. Tau­ris, 2006. 165 – 93.

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 «

The only things we know for sure about the life of Farid al-Din Attar are that he was a phar­ma­cist and a native of Nisha­pur, Iran, where a monu­ment¹ to him that was built over his tomb at the end of the 15^th cen­tury CE still stands. The best evi­dence that we have pla­ces his birth in Nisha­pur in either 1145 or 1146; and scho­lars seem to agree that he died in Nisha­pur when he was well over seventy years old, at the hands of Mon­gol inva­ders, in April of 1221. The legends which grew up around him once his fame as a poet and mys­tic began to spread in ear­nest in the 1400s tell us something about the high esteem in which others held him and his work, but — except for the fact of how he ear­ned his living and his claim that he the­re­fore did not have to write the eulo­gies and other panegy­rics that court poets had to pro­duce to earn their keep — the work itself reveals next to nothing about the details of his life.

Attar wrote six major works of poetry and one of prose. The prose work, Tadh­ki­rat al-awliya (Memoirs of the Saints), is a collec­tion of bio­graphies of famous Sufis. The poe­tic works are Asrar-nama (Book of Mys­te­ries), Man­tiq al-tayr (The Con­fe­rence of the Birds)², Mushibat-nama (Book of Adver­sity), Mukhtar-nama (Book of Selec­tions), Divan (Collec­ted Poems), and the book por­tions of which I will be trans­la­ting, Ilahi-nama (Book of the Divine). Recog­ni­zed mas­ter­pie­ces though they are, none of these books ear­ned Attar much recog­ni­tion outside of Nisha­pur during his life­time. Only after he died, in the second half of the 13^th cen­tury, did peo­ple start to pay atten­tion in ear­nest to Memoirs of the Saints, and, as men­tio­ned above, it was not until the 15^th cen­tury that his fame as a mys­tic, a poet and mas­ter of narra­tive really began to spread.

The more peo­ple valued Attar’s work, the more they told sto­ries about him. There is, for exam­ple, a pro­bably apocryphal tale about the time that Rumi’s family came to Nisha­pur when Rumi was still a child. Attar — who was by then already an old man — imme­dia­tely recog­ni­zed in the young Rumi a uni­que curio­sity and inte­lli­gence. One day, accor­ding to this narra­tive, Attar saw Rumi follo­wing his father out of their house and said, “Look! There goes a sea cha­sed by an ocean!” This story also has Attar giving Rumi a copy of his Book of Mys­te­ries and, when Rumi’s family left Nisha­pur, saying to Rumi’s father, “One day your son will set fire to all for­lorn hearts” (Moyne & New­man 28 – 29).

The desire that there should have been a mee­ting bet­ween Attar and Rumi, cer­tainly one of the grea­test poets Iran has ever pro­du­ced, no doubt arose from Rumi’s own ack­now­ledg­ment of Attar as one of his spi­ri­tual and lite­rary mas­ters. About Attar, for exam­ple, Rumi wrote the following:

Attar was the spi­rit;
Sanai, its two eyes.
I am their shadow.

…

Attar has tou­red the seven cities of love;
I am still at the turn of the first alley. (Quo­ted in Moyne & New­man 29)

Rumi, in other words, loo­ked to Attar not only, and perhaps not even pri­ma­rily, as a lite­rary influence, but also as a spi­ri­tual one. Indeed, everything Attar wrote is devo­ted exc­lu­si­vely to Sufi prac­tice and ideas. As Leo­nard Lewi­sohn and Chris­topher Shac­kle write in their intro­duc­tion to Attar and the Per­sian Sufi Tra­di­tion: The Art of Spi­ri­tual Flight, “throughout all of [Attar’s] genuine collec­ted works, there does not exist even one sin­gle verse without a mys­ti­cal colou­ring [sic]; in fact, Attar dedi­ca­ted his entire lite­rary exis­tence to Sufism” (xix). This spi­ri­tual focus lies at the root of Attar’s impor­tance in both the East, where his sta­ture and influence are com­pa­ra­ble to that of John Mil­ton in the West, and the West, where the trans­la­tion and study of his work has not only influen­ced Wes­tern per­cep­tions of Iran and, more gene­rally, Islam, but has also ins­pi­red artists of all kinds. » Read the rest of this entry «

Edi­ted to add: Bahari has writ­ten in News­week a harro­wing and necessary-to-read account of his impri­son­ment. Go read it right now.

Maziar Bahari, a News­week jour­na­list, was held in pri­son for 118 days in Iran after the con­tes­ted elec­tions in June. His appea­rance on The Daily Show is worth watching:

I’ve been fee­ling guilty that I haven’t pos­ted about the recent goings on in Iran. Peo­ple were out in the streets pro­tes­ting again, and the basij were there to try to beat them back, and it’s impor­tant – espe­cially because of the nego­tia­tions hap­pe­ning now about Iran’s nuc­lear pro­gram – that we in the Uni­ted Sta­tes know that the oppo­si­tion move­ment in Iran has not simply retrea­ted. I just have not had the time to gather the pic­tu­res I have seen, the artic­les and wit­ness accounts that I have read, and write about them in a way that will make sense. So – and even this is late – I am repos­ting here something I wrote on my other blog¹ during the pro­tests in June.

Pro­tes­ters in Fer­dowsi Square after the June 09 elec­tions in Iran

The con­nec­tion bet­ween lite­ra­ture and poli­tics is always a dif­fi­cult one. Trea­ting poli­tics as if it were lite­ra­ture, poli­ti­ci­zing lite­rary texts, are stra­te­gies that peo­ple use to advance agen­das that are fun­da­men­tally poli­ti­cal, and often not pro­gres­sive in nature. Espe­cially in con­nec­tion with what is going on in Iran right now, when peo­ple are really dying and when the Ira­nian govern­ment is doing everything it can to iso­late the entire nation of Iran so that it (the govern­ment) can res­tore what it belie­ves should be the (clearly repres­sive) order of things, to talk about life imi­ta­ting art, to read what is going on in Iran through the lens of Iran’s own lite­ra­ture, has felt to me like a self-indulgent and gra­tui­tous inte­llec­tual exer­cise. Yet lite­ra­ture, and in this case spe­ci­fi­cally poetry, also helps peo­ple give mea­ning to their lives; it can ins­pire, and it can con­nect us to something lar­ger than our­sel­ves in ways that poli­ti­cal fee­lings, no mat­ter how strongly felt and/or acted upon, often can­not. And so, pre­ci­sely because peo­ple are really dying in Iran – because I really do believe, along with William Car­los Williams, that peo­ple die every day for lack of what is found in poetry – and pre­ci­sely because there is so much at stake over there, and because Iran is a cul­ture that loves and reve­res its poets, I have deci­ded to write this. Perhaps con­nec­ting the unrest in Iran not only to the spe­ci­fic his­tory of the Isla­mic Repu­blic and the revo­lu­tion out of which that repu­blic was born – which most analysts, rea­so­nably, are focu­sing on – but also to the Ira­nian cul­ture that is lar­ger and older than both the Repu­blic and Islam, will make a dif­fe­rence. What that dif­fe­rence might be, and to whom, I have no way of kno­wing, but I just don’t think it is mere coin­ci­dence that the current unrest finds echoes in a story Iran has been telling itself about itself for cen­tu­ries: the tale of Kaveh and Zahhak from the poem com­monly refe­rred to as Iran’s natio­nal epic, Shah­na­meh (Book, or Epic, of the Kings), part of which I am in the pro­cess of trans­la­ting. I will inc­lude my trans­la­tion at the end of this post.

Writ­ten by Abol­qa­sem Fer­dowsi in the 10^th cen­tury, Shah­na­meh tells the story of the Ira­nian nation by telling the story of its kings, from the nation’s mythi­cal begin­nings right up to the moment of the Mus­lim con­quest in the 7^th cen­tury CE. One of the the­mes that runs through the poem is the ques­tion of how to res­pond to an unjust ruler. The tale of Zahhak and Kaveh, which you will read below, is one of the narra­ti­ves that explo­res this theme. First, though, you need some backs­tory: Zahhak is Shahnameh’s first evil king. Son of an Arab monarch named Mer­das, Zahhak is sedu­ced by Eblis (the devil in these sto­ries) into killing his father to assume the throne, and he is even­tually cur­sed by Eblis with a ser­pent gro­wing out of each shoul­der, to which he must feed one human brain per night. In other words, he must kill two peo­ple a day in order to keep the ser­pents fed. As you might ima­gine, then, Zahhak does not turn out to be a bene­vo­lent ruler, and when he con­quers Iran – whose pre­vious king, Jamshid, made him­self vul­ne­ra­ble when he dec­la­red him­self a god and so lost the true god’s favor – Zahhak’s cruelty kicks into high gear.

The sta­tue of Fer­dowsi in Fer­dowsi Square, bedec­ked in green, during a rally, June 18

One night, Zahhak has a dream that dis­turbs him. When he asks his advi­sors to inter­pret it, they say that the dream fore­tells his des­truc­tion by a man named Feray­doun, who will kill him and assume the throne. Zahhak goes on a killing ram­page trying to hunt Feray­doun down, and though he is unsuc­cess­ful, he does manage to kill Feraydoun’s father. Finally, out of a kind of des­pe­ra­tion – and here is where, if you have not seen para­llels to what is going on in Iran until now, the para­llels start to get obvious – Zahhak sum­mons the prince of each pro­vince in his king­dom and asks them to sign their names to a proc­la­ma­tion asser­ting that he, as their lea­der, has only ever been con­cer­ned with jus­tice, righ­teous­ness and spo­ken only the truth. He wants this public ack­now­ledg­ment so that he can raise an army with which to defeat the neme­sis who is coming to cha­llenge him. The heads of the pro­vin­ces, kno­wing that their lea­der will kill them if they refuse to sign the proc­la­ma­tion, sign. It is at this point that Kaveh walks in, and from here I am going to let the poem speak for itself, because I think the para­llels to today’s situa­tion – a ruler afraid he will lose power, a rig­ged sta­te­ment of appro­val, a (fai­led) attempt to appease the citi­zenry and oppo­si­tion marches – while not exact, need no further expla­na­tion. (This selec­tion from my trans­la­tions of parts of the Shah­na­meh, I should add, has just been published in the really fine-looking jour­nal The Dirty Goat Maga­zine.)

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This panel should be very inte­res­ting and, given what’s been going on in Iran and the new pro­tests that took place there yes­ter­day, I think it’s a good time to learn more about Ira­nian cul­ture. If you’re in NY, I hope you’ll come.

THE PHILOCTETES CENTER FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION

at the New York Psychoa­naly­tic Ins­ti­tute
(EDWARD NERSESSIAN AND FRANCIS LEVY, DIRECTORS)

invi­tes you to a Poetry Rea­ding & Dis­cus­sion
Tues­day, Sep­tem­ber 22, 2009 at 7:00pm
at
The Phi­loc­te­tes Cen­ter
247 East 82^nd Street
(Phone: 646−422−0544; email: info@​philoctetes.​org)

This event is free and open to the public.

Per­sian Poetry: Ori­gins, Trans­la­tions, and Influences

This rea­ding and dis­cus­sion among five dis­tin­guished Per­sian poets and trans­la­tors will begin by touching on the two-thousand year his­tory of poetry in Iran. Pane­lists will high­light the sig­ni­fi­cance of such clas­si­cal mas­ters as Sa’di, Hafez, Rumi, and Omar Khay­yam, as well as con­tem­po­rary Ira­nian poets like Nima Youshij and Forough Farrokh­zad. Spe­cial atten­tion will be given to what often gets lost in English trans­la­tion. The poets will con­si­der how their unders­tan­ding of Per­sian verse and cul­ture, from its ori­gins in Iran, influen­ces the poetry they and others write in English.

Iraj Anvar is the trans­la­tor and edi­tor of Jalal al Din Rumi’s Divani-I Shams-I Tabriz: Forty Eight Gha­zals of Rumi. He has been a lea­der of the New York Ava Ensem­ble, which is dedi­ca­ted to pro­mo­ting tra­di­tio­nal Per­sian music and per­for­ming clas­si­cal Per­sian poetry.

Richard Jef­frey New­man is an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in the English Depart­ment at Nas­sau Com­mu­nity College, where he coor­di­na­tes the college’s Crea­tive Wri­ting Pro­ject. He has published trans­la­tions of two books of clas­si­cal Ira­nian poetry, Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan and Selec­tions from Saadi’s Bus­tan, and a poetry collec­tion of his own, entit­led The Silence of Men.

Roger Seda­rat is the author of a collec­tion of poems, Dear Régime: Let­ters to the Isla­mic Repu­blic, and a forth­co­ming chap­book, From Teh­ran to Texas. He teaches poetry and trans­la­tion in the MFA pro­gram at Queens College, City Uni­ver­sity of New York.

Nilou­far Talebi is the edi­tor and trans­la­tor of BELONGING: New Poetry by Ira­nians Around the World and foun­der of The Trans­la­tion Pro­ject, which brings con­tem­po­rary Ira­nian lite­ra­ture to the world through events and lite­rary and mul­ti­me­dia pro­jects. Ins­pi­red by Ira­nian story­te­lling tra­di­tions, she dra­ma­ti­zes new Ira­nian poetry in thea­ter pro­jects such as ICARUS/RISE.

Kata­yoon Zandvakili’s collec­tion of poetry, Deer Table Legs, won the Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia Press Con­tem­po­rary Poetry Series prize, and her work has been antho­lo­gi­zed in Ame­ri­can Poetry: The Next Gene­ra­tion; Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Wri­ting by Women of the Ira­nian Dias­pora; Lan­guage for a New Cen­tury: Con­tem­po­rary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond; and The Poetry of Ira­nian Women.

All Phi­loc­te­tes pro­grams are sup­por­ted, in part, by public funds from the New York City Depart­ment of Cul­tu­ral Affairs, in part­nership with the City Council.

_______________________

Events at Phi­loc­te­tes are free and open to the public. Sea­ting is on a first come basis.

The Phi­loc­te­tes Cen­ter for the Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Study of the Ima­gi­na­tion was esta­blished to pro­mote an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary approach to the unders­tan­ding of crea­ti­vity and the ima­gi­na­tive pro­cess. To achieve its mis­sion, the Cen­ter orga­ni­zes round­ta­ble dis­cus­sions and music, poetry and film series. All pro­grams are free and open to the public. Visit www​.phi​loc​te​tes​.org for more information.

This panel is on my events page here, but I want to call spe­ci­fic atten­tion to it, given the pro­tests that took place in Iran on Qods day. The oppo­si­tion mana­ged to turn out in, accor­ding to some esti­ma­tes, tens of thou­sands. It’s a good time to learn more about Ira­nian cul­ture and his­tory, I think.