December 30th, 2009 §
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 18th and 19th 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 21st 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.
December 28th, 2009 §
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 «
September 23rd, 2009 §
“My faith lies elsewhere.” When I finished reading Joshua Kryah’s Glean (Nightboat Books, 2007) and started thinking about what I would write in my review of the book, that is the sentence that came to me, almost as if it had been waiting — who knows how long? — somewhere in the back or just below the surface of my consciousness for me to read the final lines of “Come Hither,” the last poem in Kryah’s book:
Who will draw you out, now
that you’ve given yourself over?
Who dissolve
your body like a host on their tongue?
What stopping place will be provided, what
rest?
Where am I in this emergence—
who comes?
The “you” here is God, or, rather, the god that faith places on the other side of the absence that is all, according to the monotheism I was taught growing up, human beings can ever really know of the one divine being. Yet the first two questions here are not about this god per se, but rather about those whose task it is to draw this god out into the world and take him into themselves. In the face of the absence that is also the divine — and that is, therefore, in itself perhaps the deepest and most fundamental test of faith — who will those people be? At the same time, the speaker of the poem is clear that something is emerging — something which, based on the first two questions, we can assume the speaker believes to be God. Then, out of that clarity another question emerges. What is the speaker’s position in the emergence, not in relation to it, as if he were standing outside of it, watching what was happening, waiting to see the end result, but in it, as part of it, and once the speaker places himself within this emergence, who is emerging is no longer clear. The possibility exists in the language that it is the speaker who is emerging, that he is watching himself become, that he has discovered his god within himself, that he has come to accept that he is himself, somehow, within his god.
Questions of faith have been important to me since I was a teenager and I believed my future lay in the rabbinate. When I set aside the faith that being a rabbi would have demanded of me, however, I did not set aside the struggle to come to terms with the final, indifferent and absolute absence that will fill the space where I used to be in the moment after my death. It is a measure of Kryah’s success that, despite the fact my faith lies somewhere very other than his — and since this is a review of his book, I am not going to turn it into an essay about my own spirituality — the poems in Glean nonetheless confronted me with the question of just where, precisely, my spirituality does lie. In large measure, the poems accomplish this through metaphors that ground the issues they raise firmly in the body. Here, for example, are the first few lines of “My Easter:”
Breathbloom, the resurrection lily
spent on its stem,
the pale throat thrown back
announcing — what?
Behold, all at once,
the flesh-like knot
undone, each petal released, their beauty un–
mistakably and
already gone.
And here is “O Hieroglyph (forgotten word, spread your lips around me)” in its entirety:
As if the wet vowel might speak.
As if, plundered,
it might give up its blank stare, and
suddenly, shudder in my mouth.
We exchange a language
dumb as flesh, pressed into and bruised
beyond recognition, its only response the black eye’s dull circle of speech.
Blue, blue-brown
each color offset by the surrounding skin,
the calcite thought of your returning again.
I cannot muster
what I should have lost, and in the wish gained
more steadfast: your curio, what swings from a locket upon my chest,
a message that now only speaks
with its fist.
The note I wrote to myself on the page below this poem says, simply, “Donne?” The fist in the final line recalled for me Holy Sonnet #14, “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” and, indeed, I found myself thinking of Donne’s Holy Sonnets often while reading Glean, so much so that I read through the sampling of them in the edition of the Norton Anthology that I have on my shelf before I sat down to write this review. Donne’s poems, too, are rooted in the body, though very differently than Kryah’s. For while Kryah metaphorizes — if I can coin a term — the body, and the physical world in general, to give presence to the absence in the face of which he questions, asserts and maintains his faith, Donne positions the body in his poems as Other to his god, whose presence in the world the poems themselves — at least the ones I read — do not doubt for a minute. I also thought of Donne’s Holy Sonnets while reading Glean because, despite the fact that Kryah’s poems are written in a very free verse — the sentence fragment and the unconventional spacing of the poems seemed to me just about the only two formal devices used consistently throughout the book — his poem’s share with Donne’s a sense of language as something physical, something to be felt, held in the mouth, savored and then released.
In all honesty, I don’t know that I will pick this book of poems up again. It has said to me what it has to say, and it’s not something I need to hear again. Still, I admire, deeply, the craft and commitment, the honesty and courage that went into writing it. It is the kind of book I think everyone should have to read once, the kind of book that those to whom it truly speaks will treasure for the rest of their lives.
April 1st, 2009 §
On March 8th, which was International Women’s Day, the young man in the two pictures below could be seen walking through the streets of Tehran. His tee shirt reads – and excuse my perhaps awkward transliteration of the Persian–Marg bar Mardsalari, which my wife translates as “Death to Patriarchy.” That he is wearing a hajeb – or, in Persian, roosari – speaks for itself. As I understand it, he was arrested almost immediately after the pictures were taken. I have not been able to find out anything about what has happened to him s
March 2nd, 2009 §
I saw this on Feministe:
CRESAPTOWN, Md. (AP) — You’ve heard of kosher salt? Now there’s a Christian variety.
Retired barber Joe Godlewski says that when television chefs recommended kosher salt in recipes, he wondered, “What the heck’s the matter with Christian salt?”
By next week, his trademarked Blessed Christians Salt will be available from seasonings manufacturer Ingredients Corporation of America. It’s sea salt that’s been blessed by an Episcopal priest.
The company’s president hopes to market the salt through Christian bookstores.
Go here to read the rest.
Cross-posted on Alas.
January 7th, 2009 §
Frightening. Sadly predictable, but nonetheless frightening: Fears mount of Gaza conflict spill over in Europe.
December 21st, 2006 §
So reads the headline of a New York Times article about Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr.‘s letter to his consitutents warning that the election of Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who converted to Islam when he was a college student, is just the beginning of a wave of Muslim influence in the United States that will undermine “the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.” (You can read the full text of Goode’s letter here and here.) What got Representative Goode so upset was Ellison’s decision to use the Quran during his private swearing-in-ceremony. (The official swearing in of lawmakers takes place without reference to or use of religious texts of any kind.)
The full quote from which the above excerpt reads as follows:
if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country. I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.
Leave aside for the moment the fact that Ellison was born in the United States and, according to the Times traces his American ancestors back to 1742. Think about the way Goode tries to tie Ellison’s decision to use the Quran to xenophobic positions on immigration. Consider what it means that, in a country where government is not supposed to privilege one religion over another, one of our elected representatives — and I doubt Goode is the only one who feels what is expressed in his letter — has protested in such blatantly racist and xenophobic terms another elected representative’s expression of his faith. Then read this closing statement from Goode’s letter:
The Ten Commandments and “In God We Trust” are on the wall in my office. A Muslim student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Koran. My response was clear, “As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 5th District of Virginia in the United States House of Representatives, The Koran is not going to be on the wall of my office.”
There is, of course, no reason why a non-Muslim official should display anything from the Quran on the walls of her or his office, but to answer a Muslim student in the way that Goode did? It leaves me speechless.
If you were Muslim, would you dismiss Goode as being on the fringe or would you see it as further confirmation that you ought to be worried about your status in this country? From where I sit, the latter would be the wiser think to think, as Dr. Seuss would have put it.
April 9th, 2006 §
(This was originally delivered in the Spring of 2002 in New York City at the Sophia Center’s conference “An Afternoon of Poetry and Spirituality.” It was subsequently published in March 2003 in Conversations, The Sophia Center’s Newsletter. I am posting it here because I have been thinking a lot lately about how and why I became a poet and the connections between my writing and my politics.)
In my experience, the spiritual practice that writing poetry cannot help but become once you’ve chosen to make it your way of life is inseparable from the erotic practice my writing had to become before I could produce the poems that were truly mine to produce. The narrative this statement hints at is too long to tell here, but I can at least sketch the story’s contours.
At two different times during my teens, two men — one a complete stranger, the other a casual friend of the family — each took my body as his playground and his plaything and abused me sexually. Each man was a predator and each used my need for a surrogate father to lure me to him. My own father, after my mother sued him for divorce, left our house when I was three. As he walked out the door, he said to me that maybe — though of course I took it as a promise — maybe he’d be coming back. He never did, and, as any three-year-old would, I blamed myself.
I survived both these traumas, though I lived for many years afterward behind a veil of guilt and shame, of self-hatred, and the conviction that I was tainted, deeply and irrevocably, such that I would never again be worthy of another’s love. In orthodox Judaism, which I took as a teenager to be the guiding tradition of my life, god is the ultimate father, and because I was taught it explicitly, I believed that if I could gain this heavenly father’s approval, make myself good enough in his eyes to earn his love, then I would be good, and nothing, nothing — no matter what I’d done or had been done to me in the past — could ever undo that achievement.
So I studied the forms of daily Jewish life and poured as much as I could of my own living into it. The traditional religious view of the relationship between body and soul, however, that they are separable and that the full value of human worth is located primarily in the soul, and not the body, echoes in many ways the separation of mind from body that is a common experience of those who have been physically or sexually abused. As a result, learning to love my yiddishe neshama, my Jewish soul — which, as one of my rebbes used to say, was a prerequisite of earning god’s love — could not help but implicitly justify the hatred of my physical existence that I already felt. Ironically, in other words, my embrace of Judaism actually compounded the state of self-hating alienation in which I existed.
The first poems in which I named my abuse as abuse, describing in precise detail the acts and body parts involved, were primarily therapeutic and correspondingly unsuccessful as art. I remember vividly, however, how liberating it was not merely to have written them, but to understand that I had found a language in which they could be written. Suddenly, my body was more accessible to me, more mine than it had ever been. I felt differently in my body as well. The world of sensual pleasures opened to me and deepened, connecting me to my own desires and therefore also to my own sense of belonging to, of having a rightful claim to a physical presence in, this world, more powerfully than orthodox Judaism had ever made me feel good.
Indeed, the more fully I experienced myself as inhabiting my body, the more the project of making myself good in god’s eyes revealed itself as the strategy it had been all along for not confronting what my abusers had done to me. Writing those poems, in other words, helped to strip away the layers of mystification in which my body had been wrapped, uncovering the mystery — and I mean this word almost in its Christian theological sense: something that can never be fully understood and that can be apprehended only through revelation — the mystery of my own embodiment. I no longer cared whether or not I had a soul that was distinct from my body. More to the point, the approval of a god for whom the condition of that soul was a primary concern became for me irrelevant.
Tikkun olam, a concept that is central to Jewish spirituality, means, literally, the fixing of the world, and it refers to a religious duty Jews are supposed to consider ourselves obligated to perform. In the mystical tradition, tikkun olam means the task of gathering the fragments of the shattered divine, the pieces of himself [sic] that god gave up in creating the world so that the world could live and grow, and using them to reconstruct the original godhead. On a more mundane level, tikkun olam is represented by such things as the struggle for social justice. For me, writing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As poet and translator Sam Hamill has written, “The first duty of the writer is the rectification of names,” and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Confucius], “All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name.” It is in poetry, writing it and reading it, that I find this wisdom and its corresponding spiritual practice.
March 2nd, 2006 §
I have wanted to write about this for a while, now, ever since I read through the thread called (Very) Basic Economics and Abortion over at Alas, A Blog. Since then, though, a number of things have happened: the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case concerning so-called “partial-birth abortions,” South Dakota has passed the most restrictive law in the country against abortion, Utah has a proposed law that would eliminate incest exceptions in its parental notification law, and I have been in another conversation, What If Your Mother Was Pro-Choice, on Alas, the initial post of which concerned a common strategy used by people who are anti-choice to try to silence those of us who are pro-choice: what would have happened if your mother had chosen to have an abortion instead of giving birth to you?
At one point the thread became a conversation about whether the immaculate conception was an instance of divine rape or not (start reading here). This was relevant because it went to the question of what it means for women to have real choice in terms of pregnancy and childbirth — which also means in terms of when and whether and under what conditions to have sex — and, though I don’t remember that this point was brought out explicitly, to the question of what we model our understanding of women’s reproductive choice on. (I have italicized this because it will become important later on, towards the end of what I want to say.) What I want to do here is to try to tie all these various things together under the title I have given this post because I think it goes to the heart of understanding a rarely articulated aspect of what is at stake in the anti-choice position, whether it is articulated in explicitly religious terms or not, and because, under the general strategy of “know thine enemy,” I think this is an important understanding to reach. It’s going to take a while, and I’m going to have to make a number of leaps, to get where I want to go in this, so I hope you will bear with me.
» Read the rest of this entry «
February 22nd, 2006 §
Which I have just gotten around to reading: the first two paragraphs of the articles “History Illuminates The Rage Of Muslims,” by Edward Rothstein, on the first page (E1) of The Arts section:
An ant climbs a blade of grass, over and over, seemingly without purpose, seeking neither nourishment nor home. It persists in its futile climb, explains Daniel C. Dennett at the opening of his new book, “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” (Viking), because its brain has been taken over by a parasite, a lancet fluke, which, over the course of evolution, has found this to be a particularly efficient way to get into the stomach of a grazing sheep or cow where it can flourish and reproduce. The ant is controlled by the worm, which, equally unconscious of purpose, maneuvers the ant into place.
Mr. Dennett, anticipating the outrage his comparison will make, suggests that this is how religion works. People will sacrifice their interests, their health, their reason, their family, all in service to an idea “that has lodged in their brains.” That idea, he argues, is like a virus or a worm, and it inspires bizarre forms of behavior in order to propagate itself. Islam, he points out, means “submission,” and submission is what religious believers practice. In Mr. Dennett’s view, they do so despite all evidence, and in thrall to biological and social forces they barely comprehend.
Makes me want to go out and buy the book.