Often called the national epic of Iran, the Shah­nameh or Book of Kings, was writ­ten in the 10^th cen­tury CE by Abolqasem Fer­dowsi, who took as his sub­ject the pre-Islamic his­tory of the Iran­ian peo­ple, start­ing with the cre­ation of the world and end­ing with the 7^th cen­tury Arab con­quest of the Per­sian empire. A lit­er­ary expres­sion of what San­dra Mackey calls in The Ira­ni­ans “the sep­a­rate iden­tity within Islam that Ira­ni­ans [have always] felt” (64−5), the Shah­nameh rep­re­sents an act of cul­tural resis­tance, an asser­tion that, despite Mus­lim rule, the val­ues and tra­di­tions of ancient Iran were not only still rel­e­vant, but per­haps even supe­rior to those of Iran’s con­querors, whose reign, as A. Sha­pur Shah­bazi sug­gests in his Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy, was threat­en­ing to reduce the majes­tic sweep of Iran’s past into a sin­gle chap­ter in the his­tory of Islam (34). The suc­cess of this resis­tance can be seen most promi­nently in the fact that, even today, in the words of Dick Davis, the Shah­nameh is “one of the chief means by which both Per­sian rulers and the peo­ple of [Iran] have sought to define their iden­tity to them­selves and to the world at large” (3). The last Shah of Iran, Moham­mad Reza Pahlavi, for exam­ple, invoked the Shah­nameh in order to under­score Iran’s his­tor­i­cal, cul­tural, racial and lin­guis­tic dif­fer­ence from (and supe­ri­or­ity to) Iran’s Arab neigh­bors; and then, after the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in 1979, when Iran’s new and theo­cratic gov­ern­ment wanted to dis­cour­age its cit­i­zens’ iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the nation’s pre-Islamic past, the Aya­tol­lah Khome­ini him­self attested to the cul­tural impor­tance of the Shah­nameh when, along with dis­cour­ag­ing the use of Per­sian first names and express­ing the hope that peo­ple would stop cel­e­brat­ing Norooz, the Per­sian New Year, a hol­i­day with deep Zoroas­trian roots, he sin­gled out Ferdowsi’s poem as rep­re­sent­ing every­thing the rev­o­lu­tion had fought against when it ended the Shah’s reign.

More recently, to take another exam­ple, it could not have been an acci­dent that the scenes of pro­tes­tors car­ry­ing green ban­ners through the streets in the weeks fol­low­ing Iran’s con­tested pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in 2009 bore such a strik­ing resem­blance to the scene near the begin­ning of the Shah­nameh in which the black­smith Kaveh marches through the streets car­ry­ing a ban­ner and call­ing the Per­sian peo­ple to rise up against the evil Arab king Zah­hak. Kaveh is an unapolo­getic rev­o­lu­tion­ary, intent on over­throw­ing the despot who has killed all but one of his eigh­teen sons, but he is also a Per­sian call­ing for the over­throw of his people’s Arab monarch, which makes it very tempt­ing to read Fer­dowsi as more sedi­tious than he really was, as if his pur­pose in writ­ing the Shah­nameh had been to foment a rev­o­lu­tion against Islam. Noth­ing, how­ever, could be fur­ther from the truth. Just as the pro­tes­tors in Iran sought to have their votes counted in the con­text of the gov­ern­ment they already had, not to over­throw that gov­ern­ment, Fer­dowsi, who was a prac­tic­ing Mus­lim, wanted to pre­serve and trans­mit Iran’s cul­tural her­itage within an Islamic con­text, not present that cul­tural her­itage as a replace­ment for Islam.

In this pur­pose, Fer­dowsi was not alone. He may have been a prac­tic­ing Mus­lim, but he was also a proud dehqan, a mem­ber of Iran’s landed gen­try, a group Shah­bazi calls “the back­bone” of Iran­ian soci­ety, pow­er­ful enough that Arab com­man­ders some­times felt it nec­es­sary to nego­ti­ate peace treaties with them, and a group that saw itself as duty bound to pre­serve the “mem­o­ries of the golden days of [the Per­sian] empire and the heroic tra­di­tions and cul­tural her­itage of [their nation]” (20−21). After three hun­dred years of Mus­lim Arab rule, the dehqan had rea­son to be con­cerned. Not only had Ara­bic replaced Per­sian as the lan­guage of law, lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy and sci­ence, but there was also a grow­ing accep­tance among Mus­lim Ira­ni­ans that it might be pos­si­ble to rebuild Iran’s impe­r­ial struc­ture within an Islamic con­text. Indeed, revi­sion­ist his­to­ries of Iran, such as Tabari’s Tarikh, which is con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous with the Shah­nameh, were writ­ten in sup­port of this idea. In Tarikh, Tabari incor­po­rates Iran’s ori­gins into the cre­ation story as told in the Koran. His goal is to demon­strate that the reigns of the Per­sian mon­archs fit into Koranic chronol­ogy, plac­ing Iran’s leg­endary kings and heros into the world inhab­ited by, and ulti­mately sub­or­di­nat­ing those kings and heros to, char­ac­ters like Adam and Nuh (Noah), who are far more impor­tant to Islam’s over­all nar­ra­tive than Iran could ever be.

In the eyes of the dehqan, this was an unac­cept­able diminu­tion of Iran’s cul­tural her­itage, and so when Fer­dowsi wrote of the begin­ning of the world in the Shah­nameh, he placed Iran squarely at the cen­ter of the nar­ra­tive, and when he told the sto­ries of Iran’s myth­i­cal mon­archs, he told the sto­ries in their own terms, with­out try­ing to jus­tify their exis­tence within the dom­i­nant cul­tural, polit­i­cal and spir­i­tual con­text of Islam (Davis 14). Yet it would be a mis­take to under­stand the Shah­nameh purely as a his­tor­i­cal or polit­i­cal text, of inter­est pri­mar­ily not for its lit­er­ary worth, but for its role as a repos­i­tory of ancient Iran­ian leg­ends. To do so would be to ignore not only Ferdowsi’s lit­er­ary intent – he was, very self-consciously, writ­ing a poem – but also the fact that, as any of the apoc­ryphal sto­ries told about him illus­trate, both in their con­tent and by the fact of their exis­tence, it was as a poet, not a his­to­rian, that Fer­dowsi made his rep­u­ta­tion. In one tale, that rep­u­ta­tion was pre­or­dained. Ferdowsi’s father, this story goes, had a vision of his recently-born son climb­ing a roof and call­ing out loudly towards each of the four cor­ners of the earth. Each time the child called out, a strong voice answered him. Najm-al-Din, who was a dream-interperter, explained to the boy’s father that the vision fore­told Ferdowsi’s achieve­ments. “Your son will be a genius, a poet whose name will be known to the four quar­ters of the world and whose songs will be learned and revered every­where” (Shah­bazi 39, n. 1).

In another story, Fer­dowsi trav­els from his home in Nishapour to Ghazna, the cap­i­tal city of Sul­tan Mah­moud, who was a great patron of the arts and about whom I will have more to say later. Upon enter­ing the city, Fer­dowsi encoun­ters three of Mahmoud’s court poets, Ansari, Asjadi and Far­rukhi, who did not want to be dis­turbed by some­one whose man­ner of dress so clearly marked him as provin­cial. Think­ing to have some fun at Ferdowsi’s expense, and to make sure he did not bother them again, they issued him a chal­lenge. “We are the king’s poets,” Ansari, who was the most senior, said, “and only a true poet can keep com­pany with us. So, to test your abil­ity, each of us will com­pose one line of a qua­train using a sin­gle rhyme. If you can pro­vide the fourth, we will allow you to join us.” Fer­dowsi, con­fi­dent in his skill as a poet, agreed.

The rhyming word Ansari chose was roshan (bright) and, at least accord­ing to Edward G. Browne, in whose Lit­er­ary His­tory of Per­sia I first read this tale (129−30), he chose that word because he was sure there were only two other words in Per­sian that would rhyme with it: gol­shan (rose gar­den), with which Asjadi ended his line, and joshan (cuirass), with which Far­rukhi ended his. The dif­fi­culty of repro­duc­ing Per­sian rhymes in Eng­lish forces Browne to offer two trans­la­tions. The first, in the main body of Browne’s text, pre­serves the rhyming chal­lenge – though the rhyme he chooses is hardly chal­leng­ing in Eng­lish – while los­ing both the mean­ing and, because he has to change the images and metaphors, the Per­sian char­ac­ter of the lines. The sec­ond trans­la­tion, which he gives in a foot­note, pre­serves the mean­ing of the qua­train but loses the rhyming chal­lenge entirely. In each trans­la­tion, though, his ren­der­ing pre­serves the sense of Ferdowsi’s com­plet­ing line. Here is Browne’s mono-rhymed quatrain:

Ansari:      Thine eyes are clear and blue as a sun­lit ocean
Asjadi:       Their glance bewitches like a magic potion
Far­rukhi:   The wounds they cause no balm can heal, nor lotion
Fer­dowsi:  Deadly as those Giv’s spear dealt out to Poshan.

And here is the qua­train that more accu­rately ren­ders the sense of the quatrain:

Ansari:       The moon is not so radi­ant as thy brow
Asjadi:       No garden-rose can match thy cheek, I trow
Far­rukhi:   Thy lashes through the hard­est breast­plate pierce
Fer­dowsi:   Like spear of Giv in Poshan’s duel fierce.

The court poets were deeply impressed. Not only had Fer­dowsi sur­vived their poetic chal­lenge; he had done so by refer­ring to an obscure story from Per­sian lore, demon­strat­ing not only that he was a fine poet, but also a man of some learn­ing. Real­iz­ing that they had under­es­ti­mated him, Ansari, Asjadi and Far­rukhi decide to present Fer­dowsi to Sul­tan Mah­moud as a poet wor­thy of com­plet­ing the ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the national epic begun two or three decades ear­lier by another poet, Daqiqi, whose mur­der had left the court with only a thou­sand or so com­pleted verses. This the poets did and the rest, as the say­ing goes, except that the story I have just told you is almost entirely apoc­ryphal, is history.

Works Cited

Davis, Dick. Epic & Sedi­tion: The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shah­nameh. Wash­ing­ton, DC: Mage Pub­lish­ers 2006.

Mackey, San­dra. The Ira­ni­ans: Per­sia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation. New York: Dut­ton 1996

Shah­bazi, A. Sha­pur. Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy. Costa Mesa: Mazda Pub­lish­ers, 1991.

It is Norouz, the Per­sian New Year, which is cel­e­brated far and wide through­out what used to be the Per­sian Empire, and I thought I would share with you the sec­tion of Shah­nameh, the Book of Kings, often called the Iran­ian national epic, in which the story of the first Norouz is told. The Shah­nameh is a work of pro­found nation­al­ism, an asser­tion of Iran­ian national iden­tity against the power and influ­ence of the Mus­lim Arab cul­ture that con­quered Iran in the 7^th cen­tury CE. Com­posed by Fer­dowsi in the 10^th cen­tury, the poem con­sti­tutes a kind of mythopo­etic and his­tor­i­cal arche­ol­ogy, telling the story of pre-Islamic Iran through the sto­ries of the empire’s rulers, start­ing with the first, myth­i­cal king, whose name was Kayu­mars. Kayu­mars and three kings who fol­low him, Houshang, Tah­mures and Jamshid, are respon­si­ble for bring­ing civ­i­liza­tion to the world, each one deep­en­ing and strength­en­ing the social order that is nec­es­sary for human­ity to survive.

The great­est, and also the most dis­ap­point­ing, of these four is Jamshid, for it is Jamshid who estab­lishes social classes, brings the sci­ence of med­i­cine to human­ity, teaches his peo­ple to make cloth­ing and per­fume, and in gen­eral orders the soci­ety if his time such that it is rec­og­niz­able to us as the kind of social world in which we live. Jamshid, also, how­ever is the first king to allow his pride to get the bet­ter of him, declar­ing him­self a deity and los­ing the farr, which peo­ple often trans­late into Eng­lish as aura, but is more accu­rately described as the vis­i­ble qual­ity in a king that sig­ni­fies for his sub­jects the fact that God favors his rule. If you imag­ine the halos that were drawn around Christ’s head in medieval paint­ings, but pic­ture them around the heads of kings and under­stand them to be vis­i­ble proof of what the Euro­peans used to believe was the divine right of kings, you have some­thing close to what the farr is.

Once Jamshid loses the farr, there is room for evil to enter the world, which it does in the form of Zah­hak, part of whose story you can read in my trans­la­tion on Eklek­so­graphia. In addi­tion to the word farr, you need to know that peris are super­nat­ural crea­tures upon which are based the faeries of Vic­to­rian Eng­land; and you need to know as well that “Demon Binder” was the name given to Jamshid’s father, Tah­mures, because he bound Ahri­man – the source of evil – and rode him, more or less like a horse, around the world.

Here is my trans­la­tion of Jamshid’s story, which is also the story of the first Norouz:

Filled with his father’s wis­dom, when the world
was done mourn­ing the Demon Binder,
Jamshid joined the line of men
to ascend the throne and wear the crown.
Peace spread across his king­dom,
and the birds and peris bowed to him too.
“I will,” he said, “keep evil from evil-doers’
hands, and I will guide souls to light.
The royal farr rests with me. I rule
as shah and priest.”

He turned first
to mak­ing weapons, paving for his war­riors
a road to glory and renown. Iron,
beneath his farr, soft­ened, became swords
and hel­mets, chain mail and horse armor,
and he gave fifty years to train­ing
the men he charged with build­ing his armory.

The next five decades, Jamshid devoted
to cloth­ing, con­triv­ing dif­fer­ent fab­rics—
linen and silk, bro­cades and satin—
teach­ing peo­ple to spin and to weave,
to dye what they’d woven, and then sew a gar­ment
for feast­ing or fight­ing. When he fin­ished, he divided
men by their pro­fes­sion, send­ing
first to the moun­tains, to wor­ship their Mas­ter
and live lives of devo­tion, the Katuzi.
Sec­ond, he sum­moned the Neysari,
lion-hearted fight­ers whose lus­ter
lit the entire land, whose lead­er­ship
and courage kept the king secure,
and whose valor ensured the nation’s rep­u­ta­tion.
Those who farmed the fields came next,
the Basudi, who sow and reap,
who receive no thanks, but whom none reproach
when there’s food to eat. Free peo­ple
who kneel to no one and seek no quar­rel,
despite the rags they wear, their care
makes the earth flour­ish and nour­ishes peace.
A wise elder once said,
“If a free man finds him­self a slave,
he has only his own lazi­ness to blame.”

Jamshid gath­ered the crafts­men last,
the anx­ious and stub­born Ahtukhoshi.
Haughty and con­trary, they work with their hands
to make the goods sold in the mar­ket,
and they are always anx­ious. Fifty years
marched by while Jamshid showed
each per­son breath­ing earth’s air
his proper place and path, teach­ing
the scope of the life he’d been given to live.

He ordered the demons to pour water
over earth, stir­ring it into clay
they filled molds with to form bricks.
With mor­tar and stone, they laid foun­da­tions
for pub­lic baths and beau­ti­ful palaces,
and cas­tles to pro­tect against attack.
From rocks, Jamshid’s magic extracted
the lus­trous gems and pre­cious met­als
he found hid­den there, fill­ing his hands
with gold and sil­ver, amber and jacinth.
He dis­tilled per­fumes for his people’s plea­sure:
bal­sam and amber­gris, rose water and cam­phor,
musk and aloe. He made med­i­cines
to bring the sick back to health
and to help the healthy stay that way.

Jamshid revealed these secret things
as none before him had done. No one
dis­cov­ered and ordered the world as he did.

Yet another fifty years
saw Jamshid build­ing ships
he could sail quickly across the sea,
mak­ing port in each realm he reached;
and then, although he was already great,
Jamshid stepped past great­ness.
He used his farr to fash­ion a jew­eled
throne, decree­ing the demons should raise it
high in the sky, where he sat shin­ing
like the sun, and the world’s crea­tures gath­ered
around him, stand­ing in awe, scat­ter­ing
gems at his feet. It was the first of Far­vadin,
and Jamshid set that day aside,
nam­ing it Norooz, “new day,”
the day he rested, the first of the year.
His nobles declared a feast, a fes­ti­val
of wine and song we still cel­e­brate
in Jamshid’s memory.

For three cen­turies,
Jamshid ruled in peace. His peo­ple
knew nei­ther death nor hard­ship; the demons
stood ready to serve; and all who heard
the king’s com­mand obeyed it. The land,
filled with music, flour­ished. Jamshid,
how­ever, gave him­self to van­ity.
See­ing he had no peer in the world,
he for­got the grat­i­tude that is God’s due
and called the nobles of his court before him
to make this fate­ful procla­ma­tion:
“From this day for­ward, I know no lord
but me: my word brought beauty
and skilled men to adorn the earth!
My word! Sun­shine and sleep, secu­rity
and com­fort, the clothes you wear, your food—
all came to you through me!
Who else ended death’s des­o­la­tion
and with med­i­cine van­ished ill­ness from your lives?
With­out me, nei­ther mind nor soul
would inhabit your bod­ies. So who besides me
can claim, unchal­lenged, the crown and its power?
You under­stand this now. So now,
who else can you call Cre­ator but me?!”

The elders bowed their heads and held
their tongues, silenced by what he’d said,
but when the last sound left his mouth,
the farr left him, and his realm fell
into dis­cord. A sen­si­ble, pious man
once said, “A king must make him­self
God’s slave. Ingrat­i­tude towards God
will fill your heart with innu­mer­able fears.”
Jamshid’s men deserted; his des­tiny
dark­ened, and his light dis­ap­peared from the world.

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 «

Zah­hak: We’d Need To Hear His Mother’s Story, an excerpt from my trans­la­tion of parts of the Shah­nameh, the Iran­ian national epic, was pub­lished recently on Eklek­so­graphia. I hope you’ll go check it out.

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.

I am orga­niz­ing a panel on the trans­la­tion of non-Western lit­er­a­tures for the North­east Mod­ern Lan­guage Association’s annual con­fer­ence, which will be held in Mon­tréal, April 7 – 11. Here is the call for papers. Please send pro­pos­als to me at richard.newman at ncc dot edu.

Non-Western Lit­er­a­tures in Translation

The act of lit­er­ary trans­la­tion raises by def­i­n­i­tion the ques­tion of how the tar­get cul­ture frames the lan­guage and cul­ture of the text to be trans­lated. This issue, often unex­am­ined, can deter­mine not only which texts from which lan­guages are cho­sen for trans­la­tion, but also what the rela­tion­ship between the trans­la­tion and the orig­i­nal text is under­stood to be. Nine­teenth cen­tury British and Amer­i­can trans­la­tors of clas­si­cal Iran­ian poetry, for exam­ple, often por­trayed them­selves quite explic­itly as improv­ing on what they under­stood to be the “ori­en­tal” defects of the poets they were work­ing with. This stance finds its roots in British colo­nial rule of India, where Per­sian was the lan­guage of the Moghul courts, and the idea that, if only the British could under­stand Per­sian and the psy­chol­ogy it embod­ied, they could make them­selves more effec­tive colo­nial rulers. The his­tory of the trans­la­tion into Eng­lish of other non-Western lit­er­a­tures – includ­ing those we now con­sider West­ern, like clas­si­cal Greek – is fraught with sim­i­lar kinds of bias, as are con­tem­po­rary assump­tions about the value non-Western lit­er­a­tures hold for us. Keep­ing in mind the fact that less than 3% of all the books pub­lished in the United States in any given year are lit­er­ary trans­la­tions, and the fact that pub­lish­ing at all lev­els is a busi­ness that both cre­ates and responds to its mar­ket, this panel seeks to exam­ine the issues con­fronting the trans­la­tion of non-Western lit­er­a­tures, from clas­si­cal to con­tem­po­rary, into Eng­lish. While we would like the empha­sis to be on lan­guages that are not already com­monly trans­lated (Japan­ese and Chi­nese, among oth­ers), we wel­come pro­pos­als con­cern­ing any non-Western lan­guage. We encour­age a vari­ety of per­spec­tives – from authors of texts that have been trans­lated (or texts in search of a trans­la­tion), trans­la­tors, schol­ars, pub­lish­ers – and would pre­fer to have papers address­ing a range of time peri­ods. Top­ics might include the lin­guis­tic and cul­tural chal­lenges of trans­lat­ing non-Western lan­guages, what we learn from the his­tory of the trans­la­tion of a given work or body of work, trans­la­tion suc­cess sto­ries, the chal­lenges of pub­lish­ing lit­er­ary trans­la­tions of non-Western lan­guages, or why a given work or body of work deserves more atten­tion – schol­arly and oth­er­wise – than it has been given. We also look for­ward to being sur­prised by ideas that have not occurred to us.