Translating Classical Persian Literature: Introducing Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh — Part 1

March 27th, 2010 § 1

Often called the national epic of Iran, the Shah­nameh or Book of Kings, was writ­ten in the 10th 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 7th 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.

Life Imitates Art: Iran’s Opposition and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Story of Zahhak and Kaveh) — Repost

November 10th, 2009 § 4

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

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 10th 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 7th 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

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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  1. I haven’t linked back to the other blog, because I have moved all posts over to this one.

Writing and Pain; Community and Hope

November 6th, 2009 § 3

I haven’t been writ­ing and it hurts; it’s a tight­ness in my chest and a twist in my gut, and there is a part of me that wants to scream. Well, maybe not scream, but at least to grunt, let out some excla­ma­tion of frus­tra­tion that I have not been mak­ing poems, and I have not been work­ing – or only recently started work­ing again – on the fore­word I need to write for the trans­la­tion of the begin­ning of Shah­nameh that has been sit­ting on my desk more or less com­pleted for the last cou­ple of months. The other day, while I was wait­ing in a hotel lobby in Wash­ing­ton DC for a friend to call, I was able to get just a lit­tle bit of work done on that intro­duc­tion, but it wasn’t writ­ing. I was tak­ing notes on a book that has been sit­ting on my shelf for at least a month wait­ing for me to read it. It’s an inter­li­brary loan, and I am sure it is very, very over­due. (I find it funny that they abbre­vi­ate inter­li­brary loan ILL; when­ever I get an email telling me that a book I have requested has arrived, the sub­ject head­ing is some­thing like “Your ILL Request,” and it just makes me smile. I have a strange sense of humor that way.) Any­way, I was tak­ing notes on this book and just that lit­tle bit of work made me so happy. Because it was my work, not for school, not to make money, but just the work that I do, or one kind of work that I do, to make my life mean­ing­ful, to make mean­ing­ful and beau­ti­ful things to send out into the world.

The book is called Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy, and it’s by A. Sha­pur Shah­bazi. Fer­dowsi is the pen name of the poet who wrote Shah­nameh, an epic poem of about 50,000 cou­plets that tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, from the nation’s mythopo­etic begin­nings to the moment right before the Arab Mus­lim con­quest in the 7th cen­tury CE. Shah­nameh is often called Iran’s national epic, and for good rea­son. Not only do the sto­ries in the poem still res­onate in Iran­ian cul­ture, in ways that few poems or poets do in the West, but as the Ger­man scholar B. Spuler puts it in the excerpt of his work that Shah­bazi uses as an epi­graph to the book:

In the last analy­sis it was The Shah-nama […] that became the mile­stone for the self-affirmation of the Iran­ian iden­tity. [T]he impor­tance of the poems of Fer­dowsi (and sub­se­quently of later poets) for the preser­va­tion of the Iran­ian char­ac­ter can in no way be over­es­ti­mated. They pro­vided the entire Iran­ian folk – nobles, towns­peo­ple, arti­sans and peas­ants – with that “Ira­ni­an­ness” which despite all social dif­fer­ences united them, per­fectly mir­rored their image, and allowed them to iden­tify them­selves as fully and totally Iranian.

The book is called “a crit­i­cal biog­ra­phy,” at least in part because Shah­bazi arrives at his under­stand­ing of Ferdowsi’s life through a crit­i­cal read­ing of Shah­nameh. The poet left no note­books, no mem­oir and the infor­ma­tion that we have about his life from out­side the epic, as Shah­bazi shows, is entirely apoc­ryphal. Indeed, an inter­est­ing ques­tion raised by this book, though I doubt Shah­bazi intended this to be the case, is whether and why we ought to pre­fer a truth­ful account­ing of a great writer’s life to the myths and leg­ends that grow up around him, espe­cially when the work he is famous for is as impor­tant to a nation’s cul­tural iden­tity as Shah­nameh.

So, for exam­ple, the tra­di­tional story of the poem’s com­po­si­tion has the peas­ant Fer­dowsi labor­ing for 25 years to write the poem, hop­ing to earn from it a dowry for his daugh­ter. When, through the good offices of an inter­me­di­ary, he presents the poem to Sul­tan Mah­mud of Gazna, how­ever, the intermediary’s ene­mies among the Sultan’s advis­ers con­vince the ruler that the poem really is not worth all that much, espe­cially since Fer­dowsi is a Shi­ite and there­fore a heretic. Tak­ing his advis­ers’ advice, the Sul­tan pays Fer­dowsi only 50,000 pieces of sil­ver, not gold, an amount which Fer­dowsi sees as an insult. So, instead of tak­ing the pay­ment for him­self, he divides the money between two peo­ple who have served him. He then flees to another ruler’s court, where he attacks the Sul­tan in a satire of which only a small num­ber of lines sur­vive. Even­tu­ally, he returns home, though he con­tin­ues to live in con­stant fear of the Sultan.

One day, some­thing hap­pens in Mahmud’s court that reveals to him the great­ness of Ferdowsi’s poem, and he repents of his ear­lier to deci­sion to under­pay the man. So the Sul­tan sends along with a suit­able apol­ogy, 60,000 gold coins, a 10,000 coin increase over the amount Fer­dowsi had orig­i­nally expected. Just as the couri­ers arrive with the money, how­ever, Ferdowsi’s corpse is being car­ried out of his house so he can be buried. Ferdwosi’s daugh­ter, accord­ing to this story, refuses the Sultan’s money, and so it is used to repair a local hostelry.

Shah­bazi shows that this story is com­pletely false. It is now gen­er­ally accepted, he points out, that Fer­dowsi was not a peas­ant, was never in Sul­tan Mahmud’s court and never had a daugh­ter. Yet which story is bet­ter, which one should be the story about Fer­dowsi that gets told? The one I have just told you, or the truth: that Fer­dowsi was a mem­ber of the landed gen­try, that he com­posed the Shah­nameh while liv­ing on his own income, that he had a son who died at a young age. It’s easy enough to say that what really mat­ters is the truth, but the lessons in the apoc­ryphal story are also truths that are impor­tant to tell and the way that Fer­dowsi and his daugh­ter behave when con­fronted with the dif­fer­ent pay­ments from the Sul­tan embody val­ues it is worth emu­lat­ing, or at least hon­or­ing. I’m not sug­gest­ing that we should accept false­hoods as his­tory, but one of the things I like about Shahbazai’s book is how the false­hoods become part of the his­tory, part of Ferdowsi’s biog­ra­phy, even as he (Shah­bazi) claims to be arriv­ing at as accu­rate a fac­tual biog­ra­phy of Fer­dowsi as can be gleaned from the text of the Shah­nameh itself.

But I started writ­ing about how painful it is to be not to be writ­ing, which is ironic, of course, because I am writ­ing this blog post, and I will admit that sit­ting here in my bed, half lis­ten­ing to the TV pro­gram my son is watch­ing in the next room, peck­ing away at these keys is mak­ing me feel bet­ter. Except that my foot is start­ing to hurt with the onset of another gout attack. I’ve been in the mid­dle of one now for a cou­ple of days, the result of hav­ing lost a decent amount of weight in a short period of time because of a liver detox­i­fi­ca­tion reg­i­men my doc­tor put me on. The pain is start­ing to dis­tract me and so I have lost track of where I wanted to take this blog post next, but it does make me think about the degree to which writ­ing seems to reduce the pain. Or, since I am sure it does not actu­ally reduce it, the way writ­ing is able to take my mind away from the pain, and so I am won­der­ing about the con­nec­tion between the pain I feel when I am not writ­ing, the pain of my gout, and the way writ­ing seems to alle­vi­ate both.

I think it was in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body In Pain that I read about how peo­ple expe­ri­ence pain as some­thing alien, some­thing other, some­thing not of the body. Which is ironic, of course, since it is the body that is in pain. The prepo­si­tion is sig­nif­i­cant. Metaphor­i­cally, it sug­gests that pain is some­thing phys­i­cal we can be in, like a lake, or a car, or the world; and yet, if Scarry is cor­rect, and if I under­stand her – or my mem­ory of what she wrote – cor­rectly, we expe­ri­ence pain as some­thing inside of us that we need to get out of us, some­thing that can­not be inte­grated into who we are. It can be forced on us, as in tor­ture – and the first part of Scarry’s book is a dis­cus­sion of tor­ture – but it is not some­thing that we can inte­grate, that we can make a part of our­selves, the way we make plea­sur­able sen­sa­tions wel­come within us, make them part of who we are in the world.

Lan­guage (I think this is Scarry too) is not just the one way we can give pain mean­ing – lan­guage, after all, is how we give every­thing mean­ing – but it is the only way we can make the real­ity of our pain com­pre­hen­si­ble to some­one else. Indeed, per­haps on some level we need to make our pain com­pre­hen­si­ble in ways that we don’t need to do with our plea­sures. After all, it is – at least for me – per­fectly pos­si­ble to keep one’s plea­sures entirely pri­vate, not to name them, and still find them immensely sat­is­fy­ing. It is not that way with pain. To deal with pain, espe­cially but not only emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal pain, I need com­mu­nity; I need to be able to tell some­one, and while I some­times may be the only one I tell by writ­ing about it, that is never an entirely sat­is­fac­tory solu­tion. I need to know there is some­one else who under­stands me or who has at least tried to under­stand me.

And so I won­der about the degree to which com­mu­nity, the human need for com­mu­nity and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, is rooted in pain, and I won­der if the pain I feel when I don’t write is my body remind­ing me to reach out, that I need to reach out. Because that is what I do when I write. No mat­ter how deeply inter­nal and per­sonal and inte­rior the moti­va­tion to write may be, no mat­ter how soli­tary the act of writ­ing is, every­thing I write is also an invi­ta­tion to com­mu­nity the goal of which is not so dif­fer­ent from the way Spuler describes the Shah­nameh as being “the mile­stone for the self-affirmation of the Iran­ian iden­tity.” Some­times, espe­cially when I feel like no one reads what I write, that thought fills me with a deep sad­ness, because I know I will keep writ­ing any­way, even if no one else ever reads a word I put down on the page. Now, though, I am filled instead with a giddy hope­ful­ness, and that makes me happy.

“Zahhak: We’d Need To Hear His Mother’s Story” on Ekleksographia

October 24th, 2009 § 0

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.

Persian Poetry: Origins, Translations, and Influences

September 19th, 2009 § 0

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.

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