J Street and Poetry and Jewish Poli­tics and Jewish Poets and Jewish Poe­tics and Holo­caust Tri­via­li­za­tion and Israel and Pales­tine and anti­se­mi­tism and How Can Cul­ture be a Tool for Change if You Won’t Let Cul­ture do its Work? — Part 1

January 18th, 2010 § 1

Oy! So I was, with mild inte­rest, rea­ding over at Alas the con­ver­sa­tion that was begin­ning to deve­lop around the post writ­ten by Julie about J Street ope­ning local chap­ters. I say “mild inte­rest” because I find so much of the poli­tics surroun­ding the con­flict bet­ween the Israe­lis and the Pales­ti­nians – which also means the con­flicts bet­ween and among all the various groups who have an inte­rest in how that con­flict is, or is not, resol­ved – not only tire­some, but also, all too often, chil­dish. It’s not that I think the issues are not pro­foundly, world-changingly impor­tant; it’s just that I no lon­ger have the patience that I once had for sif­ting through the par­ti­san nit­pic­king and poli­ti­cal oppor­tu­nism, not to men­tion the outright hatred, into which so many dis­cus­sions of those issues ine­vi­tably devolve. Still, the little bit that I have heard about J Street has sug­ges­ted to me that they are trying to be adults by, at the very least, broa­de­ning the con­ver­sa­tion both in terms of con­tent and in terms of who gets to par­ti­ci­pate, and that is refreshing, even though I don’t know enough about most of their posi­tions to say how much I sup­port them beyond the sta­te­ment I have just made.

What caught my inte­rest about the con­ver­sa­tion Julie’s post star­ted was that it con­cer­ned lite­ra­ture, the role of lite­ra­ture in poli­ti­cal move­ments, the stance poli­ti­cal move­ments should take towards indi­vi­dual works of lite­ra­ture, what it means to write poli­ti­cally enga­ged lite­ra­ture and what it means to engage lite­ra­ture poli­ti­cally. The first part of the con­ver­sa­tion is about the play Seven Jewish Chil­dren, writ­ten in 2009 by Caryl Churchill in res­ponse to Israel’s inva­sion of Gaza. The play con­sists of a series of sim­ple impe­ra­tive sen­ten­ces, each begin­ning with “Tell her” or “Don’t tell her”–her being a female of inde­ter­mi­nate age, though she is pro­bably pretty young. Collec­ti­vely, these impe­ra­ti­ves repre­sent some of the posi­tions that Jews, as groups and as indi­vi­duals, Israeli and not, have taken in res­ponse to both the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict and Israel’s exis­tence. In my own opi­nion, the play, which I have not read as care­fully as I might, and so I am willing to be con­vin­ced other­wise, walks a fine line bet­ween expo­sing and cri­ti­quing, but also huma­ni­zing, the denial and hypoc­risy of many who sup­port Israel’s poli­cies out of fear for their own and the Jewish community’s sur­vi­val, and pro­pa­gan­di­zing that posi­tion as a tool to demo­nize both Jews and Israel. Ulti­ma­tely, I don’t think the play cros­ses the line into pro­pa­ganda, though I can see how others might rea­so­nably say that it does. Moreo­ver, since it is a play, I sup­pose that what really mat­ters in terms of this ques­tion is how the play is pro­du­ced, not simply how it reads on the page.

The first com­ment on Julie’s post is by Sebas­tian, who says:

I do not remem­ber seeing any dis­cus­sion of J Street [on Alas]. Before you rush and sup­port them, check at least the Wiki entry… and maybe look into how mains­tream Israel sup­por­ters feel about them. Maybe also read Seven Jewish Chil­dren and remem­ber that J Street endor­ses the play.

Chin­gona then points out that J Street did not “endorse” the play. Rather, the orga­ni­za­tion asser­ted that the play is not neces­sa­rily anti­se­mi­tic and they defen­ded the thea­ter com­pany that put the play on. Sebas­tian then admits not that he’d mis­read J Street’s posi­tion on the play, but that he hadn’t even bothe­red to read the ori­gi­nal sta­te­ment; he also explains that he thinks “it’s worth rea­ding and dis­cus­sing [Seven Jewish Chil­dren], but sta­ging it accor­ding to the terms of the author is taking a stance with which I most cer­tainly do not agree.” Pre­su­mably, since he does not spe­cify, the part of the terms of per­for­mance that Sebas­tian objects to is the text in bold­face below:

The play can be read or per­for­med anywhere, by any num­ber of peo­ple. Anyone who wishes to do it should con­tact the author’s agent (details below), who will license per­for­man­ces free of charge pro­vi­ded that no admis­sion fee is char­ged and that a collec­tion is taken at each per­for­mance for Medi­cal Aid for Pales­ti­nians (MAP), 33a Isling­ton Park Street, Lon­don N1 1QB, tel +44 (0)20 7226 4114, e-mail info@​map-​uk.​org, web www​.map​-uk​.org.

Cer­tainly, Sebas­tian is within his right to disa­gree with these terms, and he is within his right not to attend any per­for­mance of the play and to try to con­vince others not to attend; he also would be within his rights to orga­nize a boy­cott of the play in his com­mu­nity were someone trying to put it on there. What I am inte­res­ted in, howe­ver, is that the disa­gree­ment he expres­ses is not with the text of the play itself, which he thinks is worth rea­ding and dis­cus­sing, but with peo­ple put­ting the play to poli­ti­cal use, to serve a prac­ti­cal pur­pose in the world, one that invol­ves human being, human bodies and the rela­tionships bet­ween and among them. Some might argue that medi­cal aid is not poli­ti­cal, or at least that it ought to be beyond poli­ti­ci­za­tion. In prin­ci­ple, I agree, if by poli­ti­ci­za­tion you mean the kind of par­ti­sanship that is more about who wins and who loses than about fin­ding solu­tions; but it’s not just that there is nothing about the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict that is not already, always, poli­ti­cal and poli­ti­ci­zed; it’s that medi­cine is itself, whe­re­ver and howe­ver it is prac­ti­ced, is already, always, poli­ti­cal simply because it is about human being and human bodies; and to sug­gest that lite­ra­ture ought not to be used to make medi­cal care avai­la­ble to peo­ple who need it, regard­less of the poli­tics of the orga­ni­za­tions invol­ved, is to sug­gest that lite­ra­ture needs to be con­tro­lled, hem­med in, fen­ced in, to be kept safe from those who would corrupt it, to pro­tect its purity, so that it can be read and dis­cus­sed, for exam­ple, without the taint of an overt poli­ti­cal agenda. Or maybe it is to sug­gest that it’s us who need to be kept safe from lite­ra­ture, because lite­ra­ture has the power to move peo­ple to act, not just to think and to feel.

Howe­ver one unders­tands the impulse to keep lite­ra­ture out of the mate­rial rea­lity of people’s lives, that impulse at its core is the impulse to cen­sor, to con­trol mea­ning and the­reby to con­trol people’s ima­gi­na­tions. Let me be clear, though: I am not accu­sing Sebas­tian of cen­sorship or of wan­ting to cen­sor anyone. He is neither making nor advo­ca­ting policy in his com­ments on Alas; and let me be clear about something else as well: I am tal­king in this post about lite­ra­ture, works that aspire to the level of art, the pur­pose of which is to explore human being and fee­ling, not – as pro­pa­ganda attempts, and is desig­ned, to do – dic­tate it. I can ima­gine, for exam­ple, a pro­duc­tion of Seven Jewish Chil­dren that might qua­lify as pro­pa­ganda, one in which, say, the cha­rac­ters were all wea­ring Nazi uni­forms and in which there was no irony to make that cos­tu­ming deci­sion anything other than a sim­ple equa­ting of Israel with Nazi Ger­many. I would not argue that such a pro­duc­tion should be cen­so­red, but it is unam­bi­guously a pro­duc­tion neither I nor anyone I know would sup­port, no mat­ter how worthy the goal of fund rai­sing for Medi­cal Aid for Pales­ti­nians might be – and from what I can tell that is a worthy goal. What if, though, the direc­tor of the play, the one who made the choice to put Nazi uni­forms on the actors, was Jewish, and let’s say he or she was making in this pro­duc­tion a serious attempt to use that cos­tu­ming in an iro­nic way, as a refe­rence to the fact that the Jews – and I am assu­ming that the cha­rac­ters in Seven Jewish Chil­dren are Jewish – who were the vic­tims in the Holo­caust, are now, in Israel, in the posi­tion of being an occup­ying oppres­sor, of vic­ti­mi­zing the Pales­ti­nians.1 The point of the com­pa­ri­son, in other words, is not to say that Israel – and, by exten­sion, the Jews – are no dif­fe­rent from the Nazis, that the Israe­lis are com­mit­ting what is tan­ta­mount to geno­cide against the Pales­ti­nians, but rather to illu­mi­nate the dyna­mic by which vio­lence begets vio­lence, all too often tur­ning those who were vic­tims of vio­lence into per­pe­tra­tors of the kinds of vio­lence they suf­fe­red. Further, ima­gine that the pro­gram notes for this ima­gi­nary pro­duc­tion make clear that it is inten­ded to explore what it means that the vio­lence done by the Israe­lis to the Pales­ti­nians has become part of Jewish iden­tity, in the sense that if one is Jewish, one must be accoun­ta­ble in some way for one’s res­pon­ses to that vio­lence. Moreo­ver, let’s even say that there is a note in the pro­gram explai­ning that the choice of Nazi uni­forms was because the Holo­caust, more than any other per­se­cu­tion the Jews have suf­fe­red, can stand for all the per­se­cu­tions through which the Jews have lived. The com­pa­ri­son to the Holo­caust per se, in other words, is not even the point. » Read the rest of this entry «

  1. I wish I didn’t feel the need to add this foot­note, but I do: To make this refe­rence is, of course, not to deny that the Pales­ti­nians have also been guilty of vic­ti­mi­zing Israe­lis.

Trans­la­ting Clas­si­cal Per­sian Poetry: Why Retrans­late Attar’s “Ilahi-Nama?”

December 30th, 2009 § 0

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.

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

December 28th, 2009 § 1

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

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

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

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

Trans­la­ting Clas­si­cal Ira­nian Poetry: Farid al-Din Attar

December 13th, 2009 § 7

Attar's BustThe 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 15th 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 13th cen­tury, did peo­ple start to pay atten­tion in ear­nest to Memoirs of the Saints, and, as men­tio­ned above, it was not until the 15th 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 «

  1. The image of Attar’s tomb shown below is from the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons.
  2. The first link will take you to Fitzgerald’s 1800s trans­la­tion; the second to the Ama­zon page for Dick Davis’s 20th cen­tury trans­la­tion.

A New Covenant

December 6th, 2009 § 2

They say it’s a shame we didn’t do it
when we should have, that pro­bably you’ll need it
later in life, when it’s more com­pli­ca­ted,
more pain­ful and, worse, you’ll remem­ber it.

They say women won’t want you, that you’ll not
for­give us, ever, espe­cially me, and that
the Jews who’ve died for what it means to be cut
will have died in vain because we left you complete.

And I know I can’t not bur­den you with that.
You have to, have to, reso­nate with what
your body would have meant to all that hate,
and you will — but sit­ting here alone tonight,

my ampu­ta­ted life aching anew,
I’m gra­te­ful for all that’s merely whole in you.

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.)

» Read the rest of this entry «

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

Richard Jef­frey New­man on The Power of Poetry

November 8th, 2009 § 0

This past Satur­day, my collea­gue and friend Mar­cia McNair inter­vie­wed me about my book of poems, The Silence Of Men, on her Blog­Talk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.

Mar­cia is a per­cep­tive rea­der and won­der­ful inter­vie­wer and her ques­tions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favo­rite part of the con­ver­sa­tion was about the poem called “Wor­king The Dot­ted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girl­friend and I had sex, and she was a vir­gin. What I liked best about Marcia’s rea­ding of this piece was her noti­cing my mother’s pre­sence in the poem and how that star­ted me tal­king about something I often encoun­ter but have never given much serious thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncom­for­ta­ble with their mother’s sexua­lity, and I don’t unders­tand it. Or, to be more accu­rate, while I unders­tand inte­llec­tually, I don’t get it emo­tio­nally. As well, they often it pro­foundly dis­tur­bing that I am not made uncom­for­ta­ble not just by the idea of my mother as a sexual being, but by the fact that, when I was gro­wing up, I knew – that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she cer­tainly did not rub it in my face either) – that she had sexual rela­tionships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occa­sio­nally go to bars, or dan­cing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick someone up her­self, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it see­med to me per­fectly natu­ral. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other sin­gle 30-year-old women did when they socia­li­zed? My mother has been a sin­gle woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expec­ted her not to have one or to keep it hid­den from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was gro­wing up, and it never see­med strange to me or wrong or awk­ward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was having sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awk­ward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is something I want to write about, something I had never really thought to write about until Mar­cia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Wor­king The Dot­ted Line

I don’t remem­ber what vaca­tion
I was home for, or how Beth
mana­ged to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apart­ment to our­sel­ves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s han­ging crys­tals
scat­te­ring the after­noon sun­light
in small rain­bows that shim­mied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretching
ner­vous along the length
of the daybed’s mat­tress,
and my fin­gers tra­cing
the rid­ges of her ribs
as she tug­ged at my erec­tion.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first con­dom,
and I’d for­got­ten to read the direc­tions,
so I stood there gro­wing soft,
squin­ting at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I nee­ded to learn
was on the inside.
I rip­ped the card­board open
and sat rea­ding on the bed’s edge,
thum­bing the foil-packed
lubri­ca­ted circle,
trying to visua­lize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dot­ted line,
our pro­tec­tion, like a gold­fish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slip­ped from my grasp
and lan­ded under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I pic­ked it up,
it was cove­red with the dust
and small par­tic­les of dirt
that settle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was knee­ling hard
bet­ween Beth’s open legs.
She rai­sed her­self on her elbows,
smi­ling that the second skin
we nee­ded to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the ins­truc­tions called
the reser­voir tip — I thought
of the dams hol­ding water back
in the moun­tains near where she lived
and what would hap­pen if they broke—
her smile disap­pea­red
and bunching the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lif­ted
her butt onto the pillow
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and clim­bed up onto her,
trying with one hand
to be gra­ce­ful and accu­rate
and with the other
to balance over her
without falling.
At her first gri­mace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clam­ped shut and then
sta­ring wide, her voice
a whis­per through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I ente­red her again, trying
from the tight­ness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out any­way,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nosing down­ward
towards her navel,
and I pla­ced my palms
against her cheeks,
I can­not hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve cho­sen you!

And since I wan­ted so much to be her choice,
I kis­sed her eye­lids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hollow of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giving way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
hol­ding her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a sin­gle motion I breathed through
like I was lif­ting heavy boxes.
She screa­med into the muscle
just above my collar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said nothing after­wards.
We didn’t cuddle
or smile at each other as we dres­sed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My word­less­ness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wan­ted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.

“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.

Rea­ding Joshua Kryah’s Glean

September 23rd, 2009 § 0

“My faith lies elsewhere.” When I finished rea­ding Joshua Kryah’s Glean (Night­boat Books, 2007)1 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.

  1. This review was ori­gi­nally pos­ted on a lite­rary blog that no lon­ger exists called The Great Ame­ri­can Pinup. My unders­tan­ding is that the blog was hac­ked and that attempts by the peo­ple who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuc­cess­ful. I am repos­ting the review here because I think the books are impor­tant enough that the review should con­ti­nue to be avai­la­ble.

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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