March 27th, 2010 §
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.
December 30th, 2009 §
Farid Al-Din Attar is one of the most important writers in the Persian canon. Not only is he a major poet in his own right, but his work offers crucial insight into Sufi thought and experience, while prefiguring other important poets like Rumi, Saadi and Hafez. As well, once translations of classical Persian literature began to appear in English in the 18th and 19th centuries, Attar’s work — along with, among others, that of the three poets I just mentioned — played an important role both in helping the English-speaking world of the time understand Persian and Islamic culture and in bringing into English literature an influence felt by the likes of Matthew Arnold and Lord Byron, and that contemporary writers like Robert Bly continue to find important. It is both ironic and a shame, therefore, that only one of Attar’s major works, Manteq al-Tayr, exists in a contemporary translation for a general English-language readership, The Conference of the Birds, published in 1984 by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. Readable, enjoyable and poetically powerful, The Conference of the Birds is the kind of translation we deserve of a literature that has influenced ours in such significant ways. Unfortunately, whatever its merits on scholarly grounds, the same cannot be said — at least not with the same enthusiasm — for John Andrew Boyle’s out-of-print translation of Ilahi-Nama, The Ilahi-Nama or Book of God, published by the University of Manchester Press in 1976.
In an essay called “Representations of Attar in the West and in the East,” Christopher Shackle criticizes Margaret Smith’s 1932 translation of Manteq al-Tayr for being written “in a prose whose archaisms, including biblical ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, cover Attar’s studiously clear style with a patina of reverence….” (187). Boyle’s Ilahi-Nama suffers from the same weakness. Here, for example, is his rendering of the passage in “The Tale of Marjuma” where the woman berates her brother-in-law for trying to have his way with her:
She said to him: “Art thou not ashamed before God? Dost thou thus show respect to thy brother?
Is this thy religion and thy probity? Dost thou thus keep trust for thy brother?
Go, repent, return to God, and eschew this wicked thought.”
That man said to the woman: “It is no use; thou must satisfy me at once,
Otherwise I will cease to concern myself about thee, I will expose thee to shame, I will slight thee.
Straightaway now I shall cast thee to destruction, I shall cast thee into a fearful plight.” (32)
As well, Boyle too often relies on a literalness that ends up being unintentionally comic and/or almost impossible to comprehend. The first line of the final section of the “Exordium,” in which Attar praises and meditates upon the greatness of God — “Come, musk of the soul, open thy musk-bladder, for thou art the deputy of the Vicar of God” (27) — is an example of the former. In “The Tale of Marjuma,” to give an example of the latter, when the female protagonist is on a ship at sea, about to be raped by the entire crew, she prays to God to save her. This is Boyle’s rendering of that scene:
When the woman learned of these wicked men’s feelings, she saw the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood.
She opened her mouth [and said]: “O Knower of Secrets, preserve me from the evil of these wicked men.” (38)
The phrase “the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood” clearly relates to the idea in Persian culture that the liver, not the heart, is the seat of emotion, but what the phrase means, except in the vaguest of senses, is far from clear. By way of comparison, here is my version of those lines:
When she learned
what the men intended, she turned
and saw in the sea surrounding her,
filled with her heart’s blood, a liver
wide enough to hold all she felt.
Her mouth fell open. She knelt,
prayed: “Protect me, Knower of Secrets!
Save me from this wickedness.”
I make no claim that this is great poetry, or that there is no better solution to the “heart’s-blood-liver” metaphor; and I am very aware that whether or not my translation will endure is a question that only time and readers will answer, but the value of bringing Ilahi-Nama into 21st century American English poetry is not only, and not even primarily, that it might be successful in these terms. Rather, the value lies in the sustained engagement translation is — both in the writing and the reading — with another culture.
On the one hand, the value of such engagement is, or ought to be, self-evident, requiring no further justification. On the other hand, however, given the current national and international political moment, it is, or ought to be, impossible to talk about translating Persian literature without also talking about both the state of relations between Iran and the United States and the political unrest that has focused world attention on Iran since the contested presidential elections there in June 2009. Each of those dynamics demands that the people of the United States learn as much about the Iranian people, their culture and their history, as we possibly can, especially since our collective ignorance about Iran has been profound since diplomatic relations between our two countries ended after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 – 80. Boyle’s translation of Ilahi-Nama is not a text to which people are likely to go for that kind of learning, most immediately because it is out of print, but also because its archaic diction and biblical style is more likely than not to alienate them.
I am neither naïve nor arrogant enough to assume that my translation of Ilahi-Nama will by itself effect any change, large or small, in US-Iran relations or that it will alter even one reader’s notions about Iran and/or Islam. I do know, however, that each translated book made available to a reading public increases the likelihood of such change taking place. At the very least because it offers a radically different view of Islam from the version practiced and promulgated by the current Iranian government and can therefore help to combat the anti-Muslim stereotypes currently in fashion, but even more significantly because it is a great work of literature written by one of the world’s greatest poets, whom we in the United States deserve to know better than we do, a new literary translation of Ilahi-Nama should be among the books making such change possible.
Sources
ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. The Ilāhī-Nāma Or Book of God of Farīd Al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār. Trans. John Andrew Boyle. Persian Heritage Series, Vol. 29 Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976.
Shackle, Christopher. “Representations of Attar in the West and in the East: Translations of the Mantiq Al-Tayr and the Tale of Shaykh Ṣanʻān.” Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight. Eds. Leonard Lewisohn, and Christopher Shackle. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. 165 – 93.
December 13th, 2009 §
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 monument 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), 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 secon
d 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 «
November 10th, 2009 §
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 blog during the protests in June.
Protesters in Ferdowsi Square after the June 09 elections in Iran
The connection between literature and politics is always a difficult one. Treating politics as if it were literature, politicizing literary texts, are strategies that people use to advance agendas that are fundamentally political, and often not progressive in nature. Especially in connection with what is going on in Iran right now, when people are really dying and when the Iranian government is doing everything it can to isolate the entire nation of Iran so that it (the government) can restore what it believes should be the (clearly repressive) order of things, to talk about life imitating art, to read what is going on in Iran through the lens of Iran’s own literature, has felt to me like a self-indulgent and gratuitous intellectual exercise. Yet literature, and in this case specifically poetry, also helps people give meaning to their lives; it can inspire, and it can connect us to something larger than ourselves in ways that political feelings, no matter how strongly felt and/or acted upon, often cannot. And so, precisely because people are really dying in Iran – because I really do believe, along with William Carlos Williams, that people die every day for lack of what is found in poetry – and precisely because there is so much at stake over there, and because Iran is a culture that loves and reveres its poets, I have decided to write this. Perhaps connecting the unrest in Iran not only to the specific history of the Islamic Republic and the revolution out of which that republic was born – which most analysts, reasonably, are focusing on – but also to the Iranian culture that is larger and older than both the Republic and Islam, will make a difference. What that difference might be, and to whom, I have no way of knowing, but I just don’t think it is mere coincidence that the current unrest finds echoes in a story Iran has been telling itself about itself for centuries: the tale of Kaveh and Zahhak from the poem commonly referred to as Iran’s national epic, Shahnameh (Book, or Epic, of the Kings), part of which I am in the process of translating. I will include my translation at the end of this post.
Written by Abolqasem Ferdowsi in the 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
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 «
October 24th, 2009 §
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.
September 19th, 2009 §
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.
August 28th, 2009 §
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.