{"id":16629,"date":"2013-01-26T06:00:34","date_gmt":"2013-01-26T14:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=16629"},"modified":"2013-01-23T02:53:19","modified_gmt":"2013-01-23T10:53:19","slug":"my-face-became-eyes-my-eyes-hands-translation-strategy-and-metaphor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=16629","title":{"rendered":"“My Face Became Eyes; My Eyes, Hands” – Translation Strategy and Metaphor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Attar's<\/a>I am on sabbatical this semester to work on a translation of Ilahi Nama, The Book of God<\/em>, by Farid al-Din Attar<\/a>. I\u2019ve been working on this book in bits and pieces for the past couple of years, producing first drafts of individual poems, gathering research material, occasionally blogging about both the poet<\/a> and his book<\/a>, but I am excited, finally, to be able to devote myself if not exclusively, then certainly substantially to this project. Among the classical Iranian poets I have translated\u2014which is actually not saying much, since Attar is only the fourth\u2014and even among those about whom I have learned in the course of my research, Attar is the one poet whose work is pretty much exclusively devoted to delineating, exploring, meditating on and teaching about the Sufi mystical path. I am not a mystical\/spiritual seeker in any formal sense of that term, and there is much within Sufi Islam as I have come to understand it\u2014and I have no doubt my understanding is a very shallow one\u2014that I would not choose to embrace; but there is also, I think, a great deal to learn from the particular shape that the Sufis give to the metaphor, common among mystics in many spiritual traditions, of the road or path to enlightenment and union with the god they worship.<\/p>\n

One of the things I did in preparation for my sabbatical was read The Conference of the Birds<\/em><\/a>, a translation by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis of Attar\u2019s Manteq al-tayir,<\/em> the story of a group of birds who search for the legendary Simorgh, the king of the birds. The hoopoe, the birds\u2019 guide, describes the Simorgh like this:<\/p>\n

We have a king; beyond Kaf\u2019s mountain peak
\nThe Simorgh lives, the sovereign whom you seek,
\nAnd he is always near to us, though we
\nLive far from his transcendent majesty.
\nA hundred thousand veils of dark and light
\nWithdraw His presence from our mortal sight,
\nAnd in both worlds no being shares the throne
\nThat marks the Simorgh\u2019s power and His alone\u2014
\nHe reigns in undisturbed omnipotence,
\nBathed in the light of His magnificence\u2014
\nNo mind, no intellect can penetrate
\nThe mystery of His unending state\u2026. (33-34)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the end of the quest, when they find the Simorgh, only thirty birds remain. Indeed, the entire meaning of the poem rests on a pun in Persian that is not translatable into English. Simorgh means \u201cthirty (si) birds (morgh),\u201d the point being–and this is what the birds discover when they find the Simorgh–that the successful search for God leads you to the discovery that God is already in you, that you are already and always part of God, that, ultimately, there is no difference, no separation between yourself and God if only you are able to let go of this world and of yourself, surrendering to that final, ultimate and absolute oneness.<\/p>\n

One of the most interesting aspects of The Conference of the Birds,<\/em> for me anyway, is what Attar has to say about love, and I will write about that in subsequent posts. For now, I want to take a step back for a minute and consider something Dick Davis says in the introduction he wrote for the volume:<\/p>\n

Persian metaphors are rarely the visual images that English readers expect to find in poetry. Instead they juxtapose words which have potent associations in a way that deepens and widens the meanings implied by the passage. If the reader attempts to visualize the juxtaposition the result is often ludicrous. Henry Vaughan\u2019s poem \u201cMy soul, there is a country\u201d<\/a> has a line, \u201cSweet Peace sits crowned with smiles\u201d, which seems to me untypical of English metaphor (it is absurd to try and see a personified Peace with a crown literally made of smiles\u2014what could such a crown look like?), but it would not startle a Persian poet. The metaphor works, if it works, by juxtaposing the associations of \u201cPeace,\u201d \u201ccrowned\u201d and \u201csmiles\u201d to convey a notion of benign authority. This is exactly how most Persian metaphors convey meaning. Thus, when Attar compares the Prophet\u2019s face to the moon in one line and the sun in the next, he does not want his readers to visualize the result; rather he expects them to combine the notion of beauty associated with the moon and the notion of solitary splendour associated with the sun. (22)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While I am not persuaded that metaphors in English poetry are so exclusively visual, though I\u2019m not right now going to hunt up examples to support that doubt, Davis\u2019 assertion that the “metaphor mechanism”–if I can coin a really awkward term–is qualitatively different in Persian than it is in English fascinates me. I’ve written elsewhere <\/a>about the book Metaphors We Live By<\/em><\/a>,by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and the idea that human beings use metaphor to structure how we perceive and experience the world, but I am not so much interested here in trying to understand the difference between the Persian world view and ours as I am in the fact that Davis’ assertion reminded me of something I had forgotten: that a graduate student in translation at Islamic Azad University in Tehran<\/a>, Javad Rezaei, used my translation of Saadi\u2019s Gulistan<\/em> <\/a>in his MA thesis, \u201cAn Investigation on Translation Strategies of Metaphors and Similes in Gulistan into English.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quoting an Iranian scholar named R. Hadi, Rezaei distinguishes between two types of metaphors in Persian, \u201cexplicit\u201d and \u201callusive.\u201d In explicit metaphor, Rezaei writes, \u201cthe writer omits all parts of the [comparison] except the image,\u201d and he adduces as an example this sentence from Francis Gladwin\u2019s Gulistan<\/em> translation:<\/p>\n

You would have said that the earth was bedecked with glass spangles, and that the knot of the Pleiades was suspended from the branch of the vine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In each of the two metaphors in this sentence\u2014one comparing flowers to \u201cglass spangles\u201d and the other comparing a bunch of grapes to the \u201cknot of the Pleiades\u201d\u2014the tenor of the metaphor, that to which characteristics are being attributed, is omitted (flowers and grapes). For the writer, Rezaei suggests, this kind of metaphor \u201cemphasize[s] the immeasurable amount of similarity between the object [tenor] and the image [vehicle].\u201d Allusive metaphor, on the other hand, for which Rezaei does not propose a writerly strategy, functions a little bit like what we would call synecdoche, a figure of speech which uses a part of something to signify the whole, or vice versa. The example Rezaei uses, \u201cThe doors of heaven were shut against the earth\u201d is an allusive metaphor in Persian, according to him, because \u201cdoor\u201d is used to signify the idea that heaven is like a house, but the idea of house<\/em> is never mentioned.<\/p>\n

Since I work as a translator from English to English, making literary translations from trots that have been provided to me, the distinctions Rezaei makes do not figure at all into what I do. Whoever produced the trot I am using has already made whatever decisions need to be made in figuring out how to bring the metaphors in any given passage from Persian into English. My task is to figure out how to make them work as contemporary American poetry. Sometimes, because the translations I work from are too literal, too scholarly, and\/or too old–or are made to sound old because the translator wants to conjure in English the feel of, say, the 12th century–this becomes a real challenge. Here, for example, is a passage from the very first tale in Ilahi Nama<\/em>, translated by Professor John Andrew Boyle in The Ilahi-Nama or Book of God<\/a><\/em>, published by the University of Manchester Press in 1976:<\/p>\n

When the woman learned these wicked men\u2019s feelings, she saw the whole sea as a liver from her heart\u2019s blood.
\nShe opened her mouth [and said]: \u201cO Knower of Secrets, preserve me from the evil of these wicked men. (38)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The scene is one in which the woman\u2014and it\u2019s not important for this discussion to know who she is or why she is in such danger\u2014understands that a group of men intends to gang rape her. Her perception of the sea as a liver that has somehow come from her heart\u2019s blood\u2014or, perhaps, she perceives the sea as a liver because of her heart\u2019s blood\u2014is supposed to capture her despair, the liver being understood in Attar’s time as the seat of emotion, the way we understand the heart to be. Nonetheless, she saw the whole sea as a liver from her heart\u2019s blood<\/em> works neither as metaphor nor as poetry in English. Here is my solution:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0When she learned
\nwhat the men intended, she turned
\nand saw the sea surrounding her
\nfilled with her heart\u2019s blood, like a liver
\nwide enough to hold all she felt.
\nHer mouth fell open. She knelt
\nand prayed, \u201cProtect me, Knower of Secrets!
\nSave me from this wickedness.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the story, God answers the woman\u2019s prayer, causing a firestorm to rise from the sea, burning her would-be rapists to ashes but leaving her, the boat they are on, and all the goods the boat is carrying intact.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not completely satisfied with my version because I think the simile\u2014like a liver<\/em>\u2014loses some of the immediacy of Boyle\u2019s translation, but the jump from heart to liver is so jarring, at least to my American English ear, that the mediating like<\/em> and the explanatory wide enough to hold all she felt<\/em> are both necessary. I know there is a school of thought that would argue for keeping some version of the oddness in Boyle\u2019s language because of the value in \u201cPersianizing\u201d English, stretching the boundaries of what is possible in the \u201ctarget\u201d language by bringing into it from the \u201csource\u201d words, ideas, metaphors, images that would not otherwise be possible, but I just don\u2019t feel the payoff is worth it here.<\/p>\n

One of the things that gets brought into English through translations of Sufi poetry is the focus in Sufism on love as that which defines the relationship between the true mystic and her or his god. If you are at all familiar with the poet Rumi, you probably have some idea of what I\u2019m talking about. In the versions of Coleman Barks, Rumi is\u2014or at least he was at one time (I have not checked recently)\u2014the most popular poet in the United States, largely on the strength of the passionate and compassionate love expressed in his poems. Here\u2019s an example, though the translation is not by Barks; it\u2019s by Professor John Moyne and myself and appears in Professor Moyne\u2019s book, A Bird in the Garden of Angels: On the Life and Times and An Anthology of Rumi<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

What is Love<\/em><\/h2>\n

To be one with you is the Water of Life;
\nyou know the path of our salvation.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t leave my sight; you are the light I see by.
\nDon\u2019t leave my heart; you are the source of its every beat.<\/p>\n

Empty my eyes of your radiant presence
\nand my soul will cry out without shame,<\/p>\n

\u201cWho am I to be seeking union?!\u201d
\neven as the spark of your grace compels me to seek it.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t go to a flophouse, my heart,
\neven \u2028if yours is the most careless life in the world.<\/p>\n

There are gamblers there,
\nand if you lose, I fear you\u2019ll stay!<\/p>\n

But if you choose to go, disguise yourself;
\nlet a mask make you a stranger.<\/p>\n

If Love\u2019s arrow is what you crave,
\ndon\u2019t use armor to mask your heart<\/p>\n

Someone asked me, \u201cWhat does it mean\u2028to be a lover?\u201d
\nI said, \u201cDon\u2019t worry about meaning.<\/p>\n

Become like me, and you will know;
\nbecome like me, and when it calls you, you\u2019ll respond\u201d.<\/p>\n

Be a man! Proclaim your love like a lion!
\nWhy do you let your heart beat like a woman\u2019s?<\/p>\n

Longing for my rose-cheeked love turns my face the color of saffron;
\nfilled with the sent of autumn, my breath longs for the fragrance of your spring:<\/p>\n

You who saved the gardens from the suffering of the fall;
\nwho gave the gift of speech to those with torn ears;<\/p>\n

You who placed the secrets of infinity on the tongues of the prophets,
\nwho bestowed eternal life in death upon the souls of the saints;<\/p>\n

You who committed the care of the mind to the imperfect intellect,
\nwho each night removes five lights from creation;<\/p>\n

You who filled the eyes of women with sorcery, seduction and intoxication,
\nWho endowed a drop of blood with wisdom, intellect and realization;<\/p>\n

You who empowered love with manliness, masculinity and the force of a champion,
\nThis is how Sanai said it: \u201cIf you seek eternity, lose your life!\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh Shams of Tabriz, you are absolute light; you are the light of heaven.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Shams of Tabriz was a mystic who became Rumi\u2019s master and for whom Rumi felt such an intense love that Rumi named a volume of his own poetry after him. There are at least two versions of the story of how Shams and Rumi met. In one, Shams passed by Rumi while the latter was reading a large stack of books. \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d Shams asked. \u201cSomething you cannot understand,\u201d Rumi replied condescendingly. In response, Shams threw the books into a nearby pool of water. Rumi rushed to rescue them but, to his surprise, found them all to be dry when he retrieved them from the water. When Rumi asked Shams, \u201cWhat is this?\u201d Shams said, \u201cSomething you do not understand.\u201d In another version, the beginning is more or less the same, but when Rumi says, \u201cSomething you do not understand,\u201d his books catch fire. Rumi asks Shams to explain, and Shams gives the same answer, \u201cSomething you do not understand.\u201d The point is that true enlightenment is not to be found in books, but in direct experience, particularly of divine love and the path one must travel in order to feel that love. Much, if not all of Rumi\u2019s poetry\u2014though this is also an extreme simplification\u2014is about trying, and failing, to find the words that will embody that experience.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll notice several things about the poem Professor Moyne and I have called \u201cWhat Is Love?\u201d (Rumi did not title his poems.) First is that Rumi uses human sexual desire and love as a metaphor for love of and union with his god; second, in this poem at least, because it is addressed to Shams, this love is given homoerotic expression; third, spiritual love itself is gendered\u2014you who empowered love with manliness, masculinity and the force of a champion<\/em>–and fourth, that womanliness and femininity clearly indicate a more feeble, inferior level of spiritual development.\u00a0This gendering of spiritual love and desire through the use of sexual love and desire as a metaphor is part of what I want to write about in the posts I have in mind on Attar\u2014who, by the way, is said to have met Rumi and recognized in him the great poet he would one day become ((The story is that Rumi and his family stayed with Attar when Rumi was a child and Attar was already an old man. One day, Attar saw Rumi follow his father, Bahauddin, out the door and Attar said, \u201cLook! There goes a sea chased by an ocean.\u201d))\u2014but what I want to point out here is just how fully the erotic\/sexual metaphor is elaborated in the text.<\/p>\n

Here, as another example, is one of Rumi\u2019s quatrains, also co-translated by myself and Professor Moyne:<\/p>\n

Drunk, my Love burst in and drank
\na cup of ruby wine with me.
\nI gazed at her and touched her hair.
\nMy face became eyes; my eyes, hands.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Leaving aside the capitalized L<\/em> in love<\/em>, which is a convention of English, not the Persian in which Rumi wrote, is his a carnal or a spiritual love poem? Or is it both at the same time? Indeed, there are some stories in which Sufi masters tell those who wish to become Sufis\u2014and the characters in these tales are always men\u2014that they should try loving a woman before they try to embark on a path of spiritual seeking. The first kind of love and desire is understood to be not just a metaphor, but quite explicitly a kind of preparation, for the second; and yet it, carnal love and desire, in this way of thinking, is actually derived from–is a watered-down version of–the original love and union we all ostensibly had with the god who created us.<\/p>\n

One last thing, about the fact that the first poem I cited was homoerotic, while the second was heteronormative: Persian does not have gendered pronouns. Indeed, my wife, even though she\u2019s been in the United States for nearly 25 years and speaks English most of the time, still confuses he, she, him, or her,<\/em> when she refers to people, calling our son \u201cshe\u201d or, for example, one of her female colleagues \u201chim.\u201d ((Igbo, spoken in Nigeria, is another language with this characteristic.)) This means that, unless there is some other form of evidence that identifies the gender of a Persian love poem\u2019s addressee\u2014as in the first poem, where Shams, who was a man, is explicitly named\u2014it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to know whether the poem is addressed to a man or woman. This is true not only of Rumi\u2019s work, but of other Sufi poets as well, and it can present a real problem for a translator, not just in understanding the poem itself, but in whether or not her or his own culture would accept a spiritual love poem using homoerotic sexual desire as a metaphor for love of God. Indeed, some English-language translators of Saadi\u2019s Gulisan<\/em>, prior to the 19th century, simply \u201cheterosexualized\u201d all passages that even reeked of homoeroticism.<\/p>\n

I will write more about this in my posts on Attar as well.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am on sabbatical this semester to work on a translation of Ilahi Nama, The Book of God, by Farid al-Din Attar. I\u2019ve been working on this book in bits and pieces for the past couple of years, producing first … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iran-international-issues","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16629"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16635,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16629\/revisions\/16635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}