{"id":9394,"date":"2009-12-28T15:03:37","date_gmt":"2009-12-28T22:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9394"},"modified":"2009-12-28T15:03:37","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T22:03:37","slug":"translating-classical-persian-poetry-farid-al-din-attars-ilahi-nama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9394","title":{"rendered":"Translating Classical Persian Poetry: Farid al-Din Attar's "Ilahi-Nama""},"content":{"rendered":"

One of eight major works that can reliably be ascribed to Attar<\/a>, Ilahi-Nama <\/em>(Book of God or, sometimes, Divine Book) has, according to Encyclopedia Iranica<\/a>,<\/em> been translated once into English, by John A. Boyle<\/a> in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani<\/a> in 1961. Four of Attar\u2019s eight works\u2014Ilahi-Nama<\/em> is part of this subset\u2014are mystical narratives, each one dealing with a different aspect of Sufi thought and experience. Ilahi-Nama\u2019s<\/em> subject is zuhd<\/a>, <\/em>or asceticism, which Sufis understand to mean a disciplined stance of detachment and indifference towards one\u2019s desires so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the interior world of human emotion differentiates Ilahi-Nama<\/em> from the other of Attar\u2019s poems with which it is often compared, Manteq al-tayr<\/a> <\/em>(Conference of the Birds<\/a>), 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, <\/em>an allegory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essentially a critique of people\u2019s need to find a master who will lead them on the path to true understanding. Ilahi-Nama<\/em>, on the other hand, is about learning to master oneself.<\/p>\n

The framing narrative of Ilahi-Nama <\/em>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 <\/em>(faeries); the second wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desires Jamshid\u2019s cup<\/a> 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 <\/em>understand his desire so he can use it on the path to enlightenment. None of the sons, however, accept their father\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Tale of Marjuma,\u201d for example\u2014about 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\u2014the son accuses his father of wanting to eliminate sex. \u201cGod forbid[!]\u201d the father replies, explaining that \u201cThe Tale of Marjuma\u201d illustrates how sex, properly comprehended and entered into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:<\/p>\n

But when your desire achieves apotheosis,
\nsex gives birth to a love without limits;
\nand when this love is pushed by passion to the edge
\nof its strength, spiritual love emerges; and when
\nspiritual love can grow no further, your soul
\nwill vanish into the Beloved\u2019s endlessness. (My translation)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given that the surface of the narrative in \u201cThe Tale of Marjuma\u201d feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type<\/a> story in which the depraved and debauched men get their comeuppance than one about the spiritual nature of sexuality, the son\u2019s 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\u2014in an irony that is at the core of the story\u2019s meaning\u2014they can be healed only by confessing to the woman everything they did to her.<\/p>\n

Her<\/em> experience\u2014how she came to be the confessor and healer of the men who abused her\u2014is the one that the father talks about in the lines I quoted above, and it is also her experience that he uses to frame the tale in the first place:<\/p>\n

The father replied, \u201cBeware of lust, for lust
\nhas made you very drunk. When a man locks
\nhis heart in pursuit of sexual pleasure, he\u2019ll pay
\nuntil the last penny of his being is gone.
\nA woman, however, whose conduct is like a man\u2019s,
\ndoes not know such lust. I will tell you of one
\nwho became in God\u2019s court a leader of men
\nafter she was left without her husband.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is, in other words, the woman from whom the father wants his son to learn. For in fending off the men who tried to rape her outright\u2014most of whom die when God answers her prayers and saves her from them\u2014and in refusing the men whose desire was not initially violent, who could have \u201ccomforted\u201d her in her husband\u2019s absence, the woman\u2019s love and desire for her husband become a deeply spiritual love and desire for God that moves her to choose the life of a religious recluse. So pure is her devotion that God grants her the power of healing, which is why the men stricken with paralysis must seek her out. In the end, the woman is reunited with her husband, but she chooses to remain a recluse, making clear that she has left the world of her marriage, of merely carnal love, behind.<\/p>\n

Nowhere, however\u2014and here is another detail the son overlooks when he accuses his father of wanting to do away with sex\u2014does the story suggest that the newly healed men should similarly disavow their sexual desire, even though it was their desire that got them into so much trouble. Rather, the story is an exhortation for the son to behave \u201clike a man\u201d in response to his own sexual feelings, the irony being, of course, that the character who models this behavior is a woman. In other words, while the depiction of sexuality in \u201cThe Tale of Marjuma\u201d is entirely conventional\u2014male heterosexuality is \u201cactive;\u201d female heterosexuality is \u201cpassive\u201d\u2014there is an element of gender bending, implying that Attar does not see the sexual characteristics he is exploring as exclusively the purview of either men or women, though it does seem clear that he defines them as either male or female. Indeed, by the time this first \u201cDiscourse\u201d between father and son is over, Attar has reframed the son\u2019s desire for a beautiful woman as the desire for his own purified soul, suggesting that, in the realm of the spirit, a wholeness that embodies both male and female should be the goal.<\/p>\n

Each of the \u201cDiscourses\u201d in Ilahi-Nama<\/em> plays with conventional expectations in similar ways. The magic the second son desires to master, for example, is reframed as the ability to turn the devil he carries in himself into a Muslim. Solomon\u2019s ring, which the fourth son covets, becomes the capacity for being content with what one has. In each case, the frame story and the tales told within it command attention both for the sophistication of Attar\u2019s narrative technique and the depths at which he is able to reveal the workings of the social and spiritual values at stake in the sons\u2019 desires. Whether or not one shares Attar\u2019s spirituality, in other words, there is a lot to learn from what he wrote, not only about Iran\u2019s history and culture, and about the possibilities of narrative, but also about ourselves and how we make meaning in the world\u2014all of which makes a new translation of this little-known work both desirable and necessary.<\/p>\n

Cross posted on It’s All Connected<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, … 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":[133,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iran","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9394","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=9394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}