Translating Classical Iranian Poetry: Farid al-Din Attar

December 13th, 2009 § 19 comments

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, Tad­khi­rat 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)(/em)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.

The first work of Attar’s to be trans­lated into Eng­lish, in 1809 by the Rev­erend J. H. Hind­ley of Man­ches­ter Col­lege, was what we now know to be the apoc­ryphal Pand-nama. Hind­ley trans­lated it, accord­ing to Christo­pher Shackle, to help the British “colo­nial admin­is­tra­tor [of India] get inside the Mus­lim mind-set [….]” (168). This colo­nial­ist agenda drove much of the trans­la­tion of clas­si­cal Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture into Eng­lish dur­ing the 1800s, and one can find it also, though not as explic­itly expressed, in Edward Fitzgerald’s trans­la­tion of The Con­fer­ence of the Birds, the first authen­tic work of Attar’s to be brought into our lan­guage, and the only one to receive any sub­stan­tive atten­tion in the West. Fitzgerald’s trans­la­tion was pub­lished by his lit­er­ary execu­tor in 1889. Most recently, in 1984, Afkham Dar­bandi and Dick Davis pub­lished the only verse trans­la­tion of the entire text.

The Con­fer­ence of the Birds is about the mys­ti­cal jour­ney under­taken by thirty birds to find the Simorgh and achieve enlight­en­ment. “Simorgh,” how­ever, means “thirty birds” in Per­sian, and the point of the story is that the birds dis­cover they are them­selves the Simorgh, that enlight­en­ment is already within them. The Con­fer­ence of the Birds has sparked the imag­i­na­tions of writ­ers, poets, musi­cians and direc­tors through­out the English-speaking world. Amer­i­can nov­el­ist Jef­frey Lewis, for exam­ple, pub­lished The Con­fer­ence of the Birds: A Novel in 2005 (Other Press), while the Aus­tralian poet Anne Fair­bairn recast Attar’s mas­ter­piece in a con­tem­po­rary Aus­tralian con­text in her book length poem, An Aus­tralian Con­fer­ence Of The Birds (Black Pep­per, 1995). As another exam­ple, the musi­cal group Om recorded an album called Con­fer­ence of the Birds in 2006; and the direc­tor Peter Brook, along with Jean-Claude Car­riere, adapted The Con­fer­ence of the Birds for the stage in a ver­sion that was pub­lished in 1982, a project for which the British poet Ted Hughes wrote one hun­dred poems based on Attar’s text (Heilpern 8).

Clearly, Farid al-Din Attar is a poet to be reck­oned with. He is a cen­tral fig­ure in the lit­er­a­ture of Iran, and of Per­sian Sufism more specif­i­cally. More­over his work has influ­enced the lit­er­ary land­scape of Eng­lish in ways that con­tinue to rever­ber­ate. The rest of Attar’s work deserves to take its place in Eng­lish next to The Con­fer­ence of the Birds, so that we can see what else he has to teach us and how else we might be inspired by what he has to say. My next post will be about Ilahi-Nameh, the book of Attar’s selec­tions from which I will be translating.

Sources

Heilpern, John. Con­fer­ence of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa. The­atre Arts Book 1999

Lewisohn, Leonard & Christo­pher Shackle. Attar and the Per­sian Sufi Tra­di­tion: The Art of Spir­i­tual Flight. Lon­don: I. B. Tau­ris 2006

Moyne, John A. & Richard Jef­frey New­man. A Bird in the Gar­den of Angels: On the Life and Times and An Anthol­ogy of Rumi. Costa Mesa: Mazda Pub­lish­ers 2007

  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. [↩]

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