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

December 28th, 2009 § 4 comments

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.

Her expe­ri­ence — how she came to be the con­fes­sor and healer of the men who abused her — is 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:

The father replied, “Beware of lust, for lust
has made you very drunk. When a man locks
his heart in pur­suit of sex­ual plea­sure, he’ll pay
until the last penny of his being is gone.
A woman, how­ever, whose con­duct is like a man’s,
does not know such lust. I will tell you of one
who became in God’s court a leader of men
after she was left with­out her husband.”

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 — most of whom die when God answers her prayers and saves her from them — and in refus­ing the men whose desire was not ini­tially vio­lent, who could have “com­forted” her in her husband’s absence, the woman’s 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.

Nowhere, how­ever — and here is another detail the son over­looks when he accuses his father of want­ing to do away with sex — does 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 “like a man” 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 “The Tale of Mar­juma” is entirely con­ven­tional — male het­ero­sex­u­al­ity is “active;” female het­ero­sex­u­al­ity is “passive” — there 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 “Dis­course” between father and son is over, Attar has reframed the son’s 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.

Each of the “Dis­courses” in Ilahi-Nama 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’s 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’s 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’ desires. Whether or not one shares Attar’s spir­i­tu­al­ity, in other words, there is a lot to learn from what he wrote, not only about Iran’s his­tory and cul­ture, and about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of nar­ra­tive, but also about our­selves and how we make mean­ing in the world — all of which makes a new trans­la­tion of this little-known work both desir­able and nec­es­sary.

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