Richard Jeffrey Newman

So I have, this past week, finally been able to put aside the work I’ve been doing for my union, which is a sub­ject for another post, to focus on my own writ­ing. Frankly, it’s mak­ing me a lit­tle schiz­o­phrenic, since I am work­ing on two very, very dif­fer­ent projects. In the morn­ings, I am work­ing on turn­ing my book of poems, The Silence of Men, into a one man show. Not the entire book, but a sub­stan­tial num­ber of poems held together by an over­ar­ch­ing struc­ture. It’s a chal­lenge; I’ve never done this kind of writ­ing before, but I am enjoy­ing it tremen­dously since it gives me a chance really to let loose about the sub­jects that pre­oc­cupy me: gen­der, sex­u­al­ity, fem­i­nism and so on. And I get to say what I have to say with­out wor­ry­ing about the log­i­cal and other con­straints imposed for­mally by the essay, or even the mem­oir. Of course this form has its own con­straints, but I am hav­ing fun dis­cov­er­ing them. I am a lit­tle intim­i­dated, since if all goes accord­ing to plan I will be the one per­form­ing the show, which will bring me full cir­cle in so many ways. Per­form­ing was what I first wanted to do when I went to col­lege, but for a vari­ety of rea­sons, not the least of which was a com­plete lack of sup­port from my fam­ily, I just never had the con­fi­dence to pur­sue it seri­ously. Any­way, we’ll see. I’m work­ing with a direc­tor who has access to a venue, but I also don’t want to get ahead of myself. I need to write the show first.

The sec­ond project I am work­ing, to which I have been giv­ing my after­noons, is the fourth of the five book of trans­la­tions I was com­mis­sioned to pro­duce by the Inter­na­tional Soci­ety for Iran­ian Cul­ture. The book, Ilahi Nameh, was writ­ten by Farid al-Din Attar and is a med­i­ta­tion on the Sufi con­cept of zuhd, or asceti­cism. Right now, I am doing the prepara­tory read­ing, work­ing my way through sec­tions of Hodgson’s The Ven­ture of Islam, because under­stand­ing Attar, more than either of the other two poets I have trans­lated, Saadi or Fer­dowsi, requires an under­stand­ing of Sufi thought and the role Sufism played in the Mus­lim world. My plan is to post about each of these projects as I go, but what I’ve been think­ing about tonight is how strange an expe­ri­ence it is to go from writ­ing, as I was this morn­ing, about the expla­na­tions for Jew­ish cir­cum­ci­sion that rab­bini­cal author­i­ties have given through the cen­turies — almost all of them focused on the need to excise male sex­ual plea­sure — to read­ing about how the Sufi search for one­ness with the Mus­lim god actu­ally engen­dered a kind of reli­gious tol­er­ance that is dia­met­ri­cally opposed to the dom­i­nant image of Islam that we have in the west.

It’s easy to see the con­nec­tion between the one man show and the work I have been doing until now, not just because it is based on my book of poems, but because its sub­ject mat­ter — gen­der, sex­u­al­ity, man­hood, mas­culin­ity, fem­i­nism — is some­thing I have been writ­ing about for a very long time now. The trans­la­tions, how­ever, even though I have pub­lished three of them in the last eight years, are a dif­fer­ent story. When I first agreed to take on the project, I didn’t real­ize just how deep a field I was get­ting myself into. I fig­ured I would trans­late the poems and that the books I pub­lished would, more or less, be a side­line to the rest of my work. Instead, I have found myself wad­ing deeper and deeper into Per­sian lit­er­ary stud­ies, at least in terms of clas­si­cal Per­sian lit­er­a­ture, and I have been aware for a while now that I need to make a choice – not between the trans­la­tions and the work I’ve been doing all along, but between whether or not I am going to make Per­sian lit­er­ary stud­ies my field, at least to the degree that I am able given that I am not lit­er­ate in Per­sian and that I have never done any for­mal study of the literature. Actually, now that I think of it, I sup­pose it is more accu­rate to say that the deci­sion is whether to make the study of clas­si­cal Per­sian lit­er­a­ture in Eng­lish my field, since that is clearly the cat­e­gory in which the work that I am doing most clearly falls.

Mak­ing this choice and fig­ur­ing out what the con­se­quences are is what I am com­par­ing to turn­ing an ocean liner, because it means chang­ing the tra­jec­tory of a more-than-twenty-year teach­ing career, untan­gling myself from a lot of things that I have been doing at school, includ­ing, even­tu­ally, the union work I am doing – though I will likely con­tinue to do that work for as long as the cri­sis on my cam­pus per­sists. As I’ve planned it out, assum­ing a whole bunch of other things fall into place, the trans­la­tions I have yet to do will keep me busy for the next five years. The chal­lenge will be to make sure that work doesn’t pre­vent me from also doing the writ­ing I have been doing all along. More on this whole process, and on my two projects, in future posts.