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From "An Invitation," the introduction to
Selections from Saadi's Bustan
If you would like to read the entire introduction,
with footnotes, please click
here.
If you would like to read some sample poems from
Selections From Saadi's Bustan, please click
here.
My wife is from Iran.
Our son is therefore half-Iranian, and so the cultural heritage of Iran is his
to claim. To the degree that he is growing up in the United States, however, his
view of Iranian culture—as well as the perceptions of him as Iranian that he
will have to deal with as he moves through life—will inevitably be framed by how
Iran is seen in the United States; and the way Iran is seen in the United States
cannot help but be shaped by the nature and quality of the translations of
Iranian literature that are available to us. The lack of fidelity to the
original in Barks’ and Ladinsky’s [translations of Rumi and Hafez respectively],
however—an obvious target for my anger in this context—is not what made me
angry. Lots of translators misrepresent their original texts in all kinds of
unfortunate ways, but that misrepresentation is not necessarily a sign of bad
faith. What made me angry was what seemed to me to be the willful bad faith that
I found in the introductions Barks and Ladinsky wrote for their books.Here, for example, is Coleman Barks
from the introduction to his The Essential Rumi:
Mystical poetry can be a subject for study,
but in its essential nature it is not something to
locate or describe within a cultural context. [...]
I [therefore] am not trying to place Rumi in his
thirteenth century locus. That is fine work, and I
am grateful for those who do it. My more grandiose
project is to free his text into its essence.
Leave aside Barks’ essentializing of Rumi’s text—an
assertion that is problematic on its face—and note
instead how breezily he dismisses from relevance the
centuries of tradition and culture that formed the
context in which Rumi worked. None of that, according to
Barks, is relevant to what he wants his translation to
accomplish. What is relevant, Barks insists on the same
page, is that mystical poetry “is a way to open the
heart, as a Sufi master, or any enlightened being, is a
door to the radiant depth of the self.”
Perhaps so, but the cultural context that Barks so
blithely dismisses was also the cultural context of the
Sufism that Rumi practiced, of his friendship with
Shams, of his struggles with his students, of his
spiritual and other joys and sorrows, of his childhood,
his marriage—of everything, in other words, that made
him who he was. It was the cultural context of the poems
and sermons he produced and of the formal and other
linguistic choices he made while composing them—because
Rumi was, if nothing else, deeply committed to the
literary nature of his work. It was the cultural context
of the people who first heard or read Rumi’s work and of
their responses to it, and in the space of a few
sentences Barks makes all of that vanish. Every single
thing I have just named and everything single that is
implied by what I have just named disappears into Barks’
assertion that mystical poetry “is not something to
locate or describe within a cultural context.”
Indeed, just a few pages later, in
discussing his “more grandiose project” a little more fully, Barks makes clear
that this vanishing is an explicit part of what he wants his book to accomplish:
The design of this book is meant to confuse scholars
who would divide Rumi’s poetry into the accepted
categories. […] The mind wants categories, but
Rumi’s creativity was a continuous fountaining from
beyond forms and the mind, or as the sufis say, from
a mind within the mind, the qalb, which is a
great compassionate generosity.
The twenty-seven divisions here are
faint and playful palimpsests spread over Rumi’s imagination. Poems easily
splash over, slide from one overlay to another. The unity behind, La’illaha
il’Allahu (“there’s no reality but God; there is only God”), is the one
substance the other subheadings float within at various depths. If one actually
selected an “essential” Rumi, it would be the zikr, the remembering that
everything is God.
All of which makes the point that
these poems are not monumental in the Western sense of memorializing moments;
they are not discrete entities but a fluid, continuously self-revising,
self-interrupting medium. They are not so much about anything as
spoken from within something.
Where is Rumi in all of this?
According to Barks, the differences between the genres in which Rumi wrote don’t
matter; the integrity of Rumi’s imagination, the boundaries of it, don’t matter;
the fact that Rumi did indeed produce poems as discrete entities, each one
having a beginning and an end, doesn’t matter. Rather, what matters is the
spiritualization of Rumi’s work—“They are not so much about anything as
spoken from within something”—that Barks feels he accomplishes by what,
in his most recent translation, The Drowned Book: Ecstatic And Earthy
Reflections of Bahauddin, The Father of Rumi, he calls “transmission.” Here
is his explanation of how a translator arrives at “transmission.”
What we do with the text then, the
“second translation,” which you will read here [Barks, who neither speaks nor
reads Persian, is explaining how he works with the trots his collaborator
produces for him], feels more like mystical play. [I try] to sense something
like a presence moving within the images and ideas. This part of the
translation, when it’s working right, is done not with the mind but with an
emptiness in the soul. Work with mystical text is not scholarly work. It’s
making oneself available to an attunement with other presences, which is more
like love than studying, more like tasting food than reading a menu. So this is
not word-for-word, “faithful” translation. It is amplification, interpretation,
and spontaneous contemplation on what Bahauddin wrote. A mystic hopes for
transmission.
In literary terms, Barks’ “emptiness
of the soul” sounds an awful lot like Keats’ “negative capability,” by which
Keats meant a poet’s capacity for living with and in uncertainties without
having to rely on his or her rational mind to resolve them. Barks, however,
talks about using this “emptiness of soul” for the purposes of “amplification,
interpretation and spontaneous contemplation” in relation to the original. It
is, in other words, the precise opposite of living with uncertainties because
“amplification, interpretation, and spontaneous contemplation” cannot help but
involve the rational mind in discovering what the uncertainties mean. Barks is
concerned, in other words, not with what Bahauddin or Rumi actually wrote, but
with what Bahauddin and Rumi represent, or, more accurately, what they can be
made to represent through his acts of “amplification, interpretation, and
spontaneous contemplation.”
In The Gift: Poems By Hafiz,
Daniel Ladinsky takes this presumptuousness one step further, reducing the value
of translating Hafez’s poems—and, by implication, of the poems themselves—to the
kinds of promises made by self-help books or motivational speakers.
It is a tremendous venture to
translate an “untranslatable” masterpiece such as Hafiz’s verse, with its
brilliant whirling synergy of idioms, especially into a language as spiritually
young and evolving as English. I believe the ultimate gauge of success is this:
Does the text free the reader? Does it contribute to our physical and emotional
health? Does it put “golden tools” into our hands that can help excavate the
Beloved whom we and society have buried so deep inside?
Notice that neither Hafez nor the time and place in
which he lived, nor even the poems he wrote appear
anywhere in the objectives Ladinsky sets for himself as
a translator. Like Barks with Rumi, what Ladinsky cares
about is what he can make Hafez represent, and what he
makes Hafez represent transforms him, Ladinsky, into a
prophet.
I feel my relationship with Hafiz
defies reason and is really an attempt to do the impossible: to translate Light
into words—to make the luminous resonance of God tangible to our finite senses.
What Ladinsky actually claims to be
doing here is translating not Hafez’s poetry, but Hafez himself, a task the
divine charge for which came to him in a dream:
About six months into this work I had
an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw
him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking
me to give that message to his “artists and seekers.”
I do not doubt that Ladinsky had this
dream, nor do I doubt its power for him as a transforming vision, or even that
there are levels of consciousness at which one can be visited by spirits; and I
also do not doubt Ladinsky’s sincerity in wanting to share the beauty and power
of his vision with the world. Similarly, I cannot and will not dispute the fact
that the books Barks and Ladinsky have written have been meaningful and
transformative for an awful lot of people or that their work might offer some
useful interpretive insights into Rumi and Hafez. Nonetheless, by rooting their
translations of these two great Persian poets more in a spiritualizing agenda
than in the works they are presuming to translate, Barks and Ladinsky distort
and misrepresent not only those works and their authors, but also Iranian
culture in ways that, on behalf of my son, my wife and the other Iranians whom I
know, I resent.
///
Saadi completed the Bustan in
1257. The title, according to Wickens, means “Herb Garden,” though it is usually
translated as “Garden of Fragrance” or “Pleasure Garden.” It is a more serious
work in both purpose and in tone than the Gulistan, though both are
concerned with ethics and morality. Perhaps the closest parallel we have in
English literature is the work of Alexander Pope, whose moral essays delve into
much the same territory, though Saadi seems to have a wider range of concerns,
combining a realistic and pragmatic approach to life with a mystical
high-mindedness in a way that Pope does not. Pope and Saadi do share, however, a
proclivity for saying what’s on their minds, and there are passages in the
Bustan where Saadi shows real courage, given that the book was written for
the ruler who was his patron. Indeed, one of the pleasures I have enjoyed while
translating this book has been discovering how appropriate so much of what Saadi
wrote more than seven hundred years ago is for the world we live in today. Here
again, for example, are the lines I quoted for you above, but without the
ellipsis:
I’ve heard that with his dying
breaths Nushirvan
advised his son Hormuz on how to rule:
“Guarantee the poor their peace of mind.
Do not allow your privilege to bind you.
None who call your kingdom home will be
at peace if privilege is all you live for.
No judge will find a shepherd innocent
who slept and let the wolf among the sheep.
Go! Stand guard! Protect their impoverished lives:
The crown you wear would not exist without them.
A tree, my son, is nourished through its roots.
Just so, a monarch draws his kingdom’s strength
through those he rules. Do not betray their trust
unless you have to; you’ll find yourself rootless.”
Whether you agree or disagree with
the policies of the Bush administration, you have to admit that these lines go
right to the heart of many of the issues with which those policies have
confronted us. Sometimes, as I was working, I would try to imagine what it would
be like if there were someone in the United States—the poet laureate,
perhaps—whose job it was, as it was Saadi’s, and who had the authority, as Saadi
clearly did, to write such poetry for the people we elect to run our country.
It’s not just that I happen to agree with what the lines I just quoted have to
say and think that they say something the Bush administration needs to hear;
it’s also that poetry, given the chance, can communicate and instruct in ways
that neither philosophy nor religion nor an ethics class can, and I guess I
think we need that kind of instruction now more than ever.
///
It is true, of course, that all
translations fail and that if you want to be able to experience a text as its
author wrote it, you must read it in the original language. However, if you
define the purpose, as opposed to one desirable consequence of
literary translation to be motivating readers to learn to read that original,
then it seems to me you have reduced the whole enterprise to a kind of
striptease. Translation, in other words, becomes a form of manipulation, in
which layer after layer after layer is removed from around the core of the
original and the reader is left so filled with desire for the original’s naked
beauty that he or she is willing to go out and learn its language in order to
possess it.
The striptease metaphor, however,
misses the fact that literary translation inevitably adds to and subtracts from
the original, even as it reveals whatever aspects of the original can be brought
across more or less whole into the target language. So perhaps a more accurate
metaphor for literary translation, at least in terms of that audience member’s
assertion, would be the baiting of a hook, or the setting out of a tasty morsel
intended to induce you to want more. No matter what metaphor you choose,
however, it seems to me that this way of thinking about translation is at best
condescending and at worst insulting to readers, who deserve more from us than a
wink and a nod in the direction of the “real deal” that we are not giving them.
Indeed, to define the purpose of
translation in terms of getting a reader to want to read the original text is to
suggest that the reader should feel obliged to occupy the position of the
translator, whose relationship to the original text cannot help but be one in
which her or his own work, no matter how well it stands on its own in the target
language, is nonetheless derivative. It is, in other words, to suggest that the
reader should experience him or herself as inadequate for not having the
translator’s knowledge of the source language.
To be fair, there are times as a
reader that I feel this inadequacy, usually when I am reading a translation from
a language I know, but don’t know well enough to read the original. This is one
reason why I have begun to learn to read Persian, and why I wish I knew Korean,
Spanish and Hebrew much better than I do. I do not feel this way, however, when
I read translations from a language I don’t know at all. What I care about then
is the text in front of me, how well it is written, the ways in which it moves
me, or fails to move me, and what it teaches me, explicitly and implicitly,
about the culture from which it was translated. If the translator were suddenly
to appear to me as I finished reading and tell me that this was not sufficient,
that what I really ought to want is to learn to read the language of the
original, that it had indeed been her or his intention to make me want to learn
that language, it would be difficult for me not to see the work I’d just read as
a kind of propaganda and, therefore, as ethically suspect.
So what, then, is the purpose
of literary translation? One place to start answering this question, perhaps, is
with the fact that literary translation is itself the construction of a
metaphor. The book you are holding in your hand is not composed of actual
selections from Saadi’s Bustan. Rather, the poems you will read here are
like the poems in the Bustan, or, at least, as much like
them as I have been able to make them. More to the point, the poems in
this book are a way for you to understand Saadi’s Bustan through
something that is not Saadi’s Bustan, i.e., the poems in this book. In
order to build this metaphor, I had to bridge the gap between the tenor of the
metaphor, Saadi’s original work, and the vehicle, the subset of the English
language that, defined by my sensibilities, can embody the spirit of Saadi’s
work.
I crossed this bridge, so to speak, on the backs of the ponies I used to create
my translation, and with the help of the Persian speakers and scholars whom I
consulted, but somehow or another I had to cross over into Saadi’s Persian in
order to create an English version of his work with any kind of integrity,
artistic or otherwise.
The reader of a translation, however,
does not cross this same bridge—unless, perhaps, he or she knows the language of
the original. Instead, as a friend suggested to me, maybe the reader is looking
through a window or a door, though this image also does not feel quite right
because neither the act of looking nor the metaphor of the door or window
accounts sufficiently for the ways in which the translation is absorbed by the
reader and by the reader’s culture. Or maybe languages and cultures are rivers
and translations are tributaries connecting them; or maybe languages and
cultures are infinitely intricate carpets and what literary translators do is
copy and adapt some parts of the pattern of one carpet so that they can be woven
seamlessly into the pattern of another. What I am looking for is a metaphor of
adaptation and internalization, of incorporation and integration, one that will
capture not only the work done by the translator, but also the work done by the
reader.
I want this metaphor because to me
the purpose of literary translation is the broadening and deepening of the
reader’s consciousness, and, by extension, of the cultural imagination in which
the reader exists. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe what a translation
does is broaden the cultural imagination embodied by the target language and
then make that broadened imagination available to readers in another language.
Sometime around 1750, Benjamin
Franklin published what he claimed was a missing chapter of the book of Genesis.
In this story, Abraham invites an elderly man to eat with him, but then rescinds
the invitation when he finds out that the man worships a god that Abraham does
not recognize. After Abraham chases the elderly man away, God appears and
rebukes the patriarch, pointing out that since He had fed the man for seventy
years, despite his idolatrous worship, surely Abraham could have afforded to
give the man a single meal. About thirty years later, however, a writer in the
New Asiatick Miscellany found it curious that Franklin had told in the 18th
century precisely the same story that Saadi had told in the 13th. A
plagiarism scandal ensued, and the precise provenance of the story was not fully
established until early in the nineteenth century, when the testimony of Lord
Teignmouth, who was once the governor-general of India, established Saadi as the
first author of the tale. (In my translation, “Don’t Knot The Rope Of
Generosity” is the second story in the chapter called “Generosity.”)
One of the unsolved mysteries of
Franklin’s plagiarism is where, precisely, he got the story from. There are at
least three possibilities. First, he might somehow have lifted the story,
directly from Saadi, though almost certainly in translation. Second, he might
have found it in Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, which was
published in 1657 by Jeremy Taylor. Or, third, he might have read it in the book
where Taylor first encountered it, Gentius’ Historica Judaica, which was
published in 1651 and in which the story is attributed to “Sadus,” whose
nationality is not mentioned. What Franklin published, in other words, was a
copy of an English translation of a Latin version of the Persian original, but
it is Franklin’s rationale for publishing it—“on account of the importance of
the moral, well worth being made known to all mankind”—that makes my point.
Saadi’s story was there, waiting to be taken up into our cultural consciousness,
and it was literary translation that made this “taking up” possible.
I certainly do not want to justify
Franklin’s plagiarism, but it does seem to me that the way in which Western
culture wove Saadi’s story into itself—or maybe it is the way Saadi’s story
flowed through Western culture—is a prime example of how literary translation,
to mix my metaphors, serves a “cross-pollinating” function. Another example can
be found in No. 293 of Joseph Addison’s Spectator, in which he retells
Chardin’s version of Saadi’s fable of the rain drop that becomes a pearl, which
is the introductory poem to Chapter 8 of the Bustan. Through translation,
in other words, long before my own work with him began, Saadi was made a part of
our literary culture, where he was a thread waiting to be picked up or a river
waiting to be explored. Choose your metaphor; it doesn’t matter. He is there,
and so he is as much ours as he is Iran’s; and it is this act of sharing, more
than anything else, that for me defines literary translation’s purpose.
In addition to being a translator of
poetry, I am a poet. A book of my own poems will be published in the spring of
2006 and like anyone else who has written for publication, I like to think that
my work is important enough to demand the attention of a large and enthusiastic
public. If I had my way, lots of people would be reading my books and reviewing
them and perhaps even teaching them—because I do think I have something to say
that it would be worth your while and a few dollars out of your pocket to read.
The reality is, though, that what I think is important about what I have to say
might, in the long run, turn out to be profoundly insignificant. Saadi, though,
is someone who ought to command your attention. His wisdom and the poetry in
which he couched it have withstood the test of time. He has a lot to teach us,
though what it is precisely that we ought to be learning from him is something I
will leave to you to decide as you read.
To read the full introduction,
click
here. |
