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

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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. Con­tinue read­ing →

Translating Classical Iranian Poetry: Farid al-Din Attar

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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, Tadhki­rat 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)[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.], 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. Con­tinue read­ing →

  1. The image of Attar’s tomb shown below is from the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons. [↩]