Richard Jeffrey Newman

Just 90 min­utes ago I fin­ished a lovely inter­view with Melissa Stud­dard, con­tribut­ing edi­tor at Tiferet Jour­nal. It was a good inter­view because Melissa asked good ques­tions. Give a listen:

Aria Fani has pub­lished on Tehran Bureau a review of my book, The Teller of Tales, which is a trans­la­tion of the first five sto­ries of Shah­nameh, The Book of Kings, also known as the Per­sian (or Iran­ian) national epic. Fani calls my trans­la­tion “delight­ful to read,” but what I like most about the review is that he places the book in the con­text of how the Shah­nameh has “dom­i­nated and shaped the national psy­che of Iran­ian;” and he gets the through-line of the sto­ries I chose to trans­late, point­ing out that “the nature of the social order is the cen­tral theme” of the book.

I didn’t do much to pro­mote the book when it came out in April because my life sim­ply did not per­mit it, but I will be start­ing to get the word out lit­tle by lit­tle. You can order the book from the pub­lisher, Junc­tion Press, and if you’re inter­ested in my giv­ing a reading/talk on my trans­la­tion, you can con­tact me here. The Shah­nameh is a book that would be of inter­est in the con­text of a wide range of artis­tic, schol­arly, intel­lec­tual and even polit­i­cal concerns.

I’ve posted a lit­tle bit about the Shah­nameh already. (Here, here and here.)

I was sort­ing through some old papers and came across a pho­to­copy of this clip­ping from what I am pretty sure was The New York Times. I have not, how­ever, been able to con­firm that. If any­one can tell me the source, I’d appre­ci­ate it. Nonethe­less, I think it’s a fit­ting fol­low up to my last post about translation:

David Tuck­er­man, who lives near the United Nations, is accus­tomed to hear­ing many lan­guages. Recently, he heard a man speak­ing to his daugh­ter, who appeared to be about 5 years old, in a lan­guage he couldn’t iden­tify. He asked what it was and was told that it was Ser­bian and that nat­u­rally the lit­tle girl, liv­ing in New York, also spoke English.

Mr. Tuck­er­man com­pli­mented the girl on being bilin­gual and she cor­rected him. “I’m trilin­gual,” she said. “My mother is Greek, so I speak Greek to her.” He com­pli­mented her again, for know­ing the def­i­n­i­tions of bi– and trilin­gual, and then asked what peo­ple who spoke only one lan­guage were called.

“Amer­i­cans,” she replied with­out hesitation.

ETA: There’s some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion of this post over at Alas.

So I found out yes­ter­day that I was not elected sec­re­tary of my union. I ran not because I was eager to get into union work per se, but because there is seri­ous work that needs to be done on my cam­pus – we are fac­ing a real bud­get cri­sis and an admin­is­tra­tion that has been unam­bigu­ously hos­tile – and I thought the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee needed the skills I would have brought to the job. Clearly, my col­leagues thought oth­er­wise, since I lost by a mar­gin that could com­fort­ably be described as a land slide. While I’m dis­ap­pointed not to have won, of course, I don’t begrudge my oppo­nent the win; she is emi­nently qual­i­fied, and, to be hon­est, I am also a lit­tle bit relieved, since win­ning would have meant I’d have even less time than I do now to devote to writ­ing, and writ­ing is what I really want to be doing when I am not teach­ing, grad­ing papers, hav­ing an intel­lec­tual life, a fam­ily life, a mar­riage, a social life – not to men­tion being co-chair of the union’s Cri­sis Com­mit­tee and man­ager of the Google Group we set up so fac­ulty could com­mu­ni­cate with each other away from the col­lege email servers. (See, I am still pretty heav­ily involved in union work even though I did not get elected.)

My life, in other words, is already plenty crowded enough. The prob­lem is that my writ­ing life is also crowded. There are at least five projects scat­tered in files around my office and on my hard drive, each of which deserves my atten­tion. I am, for one, finally writ­ing poems again; there are drafts of essays on writ­ing that I’d like to com­plete; drafts of the essays I’ve been build­ing from the Frag­ments of Evolv­ing Man­hood series I started post­ing a while back; the begin­nings of a one man show based on my book of poems The Silence of Men that a direc­tor is inter­ested in work­ing on with me (I would per­form the show, which would be very cool); there is the next book of trans­la­tions, Ilahi Nama, by Farid al-Din Attar, which I have writ­ten about here, here and here; and there is the recent email I received from some­one inter­ested in turn­ing my Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan, which is out of print, into an ebook. (This last project is not as sim­ple as it sounds, since I do not own the copy­right to the book and I would need to jump through a cou­ple of hoops in order to make sure that the rights to the ver­sion that gets turned into an ebook are entirely mine.) The one thing that sim­pli­fies choos­ing which project to work on is the fact that I am eli­gi­ble to apply for a sab­bat­i­cal in the 2012 – 2013 aca­d­e­mic year, and the most obvi­ously sabbatical-worthy project among those I just men­tioned is Ilahi Nama, pri­mar­ily because a uni­ver­sity press has expressed inter­est in see­ing the man­u­script once I am finished.

Because I would not have been able to take a sab­bat­i­cal if I’d won the elec­tion, and the first draft of the appli­ca­tion was due before the elec­tion results would be in, I handed in to the com­mit­tee in my depart­ment which reviews and approves (or does not approve) sab­bat­i­cal appli­ca­tions a very rough draft, com­prised mostly of pas­sages from both the last sab­bat­i­cal appli­ca­tion I sub­mit­ted, which was for a dif­fer­ent book of trans­la­tions, and unsuc­cess­ful grant appli­ca­tions I sub­mit­ted last year for fund­ing my work on Ilahi Nama. Now that I’ve lost the elec­tion, I’ve gone back to look at my draft appli­ca­tion to start fig­ur­ing out how to revise it, and I’ve been pon­der­ing whether or not to fol­low a spe­cific piece of my committee’s advice. They want me to cut entirely, or scale back sig­nif­i­cantly, the sec­tion I had to write the last time I applied explain­ing that the lit­er­ary trans­la­tion of poetry is often done by poets who are nei­ther flu­ent nor lit­er­ate in the source lan­guage – Ezra Pound, W. S. Mer­win, and Adri­enne Rich are three very well known exam­ples. I wrote this sec­tion because the first time I sub­mit­ted my pre­vi­ous sab­bat­i­cal appli­ca­tion it was rejected; the mem­bers of the college-wide Sab­bat­i­cal Com­mit­tee sim­ply did not believe that I could pro­duce the trans­la­tions I said I was going to pro­duce with­out being flu­ent and/or lit­er­ate in Per­sian. (Inter­est­ingly, there were peo­ple from my own depart­ment on that com­mit­tee who teach some of Ezra Pound’s trans­la­tions from the Chi­nese in their lit­er­a­ture classes and they did not know he made them based on some­one else’s lit­eral trans­la­tions and notes.)

Read­ing over again the sec­tion I wrote to respond to that doubt and dis­be­lief started me think­ing about the reac­tions I’ve received from peo­ple in the Iran­ian com­mu­nity, lit­er­ary and oth­er­wise, and how they reveal the pol­i­tics that are at stake in the work I’ve done – in terms both spe­cific to the trans­la­tion of clas­si­cal Iran­ian poetry and to the project of trans­la­tion in gen­eral. I’m going to list some of those reac­tions here, with­out com­ment, but there are a cou­ple of things you should know before you read them. First, my wife is from Iran; sec­ond, while I am not lit­er­ate in Per­sian, I under­stand the spo­ken lan­guage at what I would call an inter­me­di­ate level and I can speak it as well, though not quite as well as I under­stand it.

• “Really,” she says after find­ing out that I’ve just pub­lished Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan, “you mono­lin­gual West­ern­ers ought finally to get out of the way and let us bilin­gual Per­sians trans­late our own lit­er­a­ture. Haven’t you done enough damage?”
• “Why do you call it Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture?” he lec­tures me accus­ingly. “It’s writ­ten in Per­sian, and Per­sian lit­er­a­ture was writ­ten in coun­tries other than Iran, like India.”
• “Call­ing it Per­sian lit­er­a­ture,” he wrote, “only per­pet­u­ates both British impe­ri­al­ism and its Ori­en­tal­ist per­spec­tive. The name of the coun­try was and is Iran, and the Per­sian eth­nic group in Iran is not the only one to pro­duce Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture. So  Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture is what you should call it.”
• For two years, every time she intro­duced me to her friends at a con­fer­ence or a read­ing, she would say, “…and this is Richard Jef­frey New­man, who trans­lates Per­sian lit­er­a­ture even though he does not speak Persian.”
• I am not sug­gest­ing he doesn’t belong on our panel,” he writes in a pre-conference email exchange, “but if he doesn’t know Per­sian is he really a trans­la­tor? I mean, can we call trans­la­tion what peo­ple like Richard and Cole­man Barks do?”
• “Let me tell you why I trust your trans­la­tions and why I use them in my class,” she says. “Because you’re hon­est about what you’re doing, that you’re not flu­ent in Per­sian, that this lim­its the kind of research you can do. Nei­ther Cole­man Barks nor a Daniel Ladin­sky are up front like that.
• “I know Golestan-e Saadi by heart,” he says after a read­ing, refer­ring to my Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan. “I learned it from my father and I’ve been study­ing it my whole life. It’s remark­able how close your trans­la­tions are [to the orig­i­nal], and you’re not Iran­ian and you’re not flu­ent in Per­sian. How did you do that?”
• “You’ve done impor­tant work. No one will dis­pute that,” he says after I’ve given a talk about Saadi, “but if you’re not Iran­ian, you can’t really under­stand Saadi.”
• “I used to be sus­pi­cious,” she wrote in an email, “of your love of all things Per­sian [refer­ring in part to the fact that my wife is Iran­ian], but now that I’ve read what you’ve done [as edi­tor of an Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture spe­cial issue of Arte East Quar­terly Mag­a­zine], I see there’s noth­ing to be sus­pi­cious about.”
• He is read­ing the list of the lit­er­ary organization’s advi­sory board mem­bers. My name is on it. He asks the exec­u­tive direc­tor who I am, and when she reminds him that we’ve met, that I have trans­lated Saadi, he says, “Him? He’s on your board? The one who gets trans­la­tion help from his wife?”

I was, actu­ally, hop­ing to post this yes­ter­day, before the chang­ing of the year, which hap­pened some time between 6 and 7 PM, but I was very busy and didn’t get a chance to do it. So let me take this oppor­tu­nity to wish all the Ira­ni­ans I know, fam­ily and friends, and even those I don’t know, soleh noh mob­o­rak (Happy New Year!).

And just like the title says: It is, truly, an aus­pi­cious day offi­cially to announce my new book of trans­la­tions, The Teller of Tales: Sto­ries from Ferdowsi’s Shah­nameh, which has been pub­lished by Junc­tion Press. I will be launch­ing the book on Sat­ur­day, March 26^th at Per­sian Arts Festival’s 5^th Annual Arts Fes­ti­val. The book is not yet up on the publisher’s web­site or Ama­zon, but you can order it from Small Press Dis­tri­b­u­tion.

If you’d like to read a sam­ple from the book, Eklek­so­graphia pub­lished Zah­hak: We’d Need to Hear his Mother’s Story; you can read an early ver­sion of the story of Kayu­mars and Hushang in the Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture issue of Arte East Quar­terly that I edited a few years ago; and you can read the story of Jamshid, which includes the ori­gins of Norouz in the Norouz post I wrote last year.

We cel­e­brated last night at my wife’s aunt’s house, which was lovely, and I actu­ally thought I might be cel­e­brat­ing tonight at the United Nations. Last Fri­day, I actu­ally received a per­sonal invi­ta­tion from the Iran­ian mis­sion to the UN to attend an event that the woman to whom I spoke, Zahra, said would be tak­ing place this evening. In 2009, the UN declared Norouz part of humanity’s Intan­gi­ble Cul­tural Her­itage, and the event to which Zahra called to invite me, she said, would include rep­re­sen­ta­tives from all the coun­tries that cel­e­brate it. (The ones listed on the UN site are Azer­bai­jan, India, Iran, Kyr­gyzs­tan, Pak­istan, Turkey and Uzbek­istan, though there might be more.) The invi­ta­tion never arrived, and I have been won­der­ing all week if per­haps Zahra changed her mind and decided not to invite me, though it’s also pos­si­ble, since I can­not find the event on the UN’s cal­en­dar for today, that it was can­celed. I am dis­ap­pointed mostly for my son, for whom it would have been a very cool expe­ri­ence to cel­e­brate Norouz at the UN.

Writ­ten in the 10^th cen­tury by Abolqasem Fer­dowsi (NPR did a fea­ture on him not too long ago), the Shah­nameh (Book of Kings) is the national epic of Iran, telling the nation’s story by recount­ing the tales of its kings, from the first, myth­i­cal king Kayu­mars to Yazdegerd III, who ruled Iran just before the Mus­lim Arab con­quest in the 7^th cen­tury. One of the best loved sto­ries in the Shah­nameh was given the title The Tragedy of Sohrab and Ros­tam by Jerome W. Clin­ton when he pub­lished his trans­la­tion of it in 1987. Ros­tam is a Hercules-like char­ac­ter whose role through­out the epic is to defend Iran and its kings; Sohrab is Rostam’s son, con­ceived with Tah­mine, a princess from one of Iran’s vas­sal king­doms. When Sohrab reaches puberty and dis­cov­ers who his father is, he decides that Ros­tam, the great­est war­rior in the world, should be the ruler of Iran, not Kay Kavus, the king who right­fully sat on the throne at the time. Sohrab sets off with a dual mis­sion, to find his father and to depose Kay Kavus.

Despite his youth, Sohrab is, like his father, a peer­less war­rior and when the Per­sians real­ize that none among them will be able to defeat him, they sum­mon Ros­tam. Ros­tam does not know he has a son and, in what is the most puz­zling aspect of the story, refuses to iden­tify him­self each of the sev­eral times that Sohrab asks who he is. The two war­riors fight three times and, in the end, Ros­tam is vic­to­ri­ous. As Sohrab lies dying, the true iden­ti­ties of the fight­ers are revealed and the story ends on a note of bit­ter sadness.

Matthew Arnold was so moved by this story, that he wrote his own ver­sion, “Sohrab and Rus­tum,” that is rec­og­nized by schol­ars to be an impor­tant turn­ing point in his career as a poet. There are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between Arnold’s ver­sion and the orig­i­nal, though, due largely to the fact that Arnold’s source was most like an inac­cu­rate sum­mary of the tale than an actual translation.

The pro­logue with which Fer­dowsi frames the story of Sohrab and Ros­tam is a med­i­ta­tion on fate. The idea of the just nature of death comes from a form of Zoroas­tri­an­ism which saw death as part of a realm that exists out­side this world, that peo­ple do not have access to, and that con­tains all events that are inher­ent in time and can­not be avoided. Thus, since death comes to every­one, it always comes at the proper time and is, by def­i­n­i­tion, fair and just. This ver­sion of the pro­logue is from Clinton’s trans­la­tion, which I men­tioned above:

What if a wind springs up quite sud­denly,
And casts a green unripened fruit to earth.
Shall we call this a tyrant’s act, or just?
Shall we con­sider it as right, or wrong?
If death is just, how can this not be so?
Why then lament and wail at what is just?
Your soul knows noth­ing of this mys­tery;
You can­not see what lies beyond this veil.
Though all descend to face that greedy door,
For none has it revealed its secrets twice.
Per­haps he’ll like the place he goes to bet­ter,
And in that other house he may find peace.
Death’s breath is like a fiercely rag­ing fire
That has no fear of either young or old.
Here in this place of pass­ing, not delay,
Should death cinch tight the sad­dle on its steed,
Know this, that it is just, and not unjust.
There’s no dis­put­ing jus­tice when it comes.
Destruc­tion knows both youth and age as one,
For noth­ing that exists will long endure.
If you can fill your heart with faith’s pure light,
Silence befits you best, since you’re His slave.
You do not under­stand God’s mys­ter­ies,
Unless your soul is part­ners with some div.
Strive here within the world as you pass through,
And in the end bear virtue in your heart.
Now I’ll relate the story of Sohrab,
And how he came to bat­tle with his father.

From a post by Olivia Snaije, Ara­bic and Hebrew: The Pol­i­tics of Lit­er­ary Trans­la­tion, on the blog called Pub­lish­ing Per­spec­tives, and it is a shame­ful sta­tis­tic if I ever saw one, almost as bad as the fact that less than 3% of the lit­er­ary works pub­lished in the United States are trans­la­tions from other lan­guages. If ever two cul­tures needed the kind of cul­tural exchange and under­stand­ing that lit­er­ary trans­la­tion makes pos­si­ble, they are the cul­tures in which Hebrew (Israel) and Ara­bic (most of the rest of the so-called Mid­dle East) are the lan­guages of daily life, and yet, tellingly, most of the trans­la­tion that does take place hap­pens from Hebrew to Ara­bic, not the other way around.

Not that pub­lish­ing Ara­bic trans­la­tions of lit­er­a­ture writ­ten in Hebrew is with­out dif­fi­culty. Snaije refers to a Ha’aretz arti­cle about a Tunisian pub­lisher who is “in nego­ti­a­tions with Pales­tin­ian Israeli trans­la­tor Tayeb Ghanayem for his trans­la­tions of Israeli works into Ara­bic” and who refused to be named because of con­cerns about his per­sonal safety; and she also men­tions a Lebanese pub­lisher who will be bring­ing out in Ara­bic trans­la­tions the work of Pales­tin­ian Israeli Sayed Kashua (who writes in Hebrew) but who (the pub­lisher) declined to be quoted for the article.

Pol­i­tics gets in the way of trans­lat­ing from Ara­bic into Hebrew as well. When Yael Lerer, founder of Andalus, an Israeli pub­lish­ing house focus­ing on trans­la­tion and named for the often roman­ti­cized his­tor­i­cal period of the same name, went look­ing for titles to trans­late, most of the Egypt­ian authors she approached refused on prin­ci­ple to give her the rights to trans­late their work because it would rep­re­sent “nor­mal­iz­ing” rela­tions with “the enemy.” (Other Arab authors granted her trans­la­tion rights free of charge.) At the same time, the Egypt­ian writer Nael Eltoukhy (sorry, the site is in Ara­bic, but this is the one Snaije links to) trans­lates Israeli books from Hebrew into Ara­bic, often with­out permission.

“Trans­lat­ing Israeli lit­er­a­ture and writ­ings in itself is not a taboo. The taboo is any deal­ing with Israeli pub­lish­ing houses, since this is con­sid­ered “nor­mal­iza­tion with the enemy”. But you always have your options. One of them is ille­gal trans­la­tion, which is the best of a bad solu­tion. I am sorry for this but I (and oth­ers), don’t have any other options.” Said Eltoukhy.

Ille­gal trans­la­tion, too, hap­pens on both sides of the divide. The Israel-Palestine Cen­tre for Research and Infor­ma­tion, for example, published an online Hebrew trans­la­tion of Alaa al Aswany’s book The Yacoubian Build­ing; but the fact, dic­tated by regional pol­i­tics more than any­thing else, that peo­ple some­times have to resort to what is essen­tially intel­lec­tual piracy in order to get works from one lan­guage trans­lated into the other paled for me next to the fact that Andalus had to stop pubil­sh­ing because it was not sell­ing enough books to stay afloat. Lerner says there is sim­ply a “lack of inter­est” on the part of Israeli read­ers, which to me sounds more like the com­pla­cent arro­gance – or is it the arro­gant complacency? – of the powerful.

Israelis are not inter­ested, I would wager, because they don’t think they need to be inter­ested, because the lens through which they are given to view the Arab world around them – be it a lens of the right, left or cen­ter – is enough for them to feel engaged with that world. Of course I have no proof of this, but the phrase “lack of inter­est” recalls for me the reac­tions of many of the stu­dents from the intro­duc­tion to lit­er­a­ture classes I have taught over the years when they found out they would be read­ing works in trans­la­tion from the MId­dle East. “Why do I need to read this?” they would ask. “What does it have to with me?”

Inevitably, some of the stu­dents would come away from the semes­ter feel­ing they had learned some­thing worth­while, but get­ting stu­dents to look past their resis­tance to what they per­ceived as “too for­eign” was always a strug­gle. I’d try to make a game out of it, teach­ing them, for exam­ple, to pro­nounce the names of char­ac­ters that con­tained sounds we don’t have in Eng­lish. We’d all laugh at how hard it was, which would lead to a dis­cus­sion about lan­guage and the body and how we become so con­di­tioned, phys­i­cally, cul­tur­ally and psy­cho­log­i­cally, to mak­ing the sounds of our own lan­guage that mak­ing the sounds of another can feel like a kind of tres­pass. So, for exam­ple, peo­ple who speak Eng­lish who have never had to make the gut­tural kh sound (which in Eng­lish is usu­ally translit­er­ated as the Ch in Chanuka) will almost always talk about how it feels like they are hawk­ing up phlegm in order to spit it out; the sound, in US cul­ture, is just so damned impolite.

That dis­cus­sion would often lead to a con­sid­er­a­tion of how dif­fer­ent lan­guages deal with dif­fer­ent kinds of sub­jects – obscen­i­ties pro­vide a really fun and use­ful exam­ple here, but so do things like lev­els of for­mal­ity (tu vs. Usted in Span­ish, or pan­mal and chon­den­mal in Korean) – and that would often become a con­ver­sa­tion about how lit­er­a­ture can be a win­dow into another cul­ture. Almost always, how­ever, the major­ity of my stu­dents would react to these con­ver­sa­tions with some­thing that amounted to, “Gee, that’s nice and inter­est­ing and all, but what does it have to do with me?”

Now, my stu­dents are, most of them, not much older that 20 or 21 and so some of their self-centeredness may just be their youth speak­ing, but it’s hard not to see their lack of inter­est reflected in the fact, as I said above, that less than 3% of the books pub­lished in the United States are trans­la­tions from another cul­ture. By con­trast, in some South Amer­i­can coun­tries, by way of con­trast, and in some West­ern Euro­pean nations, the per­cent­age is closer to 30 – 40%. If enough peo­ple in the US felt it was impor­tant enough to read books trans­lated from other lan­guages, pub­lish­ers would respond by pro­duc­ing such books. If pub­lish­ers believed they could make money by cul­ti­vat­ing an inter­est in the lit­er­a­tures of other lan­guages, they would find a way to cre­ate the mar­ket for those books. No mat­ter which way you look at it, it’s hard not to see a seri­ous case of cul­tural myopia at work here.

As promised, here are the guide­lines for the Quill Trans­la­tion award. Please note that sub­mis­sions do not open until Feb­ru­ary 28 and that the online sub­mis­sion process will not be in place on the QCA web­site until then.

I am very late in post­ing this spot on NPR fea­tur­ing the QUILL read­ing I was part of last week. I don’t appear in the spot, but there is men­tion of the QUILL Trans­la­tion Award, a $500 award to a Queens-based trans­la­tor in sup­port of a work in progress. I will post the full details soon, but if you know a trans­la­tor who lives in Queens, NYC and who is work­ing on either a book-length trans­la­tion of poetry or a novella, tell them to keep their eyes open, either on this web­site or the web­site of the Queens Coun­cil on the Arts.

…took to the streets again, and the irony is not lost on me that while they were doing so I was proof­read­ing the man­u­script of The Teller of Tales, my trans­la­tion of the first five sto­ries in their national epic, the Shah­nameh. Noth­ing about lit­er­ary trans­la­tion, at least as I am prac­tic­ing it here, in the com­fort and safety of my home in the United States, even remotely approaches the courage and deter­mi­na­tion and com­mit­ment shown by the peo­ple who pre­sented their bod­ies in Tehran, Shi­raz, Isfa­han and else­where in protest of a régime that sees those bod­ies as not much more than dust that can be swept away if nec­es­sary; and yet it’s hard not also to be aware that the text I was cor­rect­ing is inex­tri­ca­bly con­nected to the aspi­ra­tions of the Iran­ian pro­test­ers, not in the sense of cause-and-effect inspi­ra­tion, but because the Shah­nameh, as Dick Davis put it in Epic & Sedi­tion, has been for cen­turies “one of the chief means by which both Per­sian rulers and the [Iran­ian] peo­ple have sought to define their iden­tity to them­selves and to the world at large.”

When Abolqasem Fer­dowsi wrote the Shah­nameh in the 10^th cen­tury, Iran had been under Mus­lim Arab rule for around 300 years. Ara­bic, not Per­sian, was the lan­guage of the court, of lit­er­a­ture, of phi­los­o­phy; and the Mus­lim belief that every­thing before the com­ing of Islam was his­tor­i­cally, cul­tur­ally, polit­i­cally and of course the­o­log­i­cally irrel­e­vant had resulted over time in a grow­ing accep­tance among Mus­lim Ira­ni­ans that it might be pos­si­ble to rede­fine Iran’s his­tory and cul­ture in Islamic terms. A man named Tabari wrote a revi­sion­ist his­tory along these lines, iden­ti­fy­ing spe­cific char­ac­ters in Iran’s cul­ture with char­ac­ters who inhabit the world of the Quran. Jamshid, for exam­ple, the fourth king in the Shah­nameh, who is respon­si­ble for the emer­gence of what we would rec­og­nize as civ­i­lized soci­ety, is equated in Tabari’s book with King Solomon, while Kayu­mars, the Shahnameh’s first monarch, is said to be the same as Adam.

Not every­one accepted this assim­i­la­tion­ist approach, espe­cially Iran’s landed gen­try, the dehqan, who saw them­selves as respon­si­ble for pre­serv­ing Iran’s his­tory and cul­ture. Fer­dowsi was a dehqan and it was pre­cisely to pre­serve Iran’s pre-Islamic his­tory and cul­ture that he wrote the Shah­nameh. Yet Ferdowsi’s goal was nei­ther rev­o­lu­tion­ary nor hereti­cal. He was a devout Mus­lim who accepted com­pletely the monar­chy under which he lived. Rather, his goal was, as San­dra Mackey puts it in The Ira­ni­ans, to express “the sep­a­rate iden­tity within Islam that Ira­ni­ans [have always] felt.” For many, includ­ing some of his fel­low poets, this goal was hereti­cal. The poet Far­rokhi, for exam­ple, a con­tem­po­rary of Ferdowi’s, declared the Shah­nameh “untruth from the begin­ning to the end.” Abd-al-Jalil Qazvini accused Fer­dowsi of “recit­ing myths on the brav­ery and mag­nif­i­cance of Ros­tam and Kavus [two char­ac­ters from the Shah­nameh] in order [sin­fully] to counter the hero­ism and splen­dour of [Imam] Ali.” Still another poet, Mo’ezzi, sug­gested that Fer­dowsi would be pun­ished in the next world because of the untruths he told in the Shah­nameh. (These quotes are taken from A. Sha­pur Shahbazi’s Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biography.)

The Islamic Repub­lic of Iran was, from its very begin­ning, also threat­ened by the Shah­nameh and its cel­e­bra­tion of pre-Islamic Iran­ian his­tory and cul­ture. Accord­ing to San­dra Mackey, for exam­ple, Aya­tol­lah Khome­ini “tried to erad­i­cate ves­tiges of Iran’s pre-Islamic cul­ture [by attack­ing] Fer­dowsi, discourag[ing] the use of Per­sian first names, and hint[ing] at an end to the obser­vance of No Ruz [the Per­sian New Year] by express­ing the hope that in the future the only hol­i­day cel­e­brated would be the Prophet’s birth­day.” Even as recently as 2009, the Islamic Republic’s behav­ior towards Fer­dowsi would seem to indi­cate that it still feels this threat very keenly. Accord­ing to an arti­cle posted on the web­site of the Cir­cle of Ancient Iran­ian Stud­ies (CAIS), all pro­grams in Iran planned by the Fer­dowsi Foun­da­tion to cel­e­brate Ferdowsi’s mil­le­nium in 2009 had to be can­celed because of a lack of coöper­a­tion from the rel­e­vant agen­cies of the Islamic Repub­lic. The same arti­cle reports that on June 14, 2009 – which is Ferdowsi’s com­mem­o­ra­tion day in Iran – the gov­ern­ment of the Islamic Repub­lic demol­ished, with­out pro­vid­ing any rea­son, the Foundation’s unfin­ished build­ing in Iran. Also in 2009, the blog­ger Pedes­trian reported that the Iran­ian jour­nal­ist Bah­man Ahmadi was sen­tenced to eight years in prison for pub­lish­ing part of the Shah­nameh dur­ing the protests against the con­tested elec­tions that kept Mah­moud Ahmanide­jad in power.

I don’t want to give the wrong impres­sion, though. It’s not that the Shah­nameh is banned in Iran, or that peo­ple can only talk about Fer­dowsi or quote from his epic in whis­pers because the gov­ern­ment would oth­er­wise throw them in jail. The Shah­nameh, how­ever, clearly seems to res­onate with the peo­ple of Iran in a way that their gov­ern­ment finds threat­en­ing and so bring­ing into Amer­i­can Eng­lish poetry the parts of the Shah­nameh that I have trans­lated res­onates within me as a small dec­la­ra­tion of sol­i­dar­ity, as I hope it will res­onate with the peo­ple who read my trans­la­tion when it comes out next month – or with those who read any of the trans­la­tions that are avail­able, from Dick Davis’ prose trans­la­tion of the entire epic to Jerome Clinton’s verse trans­la­tions of two of Rostam’s sto­ries.

The story I am up to in my proof­read­ing is the story of Tah­mures, the third king of the Shah­nameh, also known as “Demon Binder” because he bound Ahri­man, the devil fig­ure” and rode him around the earth like a horse. When the Black Demon led a force of demons and sor­cer­ers against Tah­mures for this insult to their leader, Tah­mures so thor­oughly defeated them that they only way he would agree to spare their lives was if they promised to teach him knowl­edge no one else pos­sessed. What they taught him was how to write:

They taught Tah­mures to shape each let­ter
and pro­nounce the sound it stood for,
and this new and prof­itable knowl­edge
lit a light in him like the sun.

Writ­ing so often plays such an impor­tant role in the top­pling of tyrants that I will leave you, sim­ply, with the irony that, in the Shah­nameh at least, it was the tyrants them­selves who taught human­ity how to do it.