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 26th at Persian Arts Festival’s 5th 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.

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.

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.

When Abolqasem Ferdowsi wrote the Shahnameh in the 10th 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 cooperation 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.

A man whom other men of wisdom follow
tells the story of Ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz,
who owned a ring in which was set a stone
no jeweler could properly assess.
At night, you’d swear it was a rising sun.
By day, it shone with a single pearl’s luster.
One year, by God’s decree, Aziz’s rule
was plagued by drought. He watched his people’s faces
wane from full moons to narrow crescents
and knew the royal comfort he enjoyed,
unshared, would undo his manhood in their eyes.
(When people are pouring poison down their throats,
who would dare drink sweet-water in their sight?)
He sold the stone for silver, giving it all
in just one week to orphans, strangers, the poor
and anybody else he saw in need.
The court gossips pounced, “You’ll never find
a precious stone like that again!” I’ve heard
that when he answered tears poured down his cheeks
like candle wax. “A prince who wears such jewels
in time of drought betrays his people’s trust.
This empty ring looks fine on me. Hunger’s
emptiness enhances no one’s looks.”
Happiness is in providing comfort
to those who need it, not in owning gems
to decorate your hands. Those who cherish
virtue don’t buy joy with others’ sorrow.

///

If the shah sleeps well upon his throne,
I doubt the poor sleep easily, but if
the shah lights up the night with watchful eyes,
those he rules will dream deeply, waking
soothed. Praise God! The Atabeg,
Abu Bakr ibn Sa’d, is such a ruler.
The only signs of trouble plaguing Pars
are the women whose lunar beauty turns our heads.

A verse from our last party caught my ear:
“I held my moon-faced lover while she slept
and wanted nothing more from life than that,
but the sight of her so fully lost in sleep
moved me. ‘Your slender grace shames the cypress.
Wash this sweet slumber from your narcissus–
eyes, let the rose of your smile bloom
and free the nightingale song of your voice!
Your beauty subverts us all. Wake yourself
and bring the ruby wine you poured last night!’
She opened one indignant eye, ‘You say
I am subversive, and still you choose to rouse me?’”
Under the rule of our enlightened king,
no other subversion dares to stir.

Grief

Like the disheveled locks of a woman
the Karun river spreads itself
on the naked shoulders of the shore.
The sun is gone, and the night’s hot breath
wafts over the water’s beating heart.

Far in the distance the river’s southern shore
is love-drunk in moonlight’s embrace.
The night with its million brilliant bloodshot eyes
spies on beds of innocent lovers.

The cane field is fast asleep. A bird
shrieks from amid its darkness,
and the moonbeams rush to see
what fear has driven it to such despair.

On the river’s skin, palm shadows
tremble at the sensual touch of the breeze,
and inside the silent secret deep of night,
frogs sing their loud frog songs.

In this rapturous night’s bliss
the distant dream of your hands draws near,
your scent rushes in like a wave, your eyes
glimmer on the water’s face, then go dark.

My pitiful heart, eager and hopeful,
fell captive to the hands of your love.
You sailed away on your own river, left this land–
O snapped branch of my passion’s storm.

In France, where he first lived after going into exile, he was elected to the Author’s Association,  and then, in 1986, he moved to the United States, where he lived until his death in 2000. All told, Naderpour is the author of ten volumes of poetry, and his work has been translated into English, French, German and Italian. In 1993, he was awarded a Hellman/Hammett Grant by Human Rights Watch and he is said to have been a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This gorgeous love poem, which Naderpour dedicated to his wife Jaleh, was translated by Niloufar Talebi and is included in her volume Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World, which is also my source for the brief biography of Naderpour above.

Conversation in the Dark

To my dear Jaleh

Mid nights, when I’m ill and awake
And no light is visible even from a pinhole
And the soft song of your deepest breaths
Accompanies the treble and bass of my heart
To the constant ticking of the clock,
Then I see that even if my thoughts are alone,
My heart, in the hollow of my chest is not.

Softly, I bend my head over your bedside
And lightly kiss your lashes, joined in sleep.
You feel the weight of this kiss on your eye and smile.
I kiss you cheek warm
And although the clamor of your laughter echoes in my ear,
In the dark waves of night,
Your laughing face does not manifest.

Quietly, I strike a match
To illuminate your face,
But soon, the red sulfuric spark,
Rising and falling upon my two blackened fingers,
Dies in the twist and turn of its dance
And again, dense darkness
Settles in our little bedchamber.
I tell myself: Aside from that brief instant–
The moment I glimpsed your dear face
–My eye does not have fortune enough to see.

Like a child fearing darkness,
I pave a path to your embrace
And petrified of something I can’t name,
I steal this whisper in your ear:
Kinder than all the world’s kindliest creatures!
Oh friend, sweetheart, mother, companion on this voyage!
Scream away so even stone-hearted death
Does not undo us in the promised moment!
For we both know that in a riotous
World of swarming crowds,
And of all that avails on the endless horizon,
If we have a destiny, it is our loneliness.

And this house, smaller than a boat, sails us–
The distressed–into the sea of exile.
But on the alarming horizon of the sea,
Night prevails
And reveals no path in darkness
To tomorrow.

A man of God immersed himself in meditation. When he emerged from the vision that was granted him, a smiling companion welcomed him back, “What beautiful gift have you brought us from the garden in which you were walking?”

The holy man replied, “I walked until I reached the rosebush, where I gathered up the skirts of my robe to hold the roses I wanted to present to my friends, but the scent of the petals so intoxicated me that I let everything fall from my hands.”

Learn love, O morning bird, from the moth’s
giving itself in silence to the fire.
Pretenders seek enlightenment in vain,
waiting to follow those who won’t return.
And You, who transcend all we can imagine,
whose existence we can neither guess at
nor claim to know as fact, of whose glory
all the world’s words—spoken or written—fall
immeasurably short, the end is here,
and we stand as we did when it all began,
tongue-tied lovers, awe-struck at Your beauty.