I do not like the theocratic regime in Tehran, but people who have been its staunch critics, even they have criticised Nafisi's account as portraying I do not like the theocratic regime in Tehran, but people who have been its staunch critics, even they have criticised Nafisi's account as portraying Iranians and their culture in very simplistic, myopic, orientalist manner that is more a work of imagination than reality.
It's a memoir and it's based on her experiences but I think one can't separate memoirs of this kind from the politics of its printing and dissemination. Edward Said might have called it part of the larger knowledge production by the Western academy (and Nafisi is firmly part of the Western academy) to frame 'the other' in a way they had wanted it. The book was intended for a certain audience, it had to aim at its target well, and it had to portray things as it did to achieve the status it finally acquired in contemporary memoir writing of the political bent.
I might have finished reading it had it been written well. But it wasn't. So DNF....more
Come, tell me what it is that I have gained From loving you,
The doubtful quality of translation and the thematic similarity of the selection makes it anCome, tell me what it is that I have gained From loving you,
The doubtful quality of translation and the thematic similarity of the selection makes it an unsuitable book to approach Hafiz's poetry for the uninitiated. Not that it's impossible to not like him, but I hold this LBC responsible for the many one-star comments trashing Hafiz the poet that you see in community reviews. But I can't help but rate it five stars because Hafiz is a five-star poet and one of the greatest practitioners of the classical Persian love lyric - the ghazal.
The natural flow of Hafiz's poetry is lost in the rendition and rearrangement of couplets. Ghazals move erratically, break abruptly, and it feels as though a mediocre dabbler has penned them. Davies' handling of the refrain (radeef) has also been problematic (see poem on pg 29-30, which I'm not quoting here). It is also important to stick to a form when translating the ghazal. Sure, not every poem translates well into a prefigured form, but it helps to stick to one for the most part and deviate only when the occasion demands it. Arbitrarily changing form as though the originals were a bunch of dissimilar poems obscures the meticulous care the poet has put into crafting each and every ghazal of his Divan.
This selection is culled (by whom it doesn't say) from a Penguin volume Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz, which means it's a selection of a selection. The final product is constricted and doesn't feel like a representative selection of the diversity and richness of his poetic cosmos. He comes off as a fatalist winebibber incapable of talking about anything else. You could never have guessed Hafiz was primarily a Sufi poet who used wine-drinking as a metaphor for divine love, keeping the literal meaning on a mundane level yet elevating it to a higher degree with a reminder that all life is ephemeral and the pinnacle of existence is to merge as one with the Beloved - beloved with the capital B.
By way of apology for pulling a Professor Horrendo on the book, below I quote some fine examples to round off the review:
Where's a musician, so that I can give The profit I once found In self-control and knowledge for a flute's songs, And a lute's sweet sound?
------
I've lived my life without a life - Don't be surprised at this; Who counts an absence as a life When life is what you miss?
But those whose lives are centered on Your lovely mouth confess No other thoughts than this, and think Nothing of Nothingness.
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My body's dust is as a veil Spread out to hide My soul - happy that moment when It's drawn aside!
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Until my lips are played on like a flute By his lips' beauty, My ears can only hear as wind the world's Advice on duty -
And now one of the dozens of wine-laden couplets:
Sit yourself down upon the wine-shop's bench And take a glass of wine - this is your share Of all the wealth and glory of the world, And what you're given there....is all you need.
For someone who went around with nothing on his body save a thin lioncloth, it is entirely understandable Grief, like an extra garment, weighs me low.
For someone who went around with nothing on his body save a thin lioncloth, it is entirely understandable that he found grief like an extra garment he needed to cast off. Baba Tahir "Oryan" - The Naked - is an earliest personification of the love-afflicted wandering dervish that would be regularised in the following generations of mystics throughout the Islamicate world. The source of his afflictions is shrouded in mystery, since very little is known of his life except that he lived in the first half of the 11th century, spurned ordinary life, survived on alms and wild fruits, and went around towns and cities chanting his quatrains to great acclaim.
By him who knoweth grief, may grief be told.
Unlike Hindu ascetics who took pride in their complete rejection of the material world and who were revered among ordinary folks for extreme austerity, Baba Tahir was not pleased with his lifestyle, called himself 'a nomad,' 'a fanatic tramp,' and an 'idle scamp' who wanders aimless by day and night, with 'a stone as his pillow' and 'the moon his lamp,' and so paints his self-profile of a wandering dervish in an unfavourable light.
What flame-singed moth’s as blundering as I? On such a madman who would waste a sigh? Even the ants and serpents have their nests, But I have not a ruin where to lie.
The few quatrains in which he denounces himself as a wastrel and laments on his condition led some historians to believe that he might have been an ordinary working class man who had fallen on hard times. The relative absence of stock Sufi imagery in his poems strengthens the view but the religio-philosophical undertones, and more than that, the force and edge of his voice, which stands quite in contrast to that of a man resigned to bewailing his fate, betrays sharp intellect and a high degree of erudition.
O thou who dost possess no less, no more, Of heavenly knowledge than of tavern-lore, And that is—nothing! Oh, canst thou expect Aught from a world thou never wouldst explore?
If Japanese poets excelled in subtle understatement, their Persianate counterparts, in general, took pride in creating forceful verses with dynamic action and outlandish imagery. It would be a couple of centuries before Persian poetics matured into the highly stylised forms and double and triple-barreled imagery it's known for, but we still get something like this in Baba Tahir's poems:
Out hunting, when a falcon, once I went; Sudden an arrow through my wing was sent. Be warned, O heedless wanderer! by me, Against the height the strongest bows are bent.
The stretched bow about to shoot an arrow through the falcon is no longer just a scene of hunting. It has transformed into an image of a lowly thing bent to its limits to pay obeisance to a high being, even when secretly it tries to harm it. Fantastic!
The object of most quatrains is the proverbial Beloved, whether it is divine (haqeeqi) or earthly (majazi), and most of the quatrains express a yearning for unification with the beloved tempered by the impossibility of such an eventuality.
Thy pictured beauty, Love, ne’er leaves my heart, Thy downy cheek becomes of me a part, Tightly I’ll close mine eyes, O Love, that so My life, before thine Image, shall depart.
But although he's determined, the simile employed in the following quatrain suggests he's trying in vain.
I’m a green log fresh cut from off the tree, O heart of stone, thou burnest not for me,— Though who, indeed, expects a stone to burn? But I must smoulder till I kindle thee.
These translations or renderings in Victorian English, published in fin de siècle Britain, were the first ever to be attempted. It is a proof of the popularity of Edward FitzGerald's mid-19th C rendition of Omar Khayyam's rubaiyat that many a quatrain poet was translated in a similar style in the decades that followed. I like the translators' approach: they tried to remain true to the literal meaning while clothing it in an idiom acceptable for that age, and one which endeavours to reproduce the originals in a matching scheme of rhyme and metre than simply offer prose versions.
December '16
[image] The burial place of Baba Tahir Oryan in Hamadan, Iran....more
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