{"id":42027,"date":"2014-12-08T00:39:46","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T00:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=42027"},"modified":"2014-12-08T00:39:46","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T00:39:46","slug":"sunday-surprise-the-country-western-blues-of-hafez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=42027","title":{"rendered":"Sunday surprise: the country western \/ blues of Hafez"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[ by <strong>Charles Cameron<\/strong> &#8212; at the heart not of the political entity, Iran, but of the Persian culture and people, can be found a king&#8217;s ransom in poetry and song ]<br \/>\n.<\/p>\n<p>The sensual and the spiritual meet, melt, meld, merge, and dare I say it, emerge to suit each reader of the poetry of <strong>Hafez<\/strong>, Sufi poet and mystic &#8212; at times erotic, at times ecstatic, the yearning for the beloved sounding in both registers in his poetry, as in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Song+of+Solomon+1&#038;version=KJV\">Song of Songs, which is Solomon&#8217;s<\/a>. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mgnoa66ou_M?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>These versions, by <strong>James Newell<\/strong>, capture the spirit of Hafez far better IMO than the frankly best-sellerized and thus trivial versions of <strong>Ladinsky<\/strong>. The most sophisticated translator of Hafez now living is probably <strong>Dick Davis<\/strong>, who has this to say in an essay intriguingly titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cstone.net\/~poems\/essadavi.htm\">On Not Translating Hafez<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The second obvious problem faced by a translator inheres in those parts of a text which have clear cultural resonance for the original audience and very little or absolutely no resonance for the linguistic community of the target language. An obvious example of this for translators from almost any Persian text from the sixteenth century on is the lore of Shi\u2019i Islam, an intimate knowledge of the main features of which is automatically assumed by most post-fifteenth-century Persian authors, though this is of course a knowledge almost entirely lacking in the linguistic communities of the West. When we turn to Persian poetry such cultural problems can be particularly intrusive. There is the fact that after the thirteenth century virtually all Persian poetry has at least a tinge of Sufism to it, if it is not outrightly mystical in intent, and mysticism is not a subject accorded particular importance by the poetry of the major Western languages. [ .. ]<\/p>\n<p>A subdivision of this mystical problem is the set of ideas metaphorically expressed in Persian poetry by wine, drunkenness, the opposition of the rend (approximately &#8220;libertine&#8221;) and the zahed (&#8220;ascetic&#8221;), and so forth. None of these notions have any force whatsoever in the Western literary tradition. It would never occur to a Western poet to express the forbidden intoxications of mysticism by alluding to the forbidden intoxications of wine, for the simple fact that the intoxications of wine have never (if we exclude the brief and local moment of prohibition in the United States) been forbidden in the West. The whole topos of winebibbing and the flouting of sober outward convention, so dear to Persian Sufi poetry, can seem in earlier translators\u2019 work to be little more than a kind of rowdy undergraduate hijinks, and in more recent versions it can take on the ethos of Haight-Ashbury in the late sixties. But in both cases the deeper resonances of the topos are not obvious for a Western audience: they have to be explained \u2014 and to explain a resonance is like explaining a joke; when the explanation is over, no one laughs, except out of pained politeness, and no one is moved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a song in which the world-renouncing side of things comes axroo forcefully&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/r8MkFrxjomo?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I wrote a poem of my own in somewhat similar spirit yesterday, not too long after listening to that one, and offer it here in counterpoint, with <strong>Madhu <\/strong>especially in mind:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Lend me at least an echo<\/strong><br \/>\n.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re not listening to my poems<br \/>\nhow shall I possibly know I&#8217;m still alive?<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s when your heart stops<br \/>\njust for a moment<br \/>\nthat my heart begins to race,<br \/>\nwhen your breath catches<br \/>\nthat my breath can return to my heart.<br \/>\nYou kill me. I call to you,<\/p>\n<p>nightingale to rose or whatever,<br \/>\nlover to beloved,<br \/>\nthorn, petal, throat, branch &#8212;<br \/>\nare you nowhere,<br \/>\nand how can I follow?<br \/>\nLet me know it was you sang my song.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And okay, here&#8217;s a third and last Hafez version by James Newell:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DBQhngvtC20?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>**<\/p>\n<p>Dr Newell&#8217;s bio can be found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thesongsofhafiz.com\/jamesrnewell.htm\">here<\/a> &#8212; and yes, in addition to playing with the likes of <strong>Muddy Waters<\/strong>, <strong>Howlin&#8217; Wolf<\/strong>, <strong>Mose Allison<\/strong> and <strong>John Mayall<\/strong>, he does indeed hold a doctorate from Vanderbilt. His doctoral dissertation, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.symbolsoftransformation.com\/soundaspower.pdf\">should you care to read it<\/a>, is on the ethnomusicology of the <strong>Qawwali<\/strong>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Which brings me just the opportunity I need to close this post with <strong>Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan<\/strong> singing his signature qawwali, <strong>Allah Huu<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>To the best of my understanding, <strong>Allah <\/strong>is simple the Arabic term for <strong>God<\/strong>, just as <strong>Dieu <\/strong>is in French &#8212; used by mambers of any religion or done who wish to reference the Deity &#8212; while the word <strong>Hu <\/strong>in Sufism references the breath or spirit &#8212; <strong>pneuma<\/strong> in Greek, <strong>prana <\/strong>in Sanskrit, <strong>spiritus <\/strong>in Latin &#8212; the wind that &#8220;bloweth where it listeth&#8221; of John 3.8.<\/p>\n<p>Huu:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Sr6CNejcFRQ?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[ by Charles Cameron &#8212; at the heart not of the political entity, Iran, but of the Persian culture and people, can be found a king&#8217;s ransom in poetry and song ] . The sensual and the spiritual meet, melt, meld, merge, and dare I say it, emerge to suit each reader of the poetry [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[526,93,741,446,714,720,1,259],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-cameron","category-iran","category-poetry","category-shia","category-sufi","category-translation","category-uncategorized","category-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42027"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42076,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42027\/revisions\/42076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}