Highlighters. Underliners. Scribblers of marginalia. Vandals, really, smearing their graffiti all over the page. It’s not only my bourgeois concern with private property that’s offended, it’s my sensibilities as a reader. No matter how I try, I can not ignore other people’s annotations. If they underline, my inner voice adopts a stentorian tone. If they annotate, I read their notes and scoff (“You call that a trenchant observation? I’ll show you trenchant!”). In short, it tears my attention away from the story.

I’m not the only one for whom this rankles. Beyond the legions of preservationists and assorted book nerds who turn pale and clutch their first editions to their chests at the mere mention of such uncouth behavior, there is a small but militant wing devoted to stamping out not only the transgressive act but the transgressor as well. But while our side may make up in enthusiasm what it lacks in numbers, our opponents are legion:

“Let’s face it, you could read the entire book or you could just read the sentences that somebody has helpfully underlined. Better still if they’ve underlined large paragraphs and included a summary by the side then you needn’t read anything. If a book is a [sic] pointless and crap then it’s far better have someone who’s previously done the essay leave a note telling the next reader to avoid wasting valuable library hours.”

I see their point. If one person has read a particular book, why should anyone else ever read it again? You might encounter something you disagree with or dislike. According to this helpful advice, one not even need read the summary next to the underlined paragraphs; just the fact that it has been read is sufficient.  And why waste “valuable library hours” reading books? They’ve got the internet now. So listen up, doctoral students – if you want to have a lasting impact in advancing the theory and practice of your field, just get to the library early. And bring a pen.

Speaking of people not reading books, here’s one of the oddest books I’ve ever read. Just to give you an idea, when I was trying to recall the author and title, I Googled “meat piles  “solid clouds” memory”. First hit.

I came across Derby’s work while looking into the self-identified “Bizzaro” school of fiction (I’m generally suspicious of weird for weird’s sake, but Steve Aylett is a genius of something, I’m just not sure what). Derby isn’t actually cited among these authors, but bizarre would be at least part of a fitting description of his book Super Flat Times. It must also be more than that because I read it over a year ago and it still haunts me.

Village Voice review

Buy it for the author’s sake; I’ve already taken care of actually reading it.

-Hafiz via Google Translator

من باید این کار را با گفتن آه
سن جایی برده اند و از این رو سن :

دو جاده           در چوب، و من

من در زمان یکی کمتر شده توسط سفر
و ساخته شده است که همه تفاوت.

-Robert Frost also via Google Translator

Machine translation has been with us for a while now. Years ago I attended a demonstration by some contractors who wanted to sell translation software to the government. A word of advice to management: if you want an honest assessment of a product, make sure that it’s not going to replace the jobs of the people you send to evaluate it. Still, it wasn’t difficult to dismiss their efforts. It worked in theory, but only thus.

Things have progressed since then and Google’s announcement in 2009 that it was adding Persian translation sent ripples through the relatively small pool of people who cared.  “It’s curtains for us,” the pessimists moaned, while others pointed to glaring errors and declared the whole operation a hopeless failure. As always, the truth is somewhere in between. First of all, wow, Google, the corporate equivalent of, like, God, cared about Persian. Nobody cares about Persian! (I’m exaggerating for comedic effect, thou of easily offended sensibilities). Why should this be so? It be so because Iran was having riots after the disputed presidential “election” of 2009. On their official blog, Google wrote:

“We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information.”

Then they wrote about how Apple totally sucks and linked to YouTube videos of cats playing piano. LOL!

Secondly, the translations are kind of ok. Sometimes. Even Google didn’t expect much from it. As CNN’s Persian translator says, “The Persian language is very poetic, full of metaphors and poetry and expressions. You give it to the poor machine, it’s not a person or a poet, it has not got a heart. So the end result is disastrous.” Obviously, computer scientists should stop worrying about AI and start developing AH (artificial heart). (That hilarious joke just sparked a memory of Pirx the Pilot and a robot poet. Or something. Stanislaw Lem. I’ll have to look it up.)

The lines above are from the opening stanza of Hafiz’s most famous poem. As far as I know, there’s nothing about flour or butlers in it, nor the feared Media Patrol, unless all my years of study have been for naught. Then again, there has never been a wholly satisfactory human translation of this particular poem, despite many attempts. H. Wilberforce Clark rendered it as follows:

“If that Bold One (the True Beloved) of Shiraz gain our heart

for his dark mole, I will give Samarkand and Bukhara (both worlds).

Saki! give the wine (of divine love) remaining (from the people of religion); for, in Paradise, thou wilt not have

the bank of the water of the Ruknabad (the lover’s weeping eye) nor the rose of the garden of Musalla (the lover’s heart)”

Granted, Clark was writing in the 19th century, so we in turn have to translate his English. Even so, it hardly trips off the tongue. And it scarcely improves upon what  Sir William “Oriental” Jones (a distant relative of Indiana) composed around one hundred years earlier:

Sweet maid, if thou would’st charm my sight,
And bid these arms thy neck infold;
That rosy cheek, that lily hand,
Would give thy poet more delight
Than all Bocara’s vaunted gold,
Than all the gems of Samarcand.
Boy, let yon liquid ruby flow,
And bid thy pensive heart be glad,
Whate’er the frowning zealots say:
Tell them, their Eden cannot show
A stream so clear as Rocnabad,
A bower so sweet as Mosellay.

Jones’ translation is much looser but more poetic. Finally, we have Gertrude Bell in 1897:

Oh Turkish maid of Shiraz! in thy hand
If thou’lt take my heart, for the mole on thy cheek
I would barter Bokhara and Samarkand.
Bring, Cup-bearer, all that is left of thy wine!
In the Garden of Paradise vainly thou’lt seek
The lip of the fountain of Ruknabad,
And the bowers of Mosalla where roses twine.

Actually, not “finally” at all. There have been lots of translations of this poem and I’m sure there are more on the way. None of them will ever come close to the original, but it is a challenge people find hard to resist. Its difficulties are manifold: there are lots of place names which have particular metaphorical significance (Clark puts his explanation in parentheses), the image of beauty – a mole, or, Cindy Crawfordesque “beauty mark” – sounds a bit absurd in English, there’s the problem of gender, which doesn’t exist in the Persian language, so the Beloved must either be portrayed as masculine or feminine, and the original rhyme is based entirely on a grammatical particle which has no meaning in itself and doesn’t exist in English. Not to mention all the Sufi allusions and double-entendre. If you rendered it in the most prosaic terms possible, it’s saying something like “I’d give up an entire empire if my beloved would just acknowledge me (the Turk is a metaphor for a beautiful yet cruel and aloof object of affection which in turn is a metaphor for the magnificent yet elusive godhead). Pass the wine around because we’ll never find these earthly delights in heaven.” And this is just the first two lines.

Funnily enough, Google Translator does better turning Robert Frost into Persian. You can at least see a relationship between the vocabulary of the original and the translation (it’s the final stanza of The Road Not Taken). The only word it couldn’t handle was “diverged” which I had to omit because it does weird things to the layout of the text.  Let’s try the last stanza of “Reluctance“:

از طریق مزارع و جنگل

و بیش از دیواره های من ؛

من از تپه بالا رفت مشاهده

و در جهان نگاه کرد و فرود آمد؛

من توسط خانه بزرگراه آمده،

و در حقیقت، آن است که به پایان رسید.

Again, it couldn’t handle “wended” but then neither can your average high school student. The rest is pretty fair; in fact, a few lines are almost exact: “He looked at the world and descended” versus “And looked at the world, and descended,” and “In truth, it ended,” versus “And lo, it is ended.”

Does this mean Robert Frost lacks heart? Is English not a “poetic language, full of metaphors and poetry and expressions?” When I first encountered Hafiz I remarked to my professor that it reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in that reading it made me feel completely ignorant. He responded that the poetry of Hafiz is actually much easier to grasp because it draws from a standard pool of metaphors, analogies, and historical/religious references (making me, I guess, doubly ignorant). Once you know the code, so to speak, Persian poetry in general becomes easier to decipher. So consider this line from “Reluctance”:

Out through the fields and the woods

And over the walls I have wended;

and consider a single word: “walls”. How do you “wend” over walls? Frost was a New Englander and so couldn’t walk anywhere without eventually coming across stone walls. In Frost’s time, they usually served their actual function of dividing farmer’s properties, which lends a slight air of transgression and a larger scope to his wanderings (now they make excellent mountain bike obstacles and waypoints for spurring on reluctant children  – “Look for the next wall! We’ll turn around at the next wall! We can sit down at the next wall! Look, you said you wanted to come, I didn’t make you come! Why? Because the dog needs to be walked, that’s why! It’s called “being responsible”. Just get to the next wall and we’ll buy doughnuts on the way home, OK?”).

“Reluctance” is the final poem in a collection called “A Boy’s Will.” The next collection, “North of Boston,” opens with “Mending Wall” about the mystery of building these walls that keep nothing in and nothing out:

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.

I’m sure if I knew more about Frost, I’d have something more profound to say, but my point is there’s really no way to translate this “wall” into Persian (or any other language) and have it mean the same thing without the sort of lengthy explanation on which most of my academic approach to Persian poetry rests. The Persian word divar evokes a different sort of poetic image, surrounding a garden, perhaps, or courtyard (remarkably, Google choose divara, “a structure similar to a wall”. Wallish? Maybe that’s perfectly appropriate, undermining my entire thesis. Hmmph.)

But that’s what differentiates the human from the machine translator. The machine sees a wall where the human sees a rambling pile of stones, hears the crunch of feet in snow and smells the crisp air. The job of the translator is to convey those images, to be both a scholar of poetry and, to a certain degree, a poet. I guess you’d call it heart.

Here’s my latest book report: The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand. You’ll remember how I waxed lyrical about Mr. Marquand in an earlier post. My judgment stands, although I’m not sure I’m quite as rapturous about this book. This is my failing, though, not the author’s.

First of all, a pithy description of the content: http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/10/31/the_great_george_apley

The structure of the book – a biographical sketch of Mr. Apley gleaned from his letters and other writings – mirrors the intricate and self-referential society in which both the narrator and his subject lived. It’s immensely subtle. In order to understand the emotions of the actors, the reader has to navigate past the absolute certitude of the reserved, sometimes pompous biographer as well as the restrained expressions of remorse and doubt in the letters of the primary actors themselves. If you take the text at face value, it is a rather dry and slightly insufferable description of a boring man.

[A brief pause while I shovel the driveway, go sledding, eat pizza, drink beer, drink wine, start watching Bladerunner, fall asleep, wake up, go to bed, wake up, eat breakfast, look for pieces to an Erector set, and walk the dog. The parent who wishes to indulge in extra-curricular activities must be highly adaptable to evolving situations]

But assume that Marquand is being gently ironic and the story unfolds like an origami flower. There is a series of intricate relationships alluded to between George Apley and his friends and relations, between the narrator and George Apley, between the narrator and Apley’s surviving family members, and between the narrator and the reader. I love that Marquand respects the reader enough that he needs make nothing explicit; he either trusts us to get the underlying humor and pathos or he doesn’t care whether we do or not, both commendable attitudes in an author. It also pleases me to no end, for pretty much the same reasons, that Marquand received the Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley.

In my literary meanderings, I often run across an author or particular work and act like I’m the first one ever to set eyes on this wonderous creation delivered from on high accompanied by heavenly choirs. And now I’m doing it again. Robert Frost, did you know he was, like, a really good poet? And he wrote all about, get this, New England! Well, here’s a poem by Frost that apparently everybody knows and loves. Why the hell didn’t you tell me?

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods

And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,

Save those that the oak is keeping

To ravel them one by one

And let them go scraping and creeping

Out over the crusted snow,

When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,

No longer blown hither and thither;

The last lone aster is gone;

The flowers of the witch hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

But the feet question “Whither?”

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7477

How can you resist a book the preface of which reads:

“Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me, and those that tire at all of the world we know, for we have new worlds here.”

It’s called “The Book of Wonder” and it’s just one among many. If the centaur doesn’t do it for you, try one of the other stories. They have all the trappings of a fairy tale but with a knowing air usually missing from modern fantasy writing. Plus, they’re all really short.

The link above is the bare bones PG edition. Better yet, go to www.abebooks.com and find a nice old hardcover. Then put on your smoking jacket, pour yourself a glass of absinthe and retire to the library to read by firelight.

Religious poetry is an often ignored facet of Persian literature. Even in discussions of mystical Sufi poetry, one encounters more emphasis on the literary, historical or even psychological aspects than the religious. In the more formal religious context, poems commemorating religious holidays were and are regularly composed and recited. Malek al-Sho’ara Bahar did just that as a functionary at the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad (the twelve Imams of Shi’ism (well, of Twelver Shi’ism, anyway) are the descendants of Muhammad) . These are counted among his early work and almost universally dismissed by scholars as uninteresting compared to his later political poems. This assessment may very well be accurate, but that sort of consensus always makes me want to go in the opposite direction, even if that way leads off a cliff.

So here is a portion of one of those poems. Even if it lacks literary merit, it still, like all annual holidays, marks the passing of another year in our inevitable march toward death. Merry Christmas!

NOTE: It took me a while to finish the translation and now Ashura has passed. It was unfortunately marked by a bombing at a mosque in Chabahar, Iran, a coastal city in south-eastern Iran, by a Sunni group called Jundullah which left a lot of innocent people, children among them, dead. Words fail me.

O Fate! You have driven the family of ‘Ali from their homeland

You left them broken and hopeless in Karbala

You drove the gazelles of the haram from the valley of safety

to be imprisoned by the claws of man-eating wolves

You tore the pure bodies of valiant men limb from limb

Grief broke the heart of the Lion of God

You beheaded the servant of God and so,

your vengeance left his daughters bereft of family and home.

You shattered the children of Zahra with the rock of spite.

Even you, o heavens? Your heart is made of stone.

You have filled the plains with the armies of religion’s foes

to obscure the sun of purity behind the clouds of rancour.

You have oppressed the pure of heart since time began

but you have crushed the hopes of the Prophet’s family in one blow.

You spied among those gathered a babe in a cradle

Had you no shame that you would harm such a child?

They sought to silence his crying

You soothed him in an instant with the tip of an arrow

You burned the house of ‘Ali with the fire of your bitter vengeance

Then you stood among the flames and looked on.

The women of the House of Zahra have been annihilated by your cruelty

Alas for injustice, a cry against oppression, and a plea for freedom from cruelty.

I am, however, a compulsive reader. Breakfast is never eaten without a magazine or, in leaner times, a mail-order catalog in front of me (“I wonder if those Land’s End no-press flat-front cotton twill chinos come in beige?”). One advantage of having children in the house (perhaps the only advantage) is that higher-sugar content cereals have more interesting reading material on the back of the box – mazes, puzzles, code-breaking,  and bee/honey-related puns so bad they require a separate subsection under the penal code. Adult cereals, meanwhile, ask you to believe that each individual “biscuit” was hand-woven by organically grown, BGH-free Aztec women and will cure cancer.

So goes the remainder of the day – on the train to work, during lunch, standing on the platform waiting for the train home, on the train home and finally, those last few lines which will have to be read again tomorrow as I fall asleep.

Lucky for me than that I work in a library, eh Readers? Popping down to the break room for a morning Snickers bar? Just let me grab a book on Navaho grammar. Time for lunch? First I have to check out this H.P.Lovecraft compendium. Trip to the loo? Well, mind your own business.

My choices are governed largely by the arrangement of the books in the stacks, whether by the Library of Congress classification system or Widener’s old proprietary system. Actually, I tend to gravitate towards the latter, because therein lies the older material. I have an aversion to books which come highly recommended or the author of which is still living. I don’t fully understand why this is so, but there it is (it is also not a hard and fast rule; Terry Pratchett and Thomas Pynchon are notable exceptions). There is nothing more rewarding than a book stumbled upon or picked up on a whim. It is not a totally random process; as I said, I tend to drift among the subject headings and get caught in pools of history or fiction. World War I memoirs, for instance, or nineteenth century tales of horror. Lately, I’ve been stuck in American Literature, 1900-1950. I came looking for James Thurber and stayed to meet his friends and colleagues – E.B. White, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Thorne Smith, James M. Cain, Booth Tarkington and the man to whom I wish to introduce you here tonight, John P. Marquand.

I chose Mr. Marquand because he occupied a fair amount of shelf space, I had never heard of him, and I liked the well-worn yet sturdy bindings. The book I picked at random bore the title “H.M. Pulham, Esquire”. I chose well. This fictional memoir of a man clinging to a fading patrician culture in early twentieth century Boston is one of the greatest books ever. There you go. I’m not sure where to start. The writing is exquisite, so perfectly balanced in tone that what could be pedantic descriptions of mundane detail take on a burning relevance to the character, his environment and the lurking plot of marital infidelity. You could approach it narrowly as a character study or broadly as a romantic epic of new money versus old. The character is fascinating, foreshadowing the wise fool of Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller, similarly caught up in circumstances beyond his control yet different in that he’s utterly loyal to the institutions which confine him. Sort of a Babbitt without the epiphany. Only at the very end do we catch a glimpse of his internal struggle, a flash of self-awareness – and all of this is conveyed in one line, or even a single phrase. It’s remarkable craftsmanship, evident from the moment you open the book and find a two-page discussion of what the author really means when he writes “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental” (by the way, that’s called an “All Persons Fictitious Disclaimer” and All Persons Fictitious would be a great name for a certain type of band).

I’m working my way through the rest of his oeuvre. He wrote a series of thrillers centered on a Japanese  secret agent named Mr. Moto, which apparently were made into movies. I’ve read one, Thank You, Mr. Moto and I’m afraid I’ll have to say Thanks, but No Thanks, Mr. Moto. It wasn’t quite thrilling and the romance wasn’t quite romantic and the whole thing gave the impression of someone who would rather be writing something else. Fortunately, he did and I’ve just started The Late George Apley, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

Critic Martha Spaulding says he “deserves to be rediscovered,” so we’d better get to it. You know how Martha gets.  Go read her essay here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/-ldquo-martini-age-victorian-rdquo/2954/, then go to Abebooks.com and buy something (avoid Mr. Moto, at least until you’ve read one of the others).

A nightingale’s lament : selections from the poems and fables of Parvin Eʻstesami (1907-41).

Lexington, Ky. : Mazdâ Publishers, 1985.

Get it from the publisher at the thoroughly reasonable price of 10 clams:

http://www.mazdapublisher.com/BookDetails.aspx?BookID=153

Note to self: Don’t Google “Mazda” expecting to find a small publisher of books about Iran at the top of the list. You’ll be disappointed, trust me.

Persian fiction reader : texts published in the 1980s and 1990s : language and culture notes, translations, glossary

compiled by Michael Hillmann with Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami.

Kensington, Md. : Dunwoody Press, c1995.

http://amzn.com/1881265366

Hold on to your hat when you check the price. I hope you have access to Interlibrary Loan, although you can’t have ours at the moment because my reading group is using it. There are a couple others from the 1950′s and 60′s. If you want specifics, drop me a line.

There is no one more skilled in drunken love-making than Sarkhosh;

I flee from religion and love, I leave my good name and honor in the dust.”

That’s a line from Sarkhosh. It’s a charming poem and charm is what was missing when I finished translating it. The content is often so formulaic that much of the enjoyment comes from rhyme and meter. Still, I liked the defiant, almost blasphemous, tone of the finale. He’s casting himself as the rend, a drunken profligate (or what my dictionary refers to as “a slyboots.” I can’t top that). The sufis described themselves as such to accentuate the contrast between their outward acts and their inward piety. Their mystical union with Allah divorced them from earthly concerns. When it’s done well, the line between mystical fervor and an actual love of debauchery is blurry at best.

Back on the earthly plane, my search for more Sarkhosh info proceeds at a glacial pace, but recently left in its wake an information hummock (and that’s it for that metaphor). Sarkhosh had a son whose name escapes me, something Sarkhosh, who eventually moved to Australia where he published a small book of poetry. So I looked that up and discovered that while the library had it, it didn’t exist. That is, the call number which had been assigned to it did not jive with what was actually on the shelf. So I looked where it should have been and there it was. But now I was curious; why did the record in the computer have the wrong call number? Checking further, it seems that, according to the catalog, there was a whole slew of books which had non-existent call numbers. When the computer fails, we turn to the aging card catalogs out in the hall. There they were, just as in the computer catalog, but each card had a red check mark on it.

What could it mean!?!?!

Well, I don’t know. That’s about the time my curiosity lagged and my actual job intruded. Still, I’ll get back to figuring it out eventually. We can’t let lost books linger in some literary limbo. So tune in next time for the thrilling conclusion, when we hear Matt exclaim…

“Oh, there they are.”

That old edition of Sarkhosh’s divan actually provides a much more detailed description of his early life. It’s unusual for an older edition to be more informative and reflects badly on the editor of the modern version. Usually when compiling a new edition, you want to pack it chock full of detail in order to justify publishing something which is already on the shelves. So you go back to the earlier editions, the biographies, the what have you and you compile the ne plus ultra of biographical introductions. Not our man. “Brevity…etc.” was his motto.

This earlier fellow, though, actually knew Sarkhosh and fills in the gaps (actually, considering he wrote first, he paved the way. Then the later editor came along and dug some potholes). Sarkhosh, he tells us, was the third of four brothers. The eldest, Mirza Muhammad Ali,* was the one who studied under Mulla Hadi Sabzvari in Dezful. During a visit home to Tafresh, Muhammad decided to take the young Sarkhosh under his wing and the two traveled together to Tehran.

“I heard [Sarkhosh] say several times that “Hakim shaped me from raw materials and he was my father in spirit. He bequeathed me his forty years of learning and experience.”

In 1295 q. [1878], their father died at the age of 66 and Sarkhosh travelled back to Tafresh. It was at that time that he entered his uncle’s service at the ministerial office of Luristan and Arabistan (now Khuzistan. It’s in the south-west and borders Iraq – thus “Arab”istan). After 10 years there, he became homesick and headed back to Tehran via Dezful.  At the time of writing this introduction (1316/1899), the editor says, Sarkhosh had been working at the British Embassy for eight years. Let’s see, does that work out? 1295+10=1305+8=1313…yeah, close enough, given travel time.

The two hung out in Tehran and the editor says he was often present as Sarkhosh composed his poems, the best of which were ghazals.  He did not deal in panegyrics and “he only mounted the steed of speech to ride on the fields of love and emotion.” So it’s unlikely we’ll learn anything about his political leanings from his verse. In addition to this divan, he also composed a masnavi “The Ball and Mallet” (a poetic reference to polo – the bewildered lover is knocked hither and yon by the beloved/polo mallet. Other, better-known, poets have composed similar works), and another masnavi called “Shikaristan”.

I’m tired. I asked someone smarter than myself today if they had ever heard of this Sarkhosh guy and they said no, so I’m not the only one.

* Interesting thing about the name/title “Mirza”, which literally means “Prince”, from “Amirzadah”. During the Qajar period, if it was a literal title, “Prince Abbas”, it came after the name : Abbas Mirza. If it was just a sort of fancy “Mister”, it came before, as in Mirza Muhammad Ali. So you could tell in an instant if you were in the presence of royalty. Under earlier rulers – Timurids and Safavids, etc. – the literal title could come before or after. Or so says Mr. Mo’in, anyway (see “mirza” in Mo’in’s Farhang-i Farsi).