The beloved who is near and hidden

It’s been far too long since I translated any Persian, so here’s a poem by the master of masters, Mawlana Rumi, in the simple but beautiful rajaz muthamman meter:

ay bā man-o penhān cho del, az del salām-at mīkonam.

ای با من و پنهان چو دل از دل سلامت می کنم
تو کعبه‌ای هر جا روم قصد مقامت می کنم

Hey you, who’re with me and are yet hidden, like my heart—
my heartfelt greetings to you!
You’re the Ka‘bah: wherever I go, I head straight for your place.

هر جا که هستی حاضری از دور در ما ناظری
شب خانه روشن می شود چون یاد نامت می کنم

Wherever you are, you’re present, as the supervisor within us from afar;
The bed-chamber is flooded with light when I remember your name.

گه همچو باز آشنا بر دست تو پر می زنم
گه چون کبوتر پرزنان آهنگ بامت می کنم

Sometimes I briefly alight, like a friendly falcon, upon your arm;
Sometimes I head for your roof, like a pigeon fluttering its wings.

گر غایبی هر دم چرا آسیب بر دل می‌زنی
ور حاضری پس من چرا در سینه دامت می کنم

If you’re absent at every moment, then why do you injure my heart?
And if you’re present, then why do I try to ensnare you in my bosom?

دوری به تن لیک از دلم اندر دل تو روزنیست
زان روزن دزدیده من چون مه پیامت می کنم

You’re far from me physically, but there’s a window from my heart onto yours;
From that stolen window, I send you a message, like the moon.

ای آفتاب از دور تو بر ما فرستی نور تو
ای جان هر مهجور تو جان را غلامت می کنم

O sun, from afar do you shine your light upon me;
O you, who are life to all abandoned by you, I serve you as a slave.

من آینه دل را ز تو این جا صقالی می دهم
من گوش خود را دفتر لطف کلامت می کنم

I give to the mirror of my heart your lustre;
I make my ears a record for your delicate words!

در گوش تو در هوش تو و اندر دل پرجوش تو
این‌ها چه باشد تو منی وین وصف عامت می کنم

In your ear, in your mind, in your exuberant heart
Whatever may be, you’re mine—
thus do I generally describe you.

A dialogue between Man and God

This is another one of the songs from the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack of the movie Bab'Aziz, interleaving verses in Bengali (from a Baul song, according to a friend) and verses in Persian by Muhammad Iqbal. I don’t know any Bengali, but I can translate the Persian here. It’s part of his Payām-i Mashriq, a collection of Persian poems that is among the last works composed by South Asians in Persian that achieved renown in Iran and Afghanistan.




The original actually begins with three verses in the voice of God, after which follow the three verses that are sung in the video by Salar Aghili, in the voice of Man.

خدا:

جهان را ز یک آب و گل آفریدم

تو ایران و تاتار و زنگ آفریدی

من از خاک پولاد ناب آفریدم

تو شمشیر و تیر و تفنگ آفریدی

تبر آفریدی نهال چمن را

قفس ساختی طائر نغمه‌زن را

"Grieve not!"

This is a truly wonderful ghazal by that master of the Persian language, the Lisān al-Ghayb, the Tongue of the Unseen, Hafez of Shiraz. I recently read two different translations of it into English, one of them a beautiful (albeit secularized) version by Haleh Pourafzal and Roger Montgomery (p. 54 of their book Haféz: Teachings of the Philosopher of Love), and another, much more literal, much more archaic, version by Wilberforce Clarke (pp. 499–500 of The Divan-i Hafiz). The two translations are hugely different in style, and there are a few points where they vary in semantics as well. I thought I'd give it a shot and produce my own version. It's heavily inspired by Pourafzal and Montgomery, but sticks a little closer to the literal sense of the poem (at least as far as I can understand Hafez!).

Before that though, some of the verses of this ghazal in the inimitable voice of Mohammad-Reza Shajarian:

"Three Butterflies"

What can I say about ‘Aṭṭār? Would that the well of my words were deep enough!

A truly marvelous poem, so simple as to be recited by a child, so weighty in meaning as to drown an intelligent adult, and yet so beautifully winged as to carry the listener aloft into a world of infinite meaning and experience that is at the same time not separate from our own mundane. Beautifully sung by Salar Aghili.

The words in Persian are (if you didn't want to read the beautiful nastaliq font in the video):

"If I ever get to see you"

Táhirih Qurrat ul-`Ayn (طاهره قرة العین) is one of the most famous poets of early modern Iran. A practitioner of the Bahá'í faith, she was criticized and persecuted on accounts of her bravery and audacity, and was eventually secretly executed. Celebrated as a martyr for the Bábí movement and for women's rights, she is remembered to this day for her actions and for her poetry. One of her most famous poems, گر به تو افتدم نظر, sometimes referred to as "Chehreh beh Chehreh" in English transliteration, has been set to music and sung by a number of great musicians, including the incomparable Shajarian.

Here is a pre-revolution recording of Shajarian with Mohammad-Reza Lotfi performing the song at the Hafeziyeh, at the Jashn-e Honar-e Shiraz.

"The Rose-garden of Secrets"

The first two verses of the Gulshan-i Rāz of Maḥmūd Shabistarī are among the most exquisite verses I have ever read in my whole life.

بنام آنکه جان را فکرت آموخت

چراغ دل بنور جان بر افروخت

ز فضلش هر دو عالم گشت روشن

ز فضلش خاک آدم گشت گلشن

There is no way I can capture their power and compactness in English, but I am driven (like a moth to the flame?) to try to translate them:

In the Name of Him, who taught the soul to think,

Who kindled the lamp of the heart with the light of the soul.

From His excellence, the Two Worlds are illuminated;

From His excellence, Adam's dust becomes a rose-garden.

How can I capture the majesty and the beauty of such lines?

The meter(s) of the rubā`ī

Working through the super-long, complex names of the Persian meters (بحور) that make up the patterns of the rubā`ī (رباعی) has inspired me to try to take a crack at figuring out what the different adjectives modifying the general pattern can mean. (Yes, I'm sure this information can be easily obtained somewhere, but this is so much more fun! Besides, I have actual work to do right now which I'm assiduously avoiding.)

Looking at Prof. Frances Pritchett's handbook of Urdu prosody, it is clear that the basic structure of the meter of the رباعی is fairly simple.

— — [—] — {— —} — — [—] —

Here:

a) — represents a long metric unit;

b) [—] represents either — (long) or x x (two short units); and

c) {— —} represents one of three combinations: — —, — x x, or x — x.

But essentially, the meter of the quatrain is always constrained to precisely 20 morae (assuming that — corresponds to two morae and x to one).

Now under the traditional Perso-Arabic prosodic system (فنِّ عروض), each variant is named differently, according to the particular manner in which it is broken down. The general pattern is considered to be a variant of hazaj muthamman sālim (هزج مثمّن سالم), which has the form

x — — — / x — — — / x — — — / x — — —

The رباعی meters all thus have to have four different feet, and so my guess is that each variant will thus have up to four adjectives stacked up after it, one for each foot that is transformed from the hazaj sālim x — — — pattern. (This guess accords with the list of twelve named رباعی meters in Prof. Pritchett's handbook.)

What about those cases when there are fewer than four adjectives? It makes sense to suppose that an unmodified foot would have to follow the hazaj sālim x — — — pattern. Unless our basic رباعی pattern forces us to choose something different, of course. [Notice my assumption here: the رباعی's metric pattern is independent of the description using the particular terminology of Perso-Arabic عروض.]

With these preliminary ideas in mind, let's scan through (no pun intended) the list of named رباعی meters in Prof. Pritchett's handbook and see what we find.

1) Right away, there are two, and only two, patterns for the first foot, namely — — x and — — —. It is fairly obvious that these two patterns are named akhrab (اخرب) and akhram (اخرم), respectively.

2) It is also clear that there are two, and only patterns for the last foot, namely x — and simply —. We can again be fairly confident that these patterns are, respectively, majbūb (مجبوب) and abtar (ابتر). Meters #8 and #10 should be proof enough.

Knowing just these four feet is enough to reveal some of the implications of the constraints imposed on us by the underlying رباعی pattern:

a) any foot that follows — — x (اخرب) has to begin with x —

b) any foot succeeding — — — (اخرم) has to begin with a —

c) any foot preceding — (ابتر) has to end in —

d) any foot preceding x — (مجبوب) has to end in — x

And sure enough, every single meter listed here obeys these constraints.

3) Looking at meter #2, we have three adjectives describing three variants of the hazaj sālim foot, two of which have already been identified earlier. Thus, by elimination, x — — x must be makfūf (مکفوف). This is verified by meter #1.

4) By a similar process of elimination with meter #3, we find that x — x — must be maqbūz (مقبوض). This is verified by meter #4.

And furthermore, the رباعی pattern tells us that

a) مقبوض can apply only to the second foot of the رباعی pattern;

b) مقبوض has to be preceded by a foot ending in x, which in the case of the first foot has to be اخرب — — x;

b) مقبوض has to be succeeded by a foot beginning x —.

5) The only remaining adjective is ashtar (اشتر), which must apply to the only remaining pattern, — x —.

Furthermore,

a) اشتر can apply only to the second foot of the رباعی pattern;

b) اشتر has to be preceded by a foot ending in —, which in the case of the first foot has to be اخرم — — —;

b) اشتر has to be succeeded by a foot beginning x.

We are done. We have named all the variants of the hazaj sālim foot that can appear in the رباعی meter. (Which we could also have done by looking up any half-good manual on عروض, but we will let that pass.) For the sake of easy reference, here they all are, sorted from x to —.

A) x — : مجبوب

B) x — x — : مقبوض

C) x — — x : مکفوف

D) x — — — : سالم

E) — : ابتر

F) — x — : اشتر

G) — — x : اخرب

H) — — — : اخرم

One last variant of the hazaj sālim foot, which does not crop up in the رباعی but which appears very frequently elsewhere, is

I) x — — : mahzūf, محذوف

We are now in a position to generate a meter from its name! Take هزج مثمن اخرب مکفوف ابتر for instance. Its first foot clearly has to be — — x and its last, —. The only options for the second and third feet are either مکفوف x — — x or سالم x — — —, because if they were anything else they would have been named. Clearly one of them has to be مکفوف because the رباعی pattern prevents there being two successive سالم x — — — feet. But the third cannot be مکفوف because the fourth foot ابتر needs to be preceded by a foot ending in — if the رباعی pattern is to hold. Thus the third foot has to be سالم and hence the second foot has to be مکفوف, which fits perfectly in that location. And so we have

— — x / x — — x / x — — — / —

which matches the handbook!

One final test. One of the most awesome meters in Persian poetry is the one in which Nezāmī wrote Laylī-o Majnūn: هزج مسدّس اخرب مقبوض محذوف . What does that come to? Well, for starters, مسدس means only three feet per hemistich, unlike the رباعی; and since we have three adjectives, we're set. In sequence, we get

— — x / x — x — / x — —,

which corresponds perfectly with the scansion of the first line:

شرط است که وقت برگریزان / خونابه شود زبرگریزان

Wondrous, indeed, is the world of prosody!

O Khayyām!

I just discovered this pretty cool site called Exploring Khayyam that has translations and originals for the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, and I'm very excited! One for today:

آن قصر که بهرام درو جام گرفت / روبه بچه کرد و شیر آرام گرفت

بهرام که گور می‌گرفتی دائم / امروز نگر که گور بهرام گرفت

Time is not kind to hubris. Or to most other things, really.

<UPDATE>

This verse being a robā`ī, every hemistich has to be a variant of the same general metrical pattern—in this case, hazaj muthamman akhrab (هزج مثمّن اخرب). The meters for the individual hemistichs are (according to Prof. Frances Pritchett's wonderful meter handbook):

1) hazaj muthamman akhrab makfūf majbūb

2) hazaj muthamman akhrab maqbūz makfūf majbūb

3) hazaj muthamman akhrab maqbūz abtar

4) hazaj muthamman akhrab maqbūz makfūf majbūb

Or in terms of the actual feet (where — is long and x is short):

— — x / x — — x / x — — x / x —

— — x / x — x — / x — — x / x —

— — x / x — x — / x — — — / —

— — x / x — x — / x — — x / x —

The third hemistich is the only one in which the final x x — pattern is replaced by the — — pattern.

</UPDATE>

Verses to enjoy

One from Sa`dī's گلستان :

بنی آدم اعضای یک پیکر اند \ که در آفرینش ز یک گوهر اند

چو عضوی به درد آورد روزگار \ دگر عضوها را نماند قرار

تو کز محنت دیگران بی‌غمی \ نشاید که نامت نهند آدمی

Loosely translated:

"The children of Man are limbs of one body, for in creation they are of one essence /

When life brings pain to one limb, the other limbs cannot maintain their stability /

You, who feel no sorrow from others' sufferings, surely don't deserve the name 'man'."

And on the same theme in Sanskrit:

ayam bandhuḥ paro vêti gaṇanā laghu-cetasām

puṃsām udāra-cittānāṃ vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam

"The small-minded think, 'This one's a kinsman, that one's an outsider' /

For the noble-minded, the world itself is family."

While the broad sentiment expressed in these two verses is the same, there is an important difference: for Sa`dī, it simply is true as a matter of fact that all human beings share a common essence, and someone who lacks compassion is simply not a human being—s/he lacks humanity. In the Sanskrit verse, on the other hand, the conventional manner of dividing up the world into "ours" and "others" is described merely as "small-minded". (Of course, the idea that humans are limbs of one body is also present in Vedic literature in the famous Puruṣa Sūkta, but that image is commonly used to organize humans into a social or moral hierarchy, depending on your reading.)

A beautiful verse from Hafez

I love Hafez, I really do. (In the interests of scholarly scrupulousness, this is taken from Thackston's grammar.)

گر چه منزل بس خترناک‌ است و مقصد ناپدید

هیچ راهی نیست کورا نیست پایان غم مخور

On spellings, part two

Having looked at one particular Hindi example last time, it may be helpful to begin from a bird's eye view this time by looking at what spelling does in general. Before proceeding any further, let me attest to my complete ignorance of the various East Asian / CJK writing systems; I have no idea how much of what I'm going to try to sketch out here applies to those systems. (Needless to say, cuneiform, hieroglyphs, Mayan glyphs, Germanic runes, and a whole host of other writing systems also fall into the category of writing-system-of-which-I'm-woefully-ignorant, but they're different from CJK in that they fall into the subcategory of writing-system-of-which-I'm-woefully-ignorant-and-of-which-any-unfortunate-reader-of-this-blog-is-also-likely-to-be-ignorant while the CJK systems belong to the writing-system-of-which-I'm-woefully-ignorant-but-with-which-some-particular-unfortunate-reader-of-this-blog-may-perchance-be-familiar subcategory.)

Okay, with that giant caveat out of the way, let's begin. A system of writing for a language is a way of committing linguistic elements to a material less ethereal than air—whether this be sand or stone is immaterial. It should be recognized off the bat that the basic elements of the writing system, the "graphemes", so to speak, need not necessarily exist in injective correspondence with any of the language's basic units, whether they be morphemes or phonemes or tonemes or whatever. (The best example of this is the English alphabet: aside from the letters 'a', 'o', and 'i', which correspond to one-letter words, no letter necessarily or uniquely represents a basic phonetic or grammatical element of the English language. I could be overlooking something big here, so please correct me.) The point of noting this is to acknowledge that the relation between the writing system and the language is fundamentally conventional: the written entity is but a signifier that signifies a particular linguistic entity, just as that linguistic entity is itself a signifier for something else. 

At this point I've definitely stepped into a deep and messy dungheap that the philosophy of language attempts to analyze, and I'm not even going to pretend to extricate myself or justify some philosophical position over another. All I'm trying to say here, and I think this is fairly uncontroversial in and of itself, is that the relationship between a writing system and a language is a learned one, and hence this relationship can change over time as the relations among the many signifiers and signifieds evolves over time. Sometimes this can involve a radical shift that forces people to completely relearn these conventions, as happens when an existing writing system is pressed into use for a new language, or when the same language comes to be written in a new writing system. 

What has been said up to this point holds true, I think, for all writing systems, even the CJK systems that I'm trying to avoid. However, I think the concept of spelling makes sense only within a broadly alphabetic system (I'm including syllabaries, abjads, and abugidas into this one, and yes, I realize hiragana and katakana fall into this bucket), although I hypothesize that an analogous concept must exist within the CJK system as well. The reason is this: for the entire graphical system of signs to work as a method of communication, it should be possible for individuals to recognize graphical signifiers created by others. I'm using 'recognize' in two different, possibly chronologically successive, ways here: first, they need to be able to 'recognize' the graphical signifier as a signifier in general, that is as a visual artifact expressly designed to communicate a linguistic idea; second, they need to be able to 'recognize' the particular signified being referred to by the signifier. This may seem absurdly complex, but it should be clear that we need both steps.

Take a simple substitution cipher of the form that I used in order to pass on secret messages to friends when we were in the fifth grade. We treated the English alphabet as the addition group Z / 26 (and no, I had no fricking clue what that meant when I was in the sixth grade; I'm merely using unambiguous terminology that I picked up in college), and applied a simple translation of +1 or -2 or whatever took our fancy. This meant we could pass messages around that looked like "mfu't ejtdvtt ipx up ublf pwfs uif xpsme upebz bu mvodi." To the uninitiated, this may have looked like a garbled assortment of letters spelled out by a maniacal dyslexic monkey hammering away at a typewriter, but we cool kids (or nerds, as we were unfairly maligned) recognized these strings as intelligible messages and responded enthusiastically to them. Of course, once the jocks got wind of what was happening, they realized we were using codes of some sort; at this point they had attained enlightenment of the first order. However, as long as they didn't know precisely what the transformation was, the higher enlightenment eluded their grasp.

So now it should be clear what I'm driving at. Spelling is the arrangement of graphical units in particular sequences agreed upon by convention, and good spelling results in the production of well-formed graphical signs that unambiguously signify linguistic entities as agreed upon by convention. This definition of good spelling is vague, but should pass empirical tests. For instance, take one of the many bugbears of internet comments: the word "definately". Now this is indeed a well-formed graphical sign, for it's unlikely that someone will pass over it as a meaningless jumble of letters; and it certainly unambiguously refers to a linguistic concept of certainty. It falls short of achieving the status of "good spelling", however, as it fails to be recognized as one by convention. Take a different common error, this time the infuriating substitution of "you're" by "your", and vice versa. Now, this may be better described as a grammatical mistake; however there are certainly occasions when even individuals who are aware of the major grammatical distinction between the two words unintentionally substitute them, perhaps while typing in a rush. In such a situation, this substitution may be better understood as a spelling error, for while it passes the first and third requirements, it fails the unambiguity requirement because it unintentionally refers to a different concept while being intended for another. (I will confess that I haven't fully fleshed out the lack of ambiguity idea in my head, for there are situations where a language permits homographs and this definition in its current form would classify them as misspellings. Perhaps we ought to allow some room for intention here, or perhaps we should allow convention to override the lack of ambiguity requirement. In either case, I don't think this forms an insurmountable obstacle to the bigger picture of spelling that I'm trying to create.)

Great, now we have an idea of what good spelling is. But the next question is, how does good spelling arise? More precisely, what forces influence the conventions that define good spelling? Since it's true (or so we suppose) that the relationship between the graphical signifier and the linguistic signified is arbitrary, it is possible in theory to pick totally arbitrary symbols for every single possible signifier, and then to memorize the relation between signifier and signified. This is true to some extent of CJK ideograms (only as a partial and inaccurate oversimplification of the whole picture, I know, I know), and perhaps to a somewhat greater extent of Egyptian hieroglyphs. But unless you want to memorize a very large number of arbitrary symbols that lack even the structure and composition of CJK ideograms, this is not a great system. The alternative is to capture some approximation of the pronunciation of a linguistic entity, and not its semantic field. After all, if the graphical signifier reproduces the pronunciation of the linguistic entity, then any linguistic entity can be adequately represented in the writing system in a manner acceptable to all speakers / readers, right?

And with that, we're back to where we left off with the previous post. A purely pronunciation-based spelling is highly limited by spatial, ethnic, class, and temporal variations in pronunciation, and is also likely to conceal morphological structures within the language. Case in point: modern Turkish spelling. Because Turkish is governed by vowel harmony, its grammatical suffixes occur in a variety of "shapes" that are governed by the phonetic environments they occur in. The most complex example I'm aware of is the enclitic -dir, which functions as the third person copula. This copula takes no less than eight different shapes: voicing or devoicing the initial 'd', and then choosing among four vowel harmonizing variations of 'i'. Under modern Turkish spelling rules, there are thus eight different ways of writing this same suffix—even though the choice of variant is governed by two incredibly simple and entirely predictable phonological rules. Thus, it is easy for the learner to read Turkish, but to recognize that -tür and -dir are in fact the same grammatical suffix is slightly trickier. I wonder if it would not be more logical, in some sense, to use the same spelling for the suffix everywhere when it is a truth universally acknowledged (among native Turkish speakers anyway) that the pronunciation of this suffix must change in a certain entirely regular way.

Thus, even within one single dialect of a language arbitrarily chosen as the standard of pronunciation and good spelling, a strict pronunciation-based spelling pattern can obscure existing, meaningful morphological patterns within the language. And as the pronunciation of that dialect evolves over time, its readers face two difficult choices: either to change spellings over time, and thus to violate the initial conventions of good speech; or to retain spellings according to the older pronunciation, thus preserving valuable morphological and etymological information, but drifting away from contemporary pronunciation. Urdu is a prime example of this. Its Perso-Arabic script is gorgeous to look at, and far more suited to elegant calligraphy than staid Devanagari. Yet learning to read the language using the Perso-Arabic abjad (particularly in nasta`līq) is a nightmare, thanks to the script's inability to deal with the complex vowels and consonant clusters strewn throughout Hindustani / Urdu (the line between these two is indiscernible at times, and a bleeding gash at others). Devanagari, unsuited as it is to Hindustani, comes out far ahead in this race. As far as pronunciation goes, the script is a terrible choice. But when it comes to words of Persian or, even better, Arabic origin, the Perso-Arabic script beats Devanagari hollow. Possessing all the consonantal symbols needed to represent these words, the Perso-Arabic script faithfully reproduces the exact shape of the word as it was in the original, preserving a vast amount of information on the Semitic roots and stems that is utterly lost in modern (and probably medieval too) pronunciation, and that is simply unrepresentable in Devanagari in any meaningful way. Try writing فعل مضارع in Devanagari :D

This brings to mind a weird idea I held for the longest time as a kid. A certain word pronounced tĕh-kī-kāt in India and spelled tah kī kāt or tahkīkāt is the normal word used to refer to investigations, usually carried out by the police. I always thought of it as three different words that meant "the kāt of a tĕh", whatever those two words meant separately (since I could never find them in even the best dictionaries). I was utterly shocked, totally blown away, when I realized, perhaps seven or eight years later, that the word was in fact the Arabic word تحقيقات which had undergone some, uh, alterations in pronunciation in India. On the one hand the Devanagari script did a good job of representing the actual pronunciation of the word as it normally is in India (although there are diacritics used in Devanagari that can in theory represent the 'q' sound); on the other hand it wasn't merely useless but actually actively retarded my efforts to understand the word's meaning.

I've expended over three thousand words on this topic so far, but I'm still nowhere near proposing a flawless substitute to our existing problems of spelling when using alphabetic systems. The mathematician in me is willing to accept an infinite stream of arbitrary graphical symbols as representations of actual semantic content, thus allowing us to actually bypass linguistic structure (although I can already hear poststructuralists baying for my blood); the Sanskritist in me wants to forget the idea that language in all its fluidity can ever be graven in stone, and wants to revert to chains of oral transmission of knowledge. In some ways, I think Sanskrit does get the best deal of them all: a religious faith in the value of accurate recitation of the scriptures combined with exacting morpho-phonological rules (aka sandhi, the bane of all first year Sanskritists) that together do a great job of defining both spelling and pronunciation. On the other hand, this does mean you have to spend twelve years in a forest āśrama studying the language before you can use it for anything. Sigh. There really is no such thing as a free lunch.