The Leeds Review - Issue #1
The birds,
in beholding the wind,
have soared far away;
and the buds, they
in beholding clear waters;
the Earth remains unclothed,
a garden full of illusion
and the memory of Your graciousness,
more bounteous than the Sun.
The Persian poetic tradition has thrived uninterrupted for over a millennium, permeating the culture more than any other artistic facet. Its prominence could be argued to surpass that of poetry in any other culture, with - in Iran today - even even the most uneducated of rustics knowing the celebrated cantos of Hâfez, Sa'dî and Rûmî by rote.
This short piece of free-verse by the contemporary Mahmood Azâd, although formulaically contrasting with classical Persian poetry (which, since the tradition's outset, has conformed to a single set of forms and one metrical system), still bears a marked degree of similitude to ancestral works in its content. Its overt mystical overtone and depiction of a harrowing separation from the Divine are motifs that have resonated since the eleventh century, when Islamic mystics (Sufîs) found that they could more easily "express the ineffable" in poetry than in prose.
As ever with translation, there were rhetorical figures in the original which were impossible to recreate in English. The word for graciousness, mehr, for example, also means "the Sun;" an ambiguity which foreshadows the juxtaposition in the closing line. Overall, however, I feel that this translation has adequately captured the essence of the Persian.
It may be of interest that this poem has featured in two works of classical Persian music (wherein poetry is floridly chanted alongside the instrumentation, often in counterpoint) by Hossein Alizâdeh, namely, "Endless Vision" and "Birds". It was, in fact, upon reading an inaccurate translation of the poem that was included in the liner notes of the latter that I decided to attempt it myself.
Khodayar Shahriyarmolki Info