These two letters highlight the dominant challenge of our times. At the end of his letter, W.I.T. states the obvious:
“…now Muslim terrorism has adopted the Internet to inspire young men to violent Jihad and women to suicide bombings, so electronic society is now part of the Ummah. In this new planetary culture of East and West, we urgently need a new transformation of the Abrahamic religions and not new versions of Holy Wars, Crusades, and Inquisitions.â€
By referencing the mostly hidden Sufi influence on the historical European Renaissance he suggests that Sufis could again have a critical transformational role:
“…I think the Sufis will need to do it again and serve to create a planetary Renaissance by transforming the Islamist fundamentalist threat into a positive cultural transformation.â€
This would be quite a feat of alchemy. Unfortunately, he supplies no suggestion of precisely how the Islamist fundamentalist threat could be so transformed by the Sufis or anyone else for that matter.
In Pir Zia’s response, in the next to last paragraph, there are perhaps the most dramatic and most important words from him so far. I have put the last sentence in bold type for emphasis:
“…if esoteric undercurrents could flow amidst the ideological fervor on both sides of the Crusades, they can flow again amidst Global Jihad and the War on Terror. To tap that flow is Seven Pillars’ reason for being.â€
This raises many questions. Here are just a few:
Pir Zia suggests that there is a flow currently running that can be tapped rather than a flow that must be initiated. Are there now esoteric undercurrents flowing amidst Global Jihad and the War on Terror? If so are these undercurrents influencing those on the front lines, in the street, on the ground, on all sides of the conflicts? In the global marketplace of ideas, images, stories and characters, are there esoteric voices reaching the young men and women most at risk in the Islamic world and elsewhere? Or is the esoteric dialogue mostly confined to academics and scholars, to the well-educated and well-off?
I live in Florida and my youngest son has just entered the University of Florida in Gainesville – the town where a small church with a few dozen members and a controversial pastor has ignited a global firestorm with the mere suggestion of a book burning. This small ripple in the global media ocean will pass and its effects are likely to be short-lived whether or not the scheduled Qur’an burning actually occurs.
Of much greater concern are the enduring institutions promoting hatred, violence, intolerance, misinformation and willful ignorance. Such well-funded institutions encounter little in the way of competing voices. It is against such destructive forces that those as yet weak undercurrents of enlightened interdependence must rise and strengthen into a powerful life-giving stream.
As the 100th anniversary approaches of Hazrat Inayat Khan’s courageous decision to leave India for the West on the 13th of September 1910 – without which we would not be having this conversation and neither the Sufi Order of the West, Seven Pillars House of Wisdom, the Abode of the Message, nor Omega Institute would exist – I often wonder ‘what would Murshid do?’, and even beyond that, ‘who would Murshid be today, in our world?’.
It is a question especially worth asking in regards to Global Jihad, the War on Terror, the electronic planetary culture, and our responsibilities as his spiritual descendents.
— Steven Bell on September 8, 2010
The influence of Sufi thought on Western thinking and culture is well documented in Idries Shah’s “The Sufis” Octagon Press, including references to Raymond Llul.
— David Aldridge on September 22, 2010
Hello friends,
this issue has much space for wide discussion.
All I want to say here briefly is, that this “translation” of yours did not hit the mark at all. Already the given title “Sestina” is not the title. A Sestina is a Sextain, a special kind of poetry, invented by Arnaut. This poem here was the first Sestina ever. Its original title is ‘Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra’, the usual english title is “The Song of Nail and Uncle”.
More important than questions of title is, that the content of the poem, the intention of Arnaut is not grasped by your “translation”.
By the way, a translation is from one language into another. I guess that you already had a model of english translation, and you have done a new interpretation of this. Or have you studied the poem in its original occitanic language, or even french language and then translated from this? If you had, I guess you would have come to different conclusions.
Arnaut is not talking about an “inner chamber” or “making love in the heart”. He ist talking about a real chamber of his Lady, where he - real- wishes to enter. He wishes certainly for a real sexual relation, but - and that is new at this time - he wishes for that along with a certain refinement, a new quality of elaborated love.
The key words of the poem are: his Lady is giving a soul to his rod, thats it, not less, not more.
Your arguments lead to the assumption of a completely asexual, pure and chaste relation between troubadour and his Lady. This is far from mediaeval reality and mediaeval society of nobles.
We say: “the personal wish is the father of the interpretation”, you are talking about your own preferences of idealisation, but you do not grasp neither psyche nor intention of Daniel Arnaut.
It is true that the Sufis have given some impact to give birth to civilised love at that time. But more important were the movements and developements within society itself, within the different classes of society, the birth of bourgoisie and so on.
Not enough space here, nor time. I will be happy to convey to you my own translation of the poem from okzitanic / french language into german language. But certainly I will have to translate now the german text into english, what I have not done yet.
Until then,
Towards The One,
Assad from Germany
— Assad on October 7, 2010
Dear friends,
here now comes the correct english translation of the poem of Arnaut. And some comment added. Thank you for publishing.
Lo ferm voler qu’e-l cor m’intra
or
Song of Uncle and Nail
by Daniel Arnaut
The firm wish, that my heart enters
is much stronger than vile gossip of slanderers
with cursed souls
I don’t dare to use violence against them
At least I will, secretly
and unrecognized,
enjoy pleasure in the garden
or in the room.
When I remember this chamber
where no man enters,
as I know from sad experience,
(though those men rank higher than myself)
I am all trembling
like a child facing punishment
such is my fear not being close to her soul.
Were I only close her with body and not with soul,
and did she permit to hide like this in her chamber,
this would sadden my heart more
than to receive strokes
if I, as her servant, had no acces to
her soul´s dwelling place:
I will be close to her
like flesh is to bones
and I will not listen to reproaches
from friends and family.
Other women with authority I do love less
than her, by my soul!
As a finger is connected to the hand
I wish to be close to my Lady in her chamber
if it her pleases:
The power of this love, filling all my heart
enables me to do things, according to her wishes,
which a strong man with a frivolous rod cannot do.
Since from Adam flourished the human race
and the withered rod got sappy,
a great love like this, filling my heart,
was never experienced by any body or soul.
Whether I am out in in the fields or in a chamber,
my heart does not remove of hair´s breadth from her.
So my heart clings to her
like the bark to the wood.
For me this lady represents
the joy of power, splendour and intimacy,
and I don’t love as much anybody else close to me;
my soul will have double joy in paradise
if anyone with this big love there enters.
Arnaut devotes this
Song of Uncle and Nail
to her, who is giving his rod a soul,
to his Great Desire,
who enters the chamber with the prize.
Translation from occitanic and french into german language and from this into english:
Assad Splieth
10.10.2010
The Sestina or Sextain (invented by Arnaut) is a very complicated way of composing a very special kind of poetry. The poet is forced to use many plays on words to succeed in putting words into rhyme properly. Therefore, if the translator takes such words literal (like uncle and nail, which in french are oncle and ongle, in occitanic oncle and ongla) or if he is not familiar with the symbolic meanig of certain words ( like uncle, sister of my uncle, tower, palace, ) used by the troubadour, he is lost. And the result of such translation is accordingly.
The poem tells about the inner strife of the troubadour. The trobadours were descendants from nobles, but being the 3rd , 4th , or 5th sons, their inheritence was as poor as their rank within the society of nobles. Like this penniless, they could not reach up to women in power, they could not get them (the very first time ever male nobles couldnt get any women they wanted).
We do not glorify beings or objects within our reach (there is not one case of a troubadour glorifiying his own wife). The rank of the noble troubadour was as poor as were his material means.
The main objectiv of a troubadour was, by glorifying women in power to get riches from them, they were especially interested in getting a fee (feudal tenure). This worked in rare cases with renowned troubadours (Walther von der Vogelweide f.ex.). All the others had to be content with more or less valuable gifts from those ladies or at least, to get sometimes permission, if the lady was pleased (by the song and her glorification) to enter her chamber secretly.
Like this, yes, they could reach their lady and no, this was humiliating at the same time. They somehow felt happy and yet felt bad about it. They were just toys and they knew. Therefore the troubadours longed for an inner bond from soul to soul, like to feel, at least inside, to be on the same eyelevel as their ladies, but in fact they weren´t.
This inner conflict of the troubadour is very well mirrored and pictured by the above stanza of Arnaut.
The impact of the Sufis was, that some of their songs and stories were imported by the crusaders. So f. ex. the issue of the holy quest was picked up
Like this the well known legend around Perceval and the quest for the holy grail reached us. This story originates from Persia, reached the west by the crusaders and was picked up by the troubadour Wolfram von Eschenbach in his famous work: Parzival.
We understand the crucial points of different psychic habitus by comparing the glorification of his contemporary Ibn Arabi directed towards Nizam `ayn al-shams wa´l bahÄ` (a 14 – year old girl) with the glorification of Arnaut.
Ibn Arabi glorifies her qualities, her stunning beauty, outstanding knowledge, her elaborated manners and modesty, and so on. He understands and contemplates the divine shining through her. This burning love of him is certainly not consuming, is chaste and pure. Ibn Arabi understands himself as the divine eye contemplating himself through the manifestation of divine qualities shining through Nizam.
The stanza of Arnaut gives us no impression of the qualities of his lady. We learn nothing about her. In fact, she is just an exchangeable image. His love is a projection of his feelings of inferiority towards an unattainable woman of higher rank. He experiences his love being a burning and passionate inward desire, yet there is no contemplation of and connection to the divinity. He wants to consume her and to bind her by his loving glorification at the same time. His love is certainly not unselfish, yet it is a strong, rather complex emotion on a personal level based on imaginal representations, and most of all: its apparition is completely new to this late mediaeval society of nobles.
The love of Ibn Arabi is much more advanced, evolved and on a much higher level than the love of Arnaut.
The sense and intention of an Ibn Arabi is not grasped by Arnaut (nor by any other troubadour) , but that doesn´t mean that such an approach did not exist at this time: we find similarities in the Middle Ages by studying religious poetry and prose of the time, like f.ex. from Mechthild von Magdeburg, Mechthild von Hackeborn, Hildegard von Bingen, Gertrud von Helfta (Gertrud the great), all of them being more or less contemporarys. All of them being women and nuns (not a troubadour), they were equipped with finer sense.
“Between Adhri´at and Busra I saw a girl
of fourteen rising like the full moon
exalted in majesty above Time,
transcending it in pride and glory…..
You are a pyx of blended odors and perfumes
a meadow of spring herbs and flowers:
beauty in you reached its utmost limit –
another like you is impossible.
….
Long have I longed for a tender girl
endowed with prose and poetry, eloquent in her pulpit ….â€
and “I allude enigmatically to the various kinds of mystical knowledge which are under the veil of Nizam, the maiden.â€
Ibn Arabi, from The Interpreter of Desires, quoted after P.L. Wilson, Scandal, Essays in Islamic Heresy, New York 1988
Assad
— Assad on October 11, 2010
Thank you for your fascinating comments! I translated from several versions, since I read Latin, Spanish, French, and German and was aware of the double meanings of the words in the original. Your literalism, however, fails to understand the poetic; you are a scholar, but not a poet, so you miss the fact that poetry speaks on many levels at once, and can be sexual and mystical at the same time. You seem to favor a kind of reductionism that appeals to professors. Erotic mysticism swept over the medieval world from India, through Persia, to the West, as you know. The rise of allegory and the rise of a special code for initiates is one feature of this new Algebraic Mentality. The Koranic scholar’s interpretation of Nizam was like the Christian priests glossing the very sexual prothalamion of the biblical Song of Songs and turning it into an allegory of the marriage of Christ and his Church. Your comments are fascinating and rich, but they also show a personality-level bias toward an economic interpretation of poetry. You sound more Marxist than mystical. “The veil of Nizam” has esoteric significance for practioners of meditation in which they move into the inner chamber of the heart, have union with the angel “under her veil” If you haven’t practiced these forms of esoteric yoga, you literally do not know what your are talking about. But, many thanks, anyway for your rich scholarly insights. insights.
— William Irwin Thompson on October 23, 2010
Postscript. You are obviously a good scholar, but not a good poet. Your translation is not a poem, nor even poetic.
1. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, which is here on my desk, says “Sestina” and credits Arnaut Daniel as the initiator of the form. You speak of a “correct” translation as if poetry were a chemical formula, and you do not seem to realize the intratextuality of the poetic tradition in which poets recreate a poem from one language to another. Compare Ezra Pounds translations of Guilhem de Peiteu with others; or compare Keneth Rexroth’s translations of Tang Dynasty poets with more scholarly and prosaic ones. Perhaps the worst ever translations of Hafez were by Gertrude Bell, who not only gave us her bad lines of poetry, but drew the lines in the sand of Iraq that have caused thousands to die.
What you identify as the meaning of the poem is merely the metaphoric vehicle for the esoteric and symbolic dimension of the poem, a dimension that only a practioner of techniques for entering the subtle realms would recognize. This is the problem of scholars who do not understand the esoteric dimensions of the material they translate. Bruno Snell the classicist did not understand that the thymos and psyche of Greek thought were borrowings from the ka and ba of Egyptian esoterism. Rundle Clark who wrote MYTH AND SYMBOL IN ANCIENT EGYPT did not understand the esoteric significance of the Osiris myth. Translators of the Old Testament into the Revised Standard Version did not understand the meaning of “For the eyes are the light of the body, and if thine eye be single, then is thy whole body filled with light,” so they dropped the reference to the single eye, thus removing an esoteric reference to the opening of the third eye.
Oh well, this argument between scholars and poets has been going on for a long time and will continue. See, for example, W. B. Yeats’s poem, “The Scholars” on pages 140-141 of his COLLECTED POEMS.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
all wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
William Irwin Thompson
— William Irwin Thompson on October 23, 2010
Dear William,
(sorry, I felt uncertain how to adress you before, since you did not sign your article above),
to label me a marxist and a scholar will not make your interpretation a translation. Your high-speed-labeling gives a good impression how you are jumping to conclusions from mere suppositions.
You quote the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics about “Sestina”, crediting Arnaut to be the initiator of this form of poetry. True, but this supports my words, not yours. You are giving this specific poem itself the title “Sestina” (see your own words above), which is wrong. Already from this I can tell that you are not familiar with the poem nor the context.
I am not willing to start quarelling with you nor do I wish to brag with quantities of knowledge. I will not repeat my arguments either. They are very clear, there is nothing to add. Every reader of this comments may judge himself / herself. I welcome any feed-back.
A translator of poetry, or maybe of a text of a mystic, is always invited to invest his sense of love, harmony and beauty into the text to translate, to its best. But not at the cost of the original text, not at the cost of the original sense, which leads to distortion. That is what you did. The poem you present above is the poem of William Thompson, it is no longer the poem of Arnaut Daniel.
I have read about your preference of performing “mind-jazz on ancient texts”. This seems to me a very personal and subjectiv approach, interesting from your specific point of view, but which cannot claim any objectiv and historical validity (this counts as well for your exaggeration that the Sufis, not the Italians, have brought the Renaissance to Europe). And I may add that I do not like jazz. To my senses jazz lacks homogeneity and harmony.
You are questioning my personal sense of poetry. Therefore I invite you, since you claim being able to read german, to visit our website
http://www.whistleblowingsufis.org and judge yourself.
There I present several german poems (at the subpage “Gedichte”) together with one in english language (the latter was my contribution to a poetry contest). You will find there as well my Curriculum Spirituale Sufi (in english language). There is clear information to be found about myself being situated among “scholars who do not understand the esoteric dimensions of the material they translate”.
Nice try, though.
sincerely,
Assad from Germany 03.11.2010
— Assad Splieth on November 3, 2010
My Dear Assad Splieth,
I have visited your website as you suggested, and, to look on the bright side and focus on what we have in common, I see that we share an initiation into Tantra Kriya Yoga and a familiarity with Route 66. I went to Pomona College where the college pub was located on Route 66.
In reading your poems, however I see our aesthetics do not share much in common, so we would need to spend many hours in a pub, debating poetics back and forth, which, given your interesting background, would no doubt be warm and pleasant, if sometimes heated.
I will simply repeat that in English poetry there is a long tradition that one poet recreates the poem from one language to another to highlight one reading over another. Even your great Goethe, in his West-oestlicher Divan, does not always exactly follow the Persian prosody of the ghazal. I am sure you know how controversial Robert Bly’s translations of Rilke were, or of Rumi, for that matter. There is no one, exact, and scientific translation of a poem. As I said before, Ezra Pound is another example.
So the tavern is closing and we have to go our separate ways. You don’t like my translation, and I don’t like yours. Fortunately for both of us, readers can make up their own minds and, perhaps, create their own translations.
Thank you for making the pages of SEVEN PILLARS such a lively place of discussion of such far-from-common topics.
William Irwin Thompson
p.s. I notice that in my Anthologie des Troubadours, it says Sextina but in both Babette Deutch’s Handbook of Poetry (see page 140) and the Princeton Encyclcopedia of Poetics , they say “Sestina.†It would seem, that the common spelling in American English is “sestina.â€
— William Irwin Thompson on November 3, 2010
Dear William,
well, this discussion means more to me than just the like or dislike of a certain poem or a certain style of translation. I try to approach the true Arnaut, as much as possible within my limits, to feel his inner conflicts, to grasp his sense. This sounds more difficult than it is: usually I recognize own conflicts reflected inside somebody else, maybe this was the reason I was attracted by the Troubadours in my early study-years. If we do not find ourselves mirrored (in some way) in the issues we investigate, how could we do a good research? That maybe the reason I always disliked math. It was always alien to me.
Nevertheless at least once I I agree with you that it is time now to close this specific thread between the two of us and to drink my next glass of beer on your health. May the hairs on your toes never thin out! This is a hobbit - blessing from the heart and maybe another example of our different aesthetics.
Lets turn towards new challenges: we are celebrating this year the Hejirat of Hazrat Inayat Khan 100 years ago. He is respected, loved and remembered by many, so its nice but basicly he does not need a special commemoration.
Therefore I want to mention here, that this year is the 700. urs of a great and outstanding mystic, almost forgotten, almost erased from the memory of history and time by the lasting efforts of the dark power of ecclesia in middle-ages:
Marguarite Porete was burned at the stake as a heretic the 1st june 1310 in Paris. I give you a short glimpse from her book and teaching, which fortunately survived the centuries (it was not before 1946 scholarship discovered her to be the author of this book) though burned in public as well:
O my Lover, what will Beguines say and religious types,
when they hear the excellence of your divine song?
Beguines say I err, priests, clerics, and Preachers,
Augustinians, Carmelites, and the Friars Minor,
because I wrote about the being of the one purified by love.
I do not make Reason safe for them, who makes them say this to me.
Desire, Will, and Fear surely take from them the understanding,
the out-flowing, and the union of the highest Light
of the ardor of divine love.
Truth declares to my heart
that I am loved by One alone,
and she says that it is without return
that He has given me His love.
This gift kills my thought
by the delight of His love,
which delight lifts me and transforms me throughout union
Into eternal joy of the being of divine Love.
(this is not my translation, I copied it from http://www2.kenyon.edu/projects/margin/porete8.htm)
In contrast to some churchy and holy nuns I mentioned above, always obedient towards church and their superiors, following the passion of christ in their visions, she was standing alone, on her own, challenging the authorities by teaching her message: a spirituality of freedom. She not only envisioned the passion of christ, no, she lived the Imitatio Christi consequent and real until the end, until her crucification.
Coming back to this issue on prophecy and time: if we distinguish eternal time from limited time, then from time to time, when dharma decays, a certain glorious archetype, a fravarti or celestial individuation from eternal time shines forth incarnating in limited time, personalized through some human being (every being has his or her fravarti, called as well sister-soul or sister-angel). Since our time proceeds cyclic, not linear, this happens again and again, when dharma decays. So I wonder, and the idea is faszinating me, if Christ is the fravarti of Jesus, he as well must be the fravarti of Marguarite Porete (some think Vishnu to be the fravarti of Murshid, or Murshid being an avatar of Vishnu).
I imagine the light descending from such a lightful fravarti (there is a hierarchy of fravartis measured by the intensity of light they are radiating) like falling seeds from a tree: most of the rays of light will dry up and vanish unrecognized by the public due to unfavorable surroundings. Only very few seeds will grow and live and maybe even the few will not be able to spread their message, maybe finally only one at a time.
Marguarite Porete lived the message of the Christ without compromise. She did not recant and by doing so, lost her life. She did not even answer to the inquisitors, saying (in her book) she would only justify herself facing God. She was a living Christ . And it does not surprise that a femal Christ at these dark times could walked the earth without being acknowledged or recognized.
We should honor this great being by remembering her and her teaching of spiritual freedom about love most high through fana´a leading to baqa´a. We should as well remember her to defeat the intention of the catholic church to erase her from the memory of humanity. We should remember her to appreciate and praise the fravarti Christ infusing her with his / her divine light, shining forth through her with all compassion and humility.
Some seeds hide very longtime in the soil unchanged and immovable to wait for favorable surroundings to finally grow and trigger off its inner programming. We should remember Marguarite Porete to guard and to nurse her seed, so her message, which is the message and prophecy of Christ revived through her, may flourish even after 700 years of her being killed and annihilated.
Toward The One,
Assad from Germany
— Assad on November 5, 2010
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