The Conference of the Birds (Penguin)

by Farid al-Din Attar

  Though Attar treats his material in an entirely different way from Sana’i, it is possible that a shorter poem of Sana’i suggested the device of the birds to him. In Sana’i’s Divan there is a poem in which the different cries of the birds are interpreted as the birds’ ways of calling on or praising God. A second source may have been Kalila and Dimna. This extraordinarily popular work, also called The fables of Bidpai, originated in India and was translated into many languages. The Persian texts of Kalila and Dimna which survive are relatively late prose versions, but Rudaki, who lived early in the tenth century and was one of the first poets to write in Persian, made a verse translation of the work, which Attar could have known. Significantly enough, Rudaki used the same couplet form as Attar was later to use for The Conference of the Birds; but a direct influence is impossible to prove, because all but a few fragments of Rudaki’s poem have been lost. In Kalila and Dimna animals talk and act as humans; the fables usually have a moral point to them, and their narratives are allegories of human characteristics and failings. This is precisely the method of Attar’s Conference of the Birds, and the two works also show a similar kind of folksy humour. Another work which probably influenced Attar when he came to write his poem is the short Arabic treatise The Bird by Avicenna. This is the first-person narrative of a bird (clearly representing the human soul) who is freed from a cage by other birds, and then flies off with his new companions on a journey to the ‘Great King’. The group flies over eight high mountain peaks before reaching the king’s court; there are a few moments when Attar seems to echo Avicenna’s imagery.

  The hoopoe in Attar’s poem is presented as the birds’ guide and leader; he is therefore the equivalent of a sheikh leading a group of religious adepts, or would-be adepts, along their path. His relation to the other birds is also Attar’s relation to his audience: he expounds the doctrine they wish to hear and admonishes them to act on it. Attar very frequently gives the impression of merging his personality with that of the hoopoe; this is aided in Persian by the absence of punctuation, in particular quotation marks; a translator has to choose whether the hoopoe or the author is speaking, whereas Attar need not make this decision. Though the stories are ostensibly told by the hoopoe to birds they are in reality told by Attar to men, and the admonitions in them are almost always addressed to humanity, Attar’s real audience, rather than to the hoopoe’s fictitious avian audience. For example, Persian has a phrase exactly equivalent to the English ‘Be a man!’ (i.e. ‘Pull yourself together and face danger bravely!’); Attar often uses this phrase because he clearly has his true, human audience uppermost in his mind rather than the birds to whom the stories are supposed to be addressed.

  Most of the poem is organized around the hoopoe’s answers to different birds’ objections to the journey or questions about it. At the beginning the birds are identified by their species (and each species clearly indicates a human type: the nightingale is the lover, the finch is the coward, etc.); and they make excuses, according to their kind, for not going on the journey. Once the journey has begun the birds ask questions about its course, and here the analogy is much more that of a beginner on the spiritual path asking his sheikh about the trials he is likely to encounter. Each section (except for the opening and closing pages) therefore begins with a bird questioning the hoopoe (or arguing with him) and continues with the hoopoe’s answer. Each answer usually contains two or three stories which illustrate the particular point the hoopoe is making; the stories are linked together by admonition and commentary.

  Many of the stories at first reading seem obscure. This obscurity is certainly, in part at least, intentional; the reader is being asked to look at some problem in an unfamiliar way, and logic is often deliberately flouted so that we are, as it were, teased or goaded – rather than logically led – into understanding. The paradoxical koans of Zen Buddhism are an analagous phenom enon. And, nearer home, Bunyan, in the prefatory poem to the second part of his Pilgrim’s Progress, counters the objection that ‘his words and stories are so dark / They know not how, by them, to find his mark’ with lines that could well stand at the head of Attar’s poem:

  And to stir the mind

  To search after what it fain would find,

  Things that seem to be hid in words obscure

  Do but the godly mind the more allure

  To study what those sayings should contain

  That speak to us in such a cloudy strain.

  I also know a dark similitude

  Will on the fancy more itself intrude,

  And will stick faster in the heart and head

  Than things from similes not borrowèd.

  The obscurities are there to ‘allure’ the mind, and the ambiguities of the allegory are the ‘dark similitude’ which ‘will stick faster in the heart and head’. For example, Attar will tell a story about two people, one of whom is clearly God, the other the aspirant sufi, but just as the reader has worked out which is which he will find that he has to change his mind or suspend judgement; the long story with which the poem closes is a good example of this. The reader’s attempts to explain the allegory to himself are what make it ‘stick fast’.

  But though much of the poem is deliberately in a ‘cloudy strain’ it is certainly not meant to be read in a state of hazy unrelieved incomprehension. Some of what at first sight seems obscure will be clarified if the reader pays attention to the context of each story. (This is why it is not really a good idea to dip into the book at random; it is meant to be read through, at least section by section.) A good example of how the context clarifies meaning occurs when the hoopoe tells the tale of the poor fisherboy befriended by King Mas’oud (pp. 79–80); when the king casts the boy’s line he is successful, and catches a great quantity of fish, which he gives the boy. The next day he makes the boy the partner of his throne. Out of context, the story, given that the reader knows it comes from a religious allegory, would probably be interpreted as a fable about God’s grace. But if we put the story back into its context the allegory becomes more interesting. A bird has asked the hoopoe why he (the hoopoe) is spiritually successful whereas all the other birds get nowhere. The hoopoe says it is because Solomon has glanced at him; he goes on to say that this glance is worth far more than prayer. However, this does not mean that one need not pray – on the contrary, one should pray unceasingly until Solomon glances at one. There follows the story of the fisherboy; we now see that the boy’s constant fishing (he comes to fish in the same spot every day) represents the spiritual ‘fishing’ of constant prayer; the king’s visit is the glance of Solomon. The story is about individual effort as well as grace and the fact that both are necessary for spiritual progress. If the point of a story seems elusive at first reading, it is usually a good idea to re-read the preceding few lines, or to refer back to the beginning of the section in order to remind oneself what question or objection the hoopoe is answering. Similarly, stories are often linked by a key word; sometimes this link will be a pun which subtly changes the direction of the argument, at other times it seems that, as in a comedian’s patter, word which comes at the end of one story has simply reminded Attar of another story which depends on the same notion.

  It is clear that certain of the beliefs central to sufism engaged Attar’s imagination more than others. Two themes in particular are diffused throughout almost the entire poem – the necessity for destroying the Self, and the importance of passionate love. Both are mentioned in every conceivable context and not only at the ‘appropriate’ moments within the scheme. The two are connected: the Self is seen as an entity dependent on pride and reputation; there can be no progress until the pilgrim is indifferent to both, and the commonest way of making him indifferent is the experience of overwhelming love. Now the love Attar chooses to celebrate (and the stories that deal with love are easily the most detailed and the longest of the poem) is of a particular kind; it is always love that flies in the face of either social or sexual or religious convention. It may be love between a s
ocial superior and inferior (e.g. between a princess and a slave); it is very commonly homosexual love; or, as in the longest story of the poem (pp. 57–75, about Sheikh Sam’an), it may be love between people of different religions. In each case the love celebrated is seen by the world as scandalous (it may be objected that homosexual love was not seen by medieval Islam as particularly scandalous, but it is forbidden in the Koran (iv. 20), and in The Conference of the Birds the anecdote about Shebli in the brothel (p. 93) shows that it was commonly thought of as shameful). The mention of scandal reminds us of the ‘scandalous’, i.e. blasphemous, aspects of the Khorasanian tradition of sufism to which Attar belonged; the ‘scandalous’ loves which Attar celebrates, their flouting of convention, are the allegorical counterpart of this spiritually ‘scandalous’ abandonment.

  Attar’s concern to demonstrate that the sufis’ truth exists outside of human conventions also appears in his predilection for stories in which a poor, despised person (a dervish or beggar) is shown as spiritually superior to a great lord or king; and, in common with other sufi poets, Attar will use words like ‘fool’ or ‘idiot’ to mean ‘wise man’ or ‘saint’. The most extreme examples of such an attitude occur in the section where he has pilgrims insulting God. Like many religious poets he loves paradox, as when he has a saint praying that God curse him (because the curse is God’s and thus preferable to a blessing from any other source), and this is part of the same habit of mind – the need to insist that ‘normal’ apprehensions and expectations are questionable, to turn them inside out.

  Readers acquainted with medieval European literature will not find Attar’s method unfamiliar; parallels such as The Owl and the Nightingale and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls immediately suggest themselves. Indeed, it is remarkable how close Attar’s poem frequently is in tone and technique to medieval European classics. Like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it is a group of stories bound together by the convention of a pilgrimage, and as in Chaucer’s work the convention allows the author to present a panorama of contemporary society; both poems can accommodate widely differing tones and subjects, from the scatological to the exalted to the pathetic (and, occasionally, it must be admitted, the bathetic); both authors delight in quick character sketches and brief vignettes of quotidian life. With Dante’s Divine Comedy Attar’s poem shares its basic technique, multi-layered allegory, and a structure that leads us from the secular to the Divine, from a crowded, random world, described with a great poet’s relish for language and observation, to the ineffable realm of the Absolute. And in the work of all three authors we can discern a basic catholicity of sympathy, at odds with the stereotypes of inflexible exclusiveness often associated with both medieval Roman Catholicism and medieval Islam.

  To western readers Attar’s misconceptions about other religions may prove irritating; but his characterization of monasteries as places where orgies go on and good Moslems are led astray is after all no more grotesque than medieval Christian characterizations of what went on in Jewish communities. His obsession with idolatory is part of a general Islamic concern, but in The Conference of the Birds, as in a great deal of sufi poetry, the true idol to be destroyed is the Self. Of especial significance is Attar’s use of the imagery of fire to indicate religious exaltation; pre-Islamic Iran had been Zoroastrian, and the Zoroastrians worshipped fire; the ‘fire-worshippers’ of Persian mystical poetry are yet another symbol for an antinomian religious fervour scandalous to the orthodox. In the same way Persian poets, including Attar, use the intoxication induced by wine – forbidden to Moslems – as a metaphor for the ‘forbidden’ intoxications of mysticism. In the story of the Arab who has all his goods stolen while travelling in Persia (pp. 176–7), the Arab represents the follower of the formal, outward path, of religion; the bandits are the sufis, who follow the inward path of mysticism and spiritual poverty; the wine which makes the Arab drunk and which enables the bandits to strip him of his outward wealth is the sufi doctrine.

  Attar’s language is, compared with that of many Persian poets, fairly direct and does not present too many difficulties for the translator. Persian lyric poetry is often a tissue of allusion and thus extraordinarily difficult to render into English; but this poem is a narrative, and whatever else is happening the translator has at least the story to convey. Attar is relatively sparing with metaphor, but a word or two about the use of metaphor in Persian verse will perhaps be helpful. Persian metaphors are rarely the visual images that English readers expect to find in poetry. Instead they juxtapose words which have potent associations in a way that deepens and widens the meanings implied by the passage. If the reader attempts to visualize the juxtaposition the result is often ludicrous. Henry Vaughan’s poem ‘My soul, there is a country’ has a line, ‘Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles’, which seems to me untypical of English metaphor (it is absurd to try and see a personified Peace with a crown literally made of smiles – what could such a crown look like?), but it would not startle a Persian poet. The metaphor works, if it works, by juxtaposing the associations of ‘Peace’, ‘crowned’ and ‘smiles’ to convey a notion of benign authority. This is exactly how most Persian metaphors convey meaning. Thus when Attar compares the Prophet’s face to the moon in one line and the sun in the next, he does not want his readers to visualize the result; rather he expects them to combine the notion of beauty associated with the moon and the notion of solitary splendour associated with the sun.

  Most of Attar’s metaphors are stock comparisons, and readers will soon realize that his descriptions of beautiful youths and maidens all use the same vocabulary and imagery. This is of course a common device used to unify long narrative poems –particularly epics – in many languages. Two other rhetorical devices deserve mention. One is common to a great deal of Persian poetry, the other is more typical of Attar himself. The first is hyperbole; most descriptions of love, sorrow, longing etc. in the poem will strike the western reader as, to say the least, very unrestrained. This hyperbolic language is normal in Persian verse, and, as with the metaphors, one should not be too literal-minded in one’s response. To say that the moon is jealous of one’s beloved’s face or that one weeps blood rather than tears is clearly not to offer a literal explanation or description but to indicate the depth of emotion which makes one feel these things to be so. One of Attar’s favourite devices is anaphora, the repetition of a particular word or phrase many times within a few lines, or sometimes over a more extended passage, e.g. ‘Love’s built on readiness to share love’s shame; / Such self-regarding love usurps love’s name’ (p. 70). The effect produced is of an obsessive worrying of a concept; though this can sound peculiar in English, we have in general, though not in every case, tried to reproduce the device.

  The anecdotes and stories are, as one might expect, easier to render in English than the passages of commentary and religious exhortation. The latter are often highly abstract, and they lack the human interest of the tales; a particular difficulty is that a great deal of the exhortation is written in the imperative mood, which is hard to sustain convincingly for long periods in English; and the negative imperative is especially awkward. However, we have in almost all cases resisted the temptation to omit these passages, and in the few places where we have done so no more than two consecutive lines have been cut; usually only one line is absent.

  To translate a long, narrative poem into heroic couplets, a form associated largely with the eighteenth century, may seem to be an undertaking that needs justification. However, it would, I believe, be perverse to translate this poem into any other form. Attar’s metre is the common masnavi metre of Persian narrative poetry; the rhymes occur within the line, and each line has a new rhyme. Each line has, normally, twenty-two syllables, the rhymes occurring at the eleventh and twenty-second syllables. Almost all lines are end-stopped, i.e. the unit of sense is the same length as the line (there are perhaps twenty lines, out of over four thousand, in The Conference of the Birds which are not end-stopped). The proximity of this form to
the English heroic couplet is immediately obvious. In general we have translated one Persian line by one couplet, though we have sometimes compressed two lines into one couplet. English heroic couplets are not normally as relentlessly end-stopped as Attar’s Persian lines are, and we have tried to effect a compromise between producing a fairly normal English narrative flow and giving some idea of the more rigorously divided movement of the Persian. There is another less technical reason for the decision to reproduce the couplet form. As I have indicated, the subjects of Attar’s poem are largely connected with the breaking of convention; in order for this to be effective and interesting the poem must be seen to be rooted in a fairly rigid convention, and the convention of the couplet is a formal paradigm of the conventions of the society Attar is writing about. If the reader considers this a doubtful or spurious point, let him consider the idea of such a poem written in free verse; all sense of tension, of struggle against a prevailing formality, would, I suggest, be dissipated by the openness of the form.

  Further, narrative poetry depends on what the American poet Turner Cassity has called ‘recitative’. We are used to short poems and expect them to function at a maximum of emotional intensity, like the arias of grand opera. One cannot maintain such intensity over hundreds of pages, and it would be wearying if one could. Narrative poetry needs its workaday recitatives between the arias, its simple conveying of the story from point a to point b. The heroic couplet has been one of the most successful means of effecting such ‘recitatives’ in English. For these reasons – the similarity of the English form to the Persian (which gives the translator at least the chance of reproducing something of the tone and movement of the original) and the necessity of some fairly strict formal scheme if the poem’s meaning is not to be betrayed – we have considered that any drawbacks which may come from eighteenth-century associations are more than outweighed by the advantages. Our method of translation does, however, owe something to the eighteenth century; we have followed, more or less, the guide-lines set out in Alexander Fraser Tytler’s admirable Essay on the Principles of Translation (first published in 1791), with particular reference to the chapters on verse translation.