Maybe a Year Without Hafiz

Well, I posted (link) recently about Ladinsky's book, A Year with Hafiz, and even posted (link) about his entry for November 20th. Reading further I came across this little bit of Islamophobia on his December 10th entry:

He was walking unnoticed past a mosque, and the shouts of God’s admirers happened to fill the air, saying, “Allah, Allah! Where are You? Reveal Thyself, Beautiful, Precious One.” 

 And the child in the womb of the Master could not remain silent, and sang back, in an astounding voice, 

“I Am Here! I Am Here—dear life!” 

The crowd in the mosque became frantic, and they picked up shoes, clubs and stones. You know what then happened—the story becomes grim. For most cannot bear the truth.

Reading on, it was this entry for December 14th that finally did me in:

Anyone you have made love with, it is because you were really looking for God.

If you have known hundreds of partners, God may not say this publicly, but I think He is proud of all your efforts. 

Don’t let the freedom in this truth get you in trouble. 

There are men out there who get lonely up in the hills and then take it out on their camels, sheep and goats. 

I think about the best I can do today along the lines of moral advice, in such a universe as we live, is to say, 

try to not hurt any living thing, ’cause your odds will then, probably, increase for happiness—and who doesn’t want some of that? 

I tend to side now with the critics who say that Ladinsky's poetry bears little semantic connection with Hafiz. I can't imagine a Perfect Master lauding promiscuity and tolerating bestiality. These imaginings have sprung from Ladinsky's mind and have little to do with spirituality. I'm afraid Ladinsky's poetry will not form part of my spiritual reading.

Figure 1

Ladinsky's father was Jewish and his mother Catholic but religion did not play an important role in his upbringing. Nonetheless, he was both circumcised and baptised. However, he seems to have inherited something of the "Jewish Revolutionary Spirit" from his father and has decided to "revolutionise" Hafiz to the dismay of many, myself included. I wonder what Meher Baba would have thought of Ladinsky's writings? I wonder what Baba Lovers think? I wonder what Francis Brabazon would have thought? Well, I know that I think he's too crass and crude.

I might be criticised for being too old and not open to new poetic approaches but Landinsky is a year older than me so it's just one old guy's reaction to another. My disappointment shouldn't put me off Hafiz. There are many other translations and interpretations of his work available. I should explore some of them. After all, Hafiz was Baba's favourite poet.

I have Hafez: Collected Poetical Works by Delphi Classics in my library so I should perhaps start with that, although I'm sure that there are many Internet sites that are suitable as well. Any Internet searches are bound to contain a lot of Ladinsky links so that's the only off-putting thing.

Hafiz

The thought struck me recently that it was time to get serious about spirituality. I realised that I spend most of my time: 

• working on mathematical or programming problems
• reading books or articles on history, geopolitics or about famous people
• walking and exercising
• eating, sleeping etc.

I asked myself how much time do I spend in "spiritual pursuits", a term that for me means reading material dictated by Meher Baba or about Meher Baba. The answer was simply: not much time at all. On the other hand, I know a Muslim who prays seven times a day, two more than the recommended five, and often for quite lengthy periods of time. This contrasts quite sharply with the meagre time that I allot to my own spiritual pursuits.

By way of addressing this deficiency, I was recently reading additional commentary added by Meher Baba to God Speaks (identified as God Speaks Supplement to Part 2 of God Speaks) where he spends a lot of time discussing Sufi terms and occasionally quoting from Kabir, Rumi and Hafiz. I checked my library and found I had a copy of The Purity of Desire by Daniel Landinsky (with Nancy Owen Barton) which contains a 100 poems of Rumi. A reviewer wrote of this book:

The first full-length volume of Rumi's cherished verse by bestselling poet Daniel Ladinsky. Renowned for his poignant renderings of Hafiz's mystical texts, Daniel Ladinsky captures the beauty, intimacy, and musicality of another of Islam's most beloved poets and spiritual thinkers. In collaboration here with Nancy Owen Barton, and with learned insight and a delicate touch, they explore the nuances of desire—that universal emotion—in verse inspired by Rumi's love and admiration for his companion and spiritual teacher, Shams-e Tabriz. These poems thoughtfully capture the compelling wisdom of one of Islam's most revered artistic and religious voices and one of the most widely read poets in the English language.

This review alerted me to the fact that he had also done some "renderings of Hafiz's mystical texts" and so I managed to get hold of a copy of his book A Year with Hafiz. As I began to read the Acknowledgements, I was in for a surprise. It begins:

I thank my teacher, Eruch Jessawala, with whom I spent a lot of time over a twenty-year period. I think he knew Hafiz intrinsically, more truly and deeply than anyone I have ever met. Not one poem of mine would ever have been published without his extraordinary sanction and a profound, rare insight he revealed to me about my work. And I thank his decades-old little bamboo walking stick—that Zen’s master’s baton—that I journeyed next to for hundreds of miles in India. It lays across my computer as I write. I think my every word leans against it and upon Eruch, in many ways. For he is now the hub of me, and I a spoke he moves.

He concludes his foreward by saying:

What can I say to my dear Master, Meher Baba, for all his help and guidance? Whatever truth, beauty, laughter and charm you may find here, I would say is a gift from him, the Avatar. 

So the person that I had more or less randomly chosen to render Hafiz turns out to be a Baba-Lover who was mentored by Eruch. How amazing! This confirmed to me that I was on the right track in my choice of elevating spiritual literature because Hafiz was Baba's favourite poet and who better to render the spirit of Hafiz's writing in English than Landinsky.

Daniel at Sheriar Press, Myrtle Beach, S.C.
https://www.meherbabatravels.com/books/authors-of-baba-contents/daniel-ladinsky

I was prompted to find out a little about him and found some biographical details on Wikipedia from which I've extracted the following quote about his early life and background:

Ladinsky was born and brought up in suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, where his father was a wealthy developer. He grew up with two brothers, and had a Jewish upbring as his father was Jewish, though he was also baptized as a Catholic, as his mother was Christian. After studying in small colleges, at age 20, he enrolled at the University of Arizona. During this period he came across the book God Speaks, by Meher Baba, and poetry by Rumi, both of which had a deep impact on him. At the back of the Meher Baba book, he found the address of the five centers dedicated to the spiritual master. 

Some time later, as Ladinsky recounted in an interview, intending to drive towards the Andes mountain, he took a detour of a thousand miles, and stopped the Meher Baba Center at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. There, he met the disciple Kitty Davy, then in her seventies, who had spent twenty years in India with Meher Baba. He stayed at the Center for a few months, when Davy advised him to go back to his family, and to find a job that would let him work with his hands. Back home, his father helped him join a carpentry school. 

He worked for a few years at a carpentry job, and thereafter joined his father's investment company. Unable to find fulfillment, he visited the Meher Baba Center in South Carolina again. Then, in 1978, Davy advised him to visit the Meher Baba ashram, at Meherabad, near Ahmednagar, India. There he met Meher Baba's sister Mani Irani, and his close disciple, Eruch Jessawala. Though Ladinsky's first visit lasted only two weeks, it started a process which continued with regular visits for the next two decades, and Jessawala became his spiritual teacher. He even lived in a nearby spiritual community at Meherazad for six years, working at the local free clinic and spending time with Jessawala.

His work is not without controversy as the following quote from Wikipedia illustrates:

Scholars and critics point out that Ladinsky's poems are originals, and not translations or interpretations of Hafez. Christopher Shackle describes The Gift as "not so much a paraphrase as a parody of the wondrously wrought style of the greatest master of Persian art-poetry" and Aria Fanil describes his contribution thusly "Ladinsky does not know Persian while his poems bear little or no resemblance to what Hafez has composed". That his poems are neither written nor intended to fall under the purview of literal and/or scholarly translations of Hafiz' work, Ladinsky states in each of his volumes.

He was born in 1948 so he is a year older than me. There is a detailed interview with him to be found on this site. Anyway, I've very little of his poetry and haven't formed any opinion of it whatsoever. I may like it, I may not. Let's see how things unfold.

The Walled Garden of Truth

The film, The Shape of Water, that I recently watched concludes with the following dialogue:

“Unable to perceive the shape of You, I find You all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with Your love, It humbles my heart, For You are everywhere.”

As to the provenance of these lines, there is some debate. "Though he doesn’t remember exactly where the verse came from, del Toro remembers reading it in a book of Islamic poetry, found in a bookstore he’d frequent before going on set to film" ... source. Some have speculated on Reddit that it's from Rumi, another that it's taken from "Divine Eros" by Saint Symeon and yet others by a predecessor of Rumi named Hakim Sanai.

Regardless of the provenance of the lines, the investigation has led me to Sanai and Symeon for which I'm grateful. Of Sanai, the website Poetry Chaikhana: Sacred Poetry from Around the World says:

Sanai is one of the earlier Sufi poets. He was born in the province of Ghazna in southern Afghanistan in the middle of the 11th century and probably died around 1150. 

Rumi acknowledged Sanai and Attar as his two primary inspirations, saying, "Attar is the soul and Sanai its two eyes, I came after Sanai and Attar."

Sanai was originally a court poet who was engaged in writing praises for the Sultan of Ghazna. 

The story is told of how the Sultan decided to lead a military attack against neighboring India. Sanai, as a court poet, was summoned to join the expedition to record the Sultan's exploits. As Sanai was making his way to the court, he passed an enclosed garden frequented by a notorious drunk named Lai Khur.

As Sanai was passing by, he heard Lai Khur loudly proclaim a toast to the blindness of the Sultan for greedily choosing to attack India, when there was so much beauty in Ghazna. Sanai was shocked and stopped. Lai Khur then proposed a toast to the blindness of the famous young poet Sanai who, with his gifts of insight and expression, couldn't see the pointlessness of his existence as a poet praising such a foolish Sultan. 

These words were like an earthquake to Hakim Sanai. He abandoned his life as a pampered court poet, even declining marriage to the Sultan's own sister, and began to study with a Sufi master named Yusef Hamdani. 

Sanai soon went on pilgrimage to Mecca. When he returned, he composed his poetic masterpiece, Hadiqatu'l Haqiqat or The Walled Garden of Truth. There was a double meaning in this title for, in Persian, the word for a garden is the same as the word for paradise, but it was also from within a walled garden that Lai Khur uttered the harsh truths that set Hakim Sanai on the path of wisdom.

I managed to locate and download a sparse 14-page translation, in PDF format, of The Walled Garden of Truth from this website as well as a far more expansive 134-page translation, also in PDF format, and commentary from this website.

Of Symeon, I have this commentary from John McGuckin (forming part of a 21-page commentary):

The Byzantine saint and poet Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) is one of the Christian world’s greatest mystics, if such a term can properly be used of ancient writers. It is here applied for the sake of convenience, and in order to unveil the author, as it were, who is not only a visionary of the highest order within the Eastern Orthodox tradition, but equally one of the Christian world’s most lyrical and rhapsodic writers. It is a startling fact that it is only in recent years that his works have become available in English translation, and a sadder one that his name is still largely unknown to a wider public who would otherwise undoubtedly be interested in a spirituality suffused with light and hope and one of the most profound senses of the mercy and compassion of God. 

I haven't yet located a copy of Symeon's Hymns of Divine Eros but this is what McGuckin says of the hymns:

There are a total of 58 Hymns in the authentic corpus, amounting almost to 11,000 verses. They are all written in liturgical style (probably with perfor- mance in mind not merely private reading) in a strongly pulsed rhythm that uses the metrical devices of either eight, twelve, or fifteen syllables to the line. Sometimes end rhymes and half-rhyme are used. Several have the poetic pulse that is comparable to Longfellow’s epic Hiawatha, and they run into similar problems (for most are long) in sustaining the drive of the sense over against the soporific beat of the line: though in some cases the juxtaposition of the startling contents (visions, revelations, denunciations of enemies, and lurid confessions of sins), are exactly balanced by the mantra-like beat. No existing translation has attempted to render this either exactly or impressionistically so far.