Sholeh Wolpé’s translation of Farīd ud-Dīn Attār’s The Conference of the Birds

A Review of

Sholeh Wolpé’s Translation of

Farīd ud-Dīn Attār’s The Conference of the Birds

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Fall 2017

The Conference of the Birds

Farīd ud-Dīn Attār

Translated by Sholeh Wolpé

W.W. Norton & Company, $25.95

The Persian poet Farīd ud-Dīn Attār’s twelfth-century Sufi epic The Conference of the Birds stands alongside Dante’s Comedy and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as one of the great creative works of spiritual self-discovery. Straddling a place somewhere between Dante’s high fantasy and Bunyan’s naked allegory, The Conference of the Birds is also one of the most ingeniously conceived and plotted narratives in all of world literature, the denouement of its quest as astoundingly transformative as Oedipus the King, but without the horrific eye-gouging. Exactly the opposite, in fact: Like Dante’s Comedy (which had the working title Vision), Attār’s poem leads from near blindness to all-encompassing sight, its self-revelation a wholly moving and satisfying transfiguration. The poem has only been translated into English a few times in the past half century, with wildly differing results, and the Iranian-American poet Sholeh Wolpé’s new translation now brings it for the first time into the third millennium.

It’s impossible to discuss The Conference of the Birds without spoiling its surprise ending, which is by far the poem’s main feature and selling point. In brief, a conference of the world’s birds meets to decide upon who should be their king, and their avian adviser the Hoopoe tells them of the Simorgh, a legendary bird whose name means “thirty birds.” The Simorgh was first spotted soaring over China, where a single one of its feathers fell to earth and “triggered a titanic tumult in every land.” A single drawing of the feather that was mounted in China’s national art gallery subsequently became the wellspring of all wisdom, and also of all the world’s confusion:

Had the image of that feather not been recorded,

all of the world’s agitation would not have occurred.

All of science and art is but the impression

of that single feather.

A Negar Gari (miniature painting) of the Simorgh
by contemporary artist Nadia Ostovar.

Because nobody can comprehend even the drawing’s attributes—let alone the feather itself—the Hoopoe urges the birds to seek the Simorgh themselves on the distant Mount Qaf, an emerald crag that surround the world and is the place where the sun both rises and sets. The birds all offer up excuses and objections, and after a lengthy harangue from the Hoopoe instructing them on the Sufi path of self-abnegation, the Wayfarers set out to traverse the seven valleys that purify them and ready them to meet their Beloved. Each valley strips away an impeding aspect of their ego, purging the birds of their worldly attachments and radically thinning out the wayfaring flock at each step. Finally, of the initial group of 100,000 only a remaining core of thirty purified birds reaches Mount Qaf to discover that they, the thirty birds, are the Simorgh.

Like King Oedipus, they were the very one that they’d been seeking, but like Dorothy in Oz, they first needed to make the journey toward the emerald horizon in order to discover this fact. It’s not conceivable that Dante could have read this Persian poem, but its similarities to his Comedy are striking, and since much of the thinking of Europe’s high Middle Ages derived from Arabic commentary upon Aristotle and other classics, perhaps the two poems evolved from similar influences. The most startling similarity is how, like Attār’s seven valleys, Dante’s Purgatory cleanses the pilgrim in seven distinct steps of each of the seven deadly sins, leaving him immaculate and ready for the stars. As a crowning pinnacle, and as an encircling frame, Mount Qaf also fascinatingly prefigures both the peak of Mount Purgatory and the Paradiso’s heavenly Empyrean, which exists outside of space and time and is at once the epicenter and the universe’s encompassing outer limit.

From Peter Sis’s 2011 illustrated version

of The Conference of the Birds

Despite Attār’s brilliantly inspired concept for this poem, its composition and execution unfortunately fall far short of its Florentine counterpart. Attār shows remarkable resourcefulness in his parabolic approaches to the poem’s themes and concepts, and his tone and mindset are also much more sympathetic and welcoming than Dante’s harsh obsession with rules, but Attār lacks a dramatic and descriptive and organizational power that would continuously thrust the enthralled reader toward the poem’s astonishing end. The first two hundred pages (in Wolpé’s translation) are all preamble, with the Hoopoe first countering the birds’ complaints and objections and then answering their questions about the nature of their Beloved Simorgh. Then the seventy-or-so pages that address the seven purifying valleys of their journey are also all prospective preamble, describing what they’ll be like rather than actually describing their advent. Then the birds’ journey itself only fills a page and a half, followed by ten precious pages describing their transcendent transformation. These few dozen mind-bending lines make the entire poem, though. Attār then ends with a fascinating exploration of his own ego, vacillating between shocking artistic braggadocio and profoundly humble self-effacement, a meditation that revealingly illustrates the paradox of the ambitious sage who preaches humility. It’s like that old Onion article about the cocky yogi who declares, “I am the serenest!”

Compared to the two most readily available English translations of The Conference of the Birds, Wolpé’s version alights somewhere between Dick Davis & Afkham Darbandi’s 1984 Penguin edition and Peter Avery’s more scholarly 1998 version. Davis & Darbandi’s translation mimics Attār’s rhymed couplets with English rhymed couplets, to distractingly sing-song effect, and it also unfortunately elides Attār’s self-examining/self-praising epilogue. The more meticulous Avery includes the entire poem and thankfully eschews rhyme while sticking to a strictly lined verse translation, and he also provides extraordinarily helpful and thorough notes. Wolpé varies her translation’s format between verse for the narrative and prose for the Hoopoe’s parables, breaking each section up in a way that’s helpful for uninitiated readers but not exactly faithful to the original. She also elides Attār’s opening invocation to Allah, which Avery includes to gorgeous effect. In all, Wolpé has crafted a fine reading experience with her new translation, breaking up some of the monotony of the poem’s first three quarters with format shifts and chapter breaks and rubric descriptions that keep the reader turning the pages. Her version of The Conference of the Birds may not be absolutely true to the poem’s totality, but it serves as an exceptional initiation for modern lay readers into the Path of the Wayfarer.

—David Wiley