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

Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart

A Review of

Shakespeare and Company, Paris:

A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2017

Shakespeare and Company, Paris:
A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart
Edited by Krista Halverson
Shakespeare and Company Paris, $34.95

Any young writer who’s passed through Paris at any time over the past six decades and didn’t stay at least a few nights at the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company has simply not done Paris correctly. Founded in 1951 by American expat George Whitman and evolving through a series of names and incarnations until eventually being rechristened after the bookstore that first published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, Shakespeare and Company has housed more than thirty thousand writers and wannabe writers as they explored the City of Lights at invaluable leisure, as well as in considerable squalor. In exchange for free lodging in the upstairs library’s makeshift bunks—or, in the high season, on the floor of the store itself—George only asked for an hour or two of volunteer work per day, a two-page autobiography for inclusion in his vast files, and a commitment to reading one book for each night spent in his sanctuary. Most Shakespeareans stayed for two or three nights, but many stayed for weeks or months, and a few inmates remained in some guise or other for years. George offered these accommodations as a form of forward payment for the hospitality that he’d received in his early years of tramping all over globe, and with his Left Bank bookstore’s Seine-side view of Notre-Dame cathedral he gave more than half a century of writers an inestimable gift of time and space. Virtually every one of his guests has written about the store in some form, and now that George has passed away and the store has been taken over by his daughter, Sylvia (who was named after the founder of the original Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach), an official history has finally appeared: Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart.

A Young George Whitman

Edited by Shakespearean Krista Halverson, this multifaceted and multi-genre history collects nearly a century of material about George and his bookstore, including an account of Beach’s original Shakespeare and Company, a selection of George’s early travel journals, clips of newspaper and magazine articles about the man and his freeform Paris utopia, narratives by scores of store denizens—including an introduction by Jeanette Winterson—several exemplary (and often bizarre) volunteer bios, poems by some of the more well-known store associates, excerpts from an unsurprisingly diverse number of authors mentioning George and his store, and decades of evocative and beautifully laid-out photographs. Threading it all together, Halverson’s exceptionally well-researched and deftly crafted narrative paints a portrait not just of George and his store, but of a city and a country and a century, in rich and informed perspective. Many of the writers and publications associated with the store over the decades have been notoriously shoddy, and Halverson manages to capture the slapdash flavor of the place and its people while transcending the first-draft quality of many of its past exemplars. Perhaps a large part of this book’s gleaming polish can be attributed to the influence of George’s daughter, Sylvia, who inherited the bookstore in 2011 when George passed away at the age of ninety-eight, and who brought it into the twenty-first century while somehow managing to retain much of its original bohemian integrity. Straddling several overlapping and contrasting worlds, this book captures the madness and squalor of the place while being in no way squalid itself, which is a seriously impressive feat.

Sylvia Whitman, her partner David Delannet,
and editor Krista Halvorson

The most valuable part of this book for people who knew George is the selection of his early travel journals, because it captures his mind and voice in a way that was almost totally inaccessible to even most of his best friends. As the book’s narrative mentions, George was not at all a conversationalist, and his essentially solitary personality often seemed miles away from the store, even as he stormed through its center. In fact, many Shakespeareans doubted that this mad King Lear even knew anything about literature, often judging him by the sub-literate Beat and wanna-Beat writers who abused his hospitality, and it’s enlightening to see how extraordinarily well read and sophisticated and intellectually resourceful he was—as well as how good a writer he was, his early voice very quickly maturing in the most curious directions. If this book serves its central character as well as he deserves, it will spawn a fuller collection of his journals, as well as an in-depth biography. These pages are a revelation, but they also seem like a preface to deeper volumes, because it would be a tragedy to let this fascinating man fade away into mere cameo appearances in books by the writers he hosted and inspired.

Sylvia and George Whitman

That’s not to say that this great man was also a really great guy. Halverson’s narrative dances around his personality by referring to him as “irascible” and “cantankerous” while illustrating with kid gloves a few slight shades of how abusive he could be. For a more gloves-off portrait (that’s still entirely loving and grateful), see Jeremy Mercer’s 2005 memoir Time Was Soft There. Clearly in the employ of Sylvia Whitman, who has a deeply moving last word here in a heartrending afterword that more than makes up for the book’s gentle circumlocutions, Halverson has her hands tied in what she can convey in this history, but despite what got left on the editing-room floor (or what was perhaps hidden from her), Halverson mirrors George’s complex sophistication in how she juggles so much competing information and influence to create a document that feels both so satisfyingly full and so tantalizingly suggestive of what’s missing. Halverson is so adroit an editor and writer that for readers who don’t know the bookstore’s ins and outs she only leaves one gaping lacuna in the book’s surface: the relationship between George and his daughter’s mother, who’s never named or described or even alluded to in this book, even when narrating Sylvia’s unconventional upbringing. Like an Old-Testament patriarch, George was nearly seventy when Sylvia was born, but the girl’s mother is completely and conspicuously elided from these pages. Nearly perfectly balancing her dual duties as hired editor and truth-telling chronicler—and outshining any quibbling critique of her herculean efforts—Halverson satisfies insider and outsider alike with this book, creating a work that serves as a brilliant standalone history while simultaneously inspiring untold future volumes. With so many thousands of writers in George Whitman’s prodigious debt, surely this is not the end of his story.

—David Wiley

Jim Walsh’s Gold Experience: Following Prince in the ’90s

A Review of Jim Walsh’s

Gold Experience: Following Prince in the ’90s

Originally published in the Minneapolis StarTribune

on January 22nd, 2017

Gold Experience:

Following Prince in the ’90s

By Jim Walsh

University of Minnesota Press, 200 pages, $16.95

Minneapolis native Prince was perhaps the last American pop musician who could legitimately be compared to such prime movers as Elvis Presley or James Brown or Jimi Hendrix. Arriving almost fully formed as a teenage recording artist in the late 1970s, he drew upon a particularly vibrant circle of musical scenes, absorbing the exuberance of disco, the edginess of punk rock and new wave, the fervor of Michael Jackson, and the pyrotechnic thrills of Van Halen and heavy metal, transforming it all into a body of work that was as accomplished as it was ambitious. He flashed through the 1980s in a delirious purple dream, besting himself so often and so brilliantly that he quickly became his only competition, thrusting himself into the 1990s as virtually the only musician left standing, which is the position Jim Walsh’s new book Gold Experience: Following Prince in the ’90s finds him in.

Walsh covered Prince for the St. Paul Pioneer Press between 1994 and 2002, and this book collects all of his articles about the little purple guy as he attempts to continue surging forward. Adding very few editorial comments to this collection of clips—and presumably making no revisions, capturing both writer and subject, who were the same age, in journalistic amber—Walsh eschews hindsight perspective and delivers the reader right into the drama of each moment, making it possible to experience Prince’s development during these years with a sense of urgent suspense. His maniacal energy and challenging diversity suddenly beginning to lose traction in a cultural landscape that would rather be sedated by Seattle’s stultifying borecore or L.A.’s mellow stoner rap, Prince struggled to maintain purpose and relevance in the 1990s, and Walsh documents his wavering trajectory in observant and sometimes painful detail. At the book’s outset Prince had recently changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, and it’s telling that for almost the whole era that this book documents Walsh refers to him as “the former Prince.” Nearly every new step seems to herald a return to Prince’s golden age, with Walsh cheering him on (and occasionally lecturing him), but as the decade slacks toward millennium it gradually becomes clear that Prince won’t be reinstating his purple reign in time to celebrate 1999.

Jim Walsh

Following Prince as he tries to recapture his astonishing prime, Walsh’s Gold Experience is in fact a chronicle of the artist’s silver age, and as such it serves more as a record of the journalist’s emotional journey than as a vital document of a crucial time. With his hero going astray again and again, Walsh struggles with acceptance as he’s forced to compare this fluctuating luminary to the dimmest bulbs of the era. It’s astonishing to see Walsh refer to the monochromatic Beck as “state of the art” in comparison to anything that Prince could do, but that’s just how far pop musicianship had descended into dreary incompetence, leaving little room for a true polymath to shine. Vividly capturing the hope and heartbreak of this waning musical epoch, Walsh’s Gold Experience paints a poignant portrait of the artist formerly known as Prince.

—David Wiley