Author Archives: mshiva

Why

Far be it from me
to start arguing
about the cosmic
proprieties of love,
but consider:

God mixes water
with a little clay
and makes it walk –
and in its form and motion
puts the tidal power
of the moon –

But then he makes it all –
the blackness of an eyebrow,
and the way a braid
can catch a glint of light,
and how a woman’s lips
can purse just so –
he makes it all forbidden!

Why the love-slick,
Sweet, quick-witted girls
if what he wants
is undivided prayer?
If love is such debauchery,
why give us wine
to start with?

The moth won’t burn
without the candle.
The nightingale would keep
its head without the flower.
If Layla hadn’t broken faith,
Majnun would not
have wandered in the desert.

What I’m saying, I’m afraid,
is that both God’s essence
and his beauties irretrievably
are in my inner heart.

Why these troubled words
have leapt from love’s fire
and burnt into Ma’zun’s talk –
I wonder.

Manifestations of Love (D-S60-61)

In the bones and blood
of a lover are the signs
of the one he loves –
and inside that.

He feels her in his veins,
as if the Moon had carved
its signature in his blood –
as if a form of Venus,
scintillating in the evening
sky, had run a current
through his limbs –

Is she really, like an houri,
a descendant of the stars?
Or is this what human beings are –
this blinding body beauty?

In reality the one I love
is born of neither earth nor sky –
Every day her beauty deepens;
every day I’m further saddened.
She’s closer to me than I am
to myself, so close I don’t know
where she is at all –

Like attracts like.
Knowledge has intimate
relations with knowledge,
reason with reason.
So me,
I wander like Majnun,
helpless and accustomed
to the desert.

There’s a kind of guy
who roars like a lion
wanting just to see
his girlfriend’s face
when she’s away.

Another trembles with anxiety
every time he pictures
her hair.

Another can’t stop thinking
of her smooth round breasts –
so helpless that at dinner
when he touches an apple
he’s reminded of them,
and to everyone’s
embarrassment,
including his,
he starts
describing them!

And yet another rants so loud
about her leaving for the weekend,
you’d think he thinks we’re deaf –
To him, the mills of time
are grinding out a cosmic
prison term – they scrape
so loud his voice
seems faint,
to him,
who’s losing her.

Neither earth- nor sky-born,
but above all that, the one
I love’s compassionate,
like the widows’ husband –
comprehends the evidence
of things unseen –
a candle flame unmoved
by wind or breath, or time –

I am the lover.
My beloved
is the ocean –
and Mazun,
a fish in endless seas.

Pathways (D-S34)

In the market, crowds of people
surge from one booth to another.
The din is unbelievable,
the shouting. One man barters
angrily and loud for jugs of wine.
A woman watches as a vendor
measures out a bag of cumin seeds.
We shuffle past to find a booth
where we can trade our reason in
for love, and we succeed.

The mystic’s shop is different
from the others. Its sign’s distinct.
It trades in journeys.
What you thought
were rugs piled under chairs and wine
in casks stacked out of sight are pathways
past the planets to another world,
as different from the noisy market
as Cairo is from Almaty.

The market-goers plod the dirt
and never realize that paths
through air ascend beyond the booth.
Those familiar with the desert
have no knowledge of the sea
or those who live there. Moses
saw his one beloved on Mount Sinai;
Jesus, while he dangled from a cross
in agony. Another sees in darkness,
still another, through a brilliant light.

Each person finds his own way
to the neighborhood of God.
One crumbles into dirt, and kisses
the doorway threshold, that’s the place
he loves. Another searches
solemnly for light, and when he finds
the flame, becomes as giddy
as a fluttering moth. Another,
like Mazun, tears off his shirt,
and throws his chest out as a shield,
and hopes for arrows.

The Place of Insanity (D-S31)

This place is
insane.

And I
designed it
and built it,
stone drunk
the whole time.

I’m so drunk
with the way
of the spirit
I am the wine.
I’ve disappeared
in the cool
of my friend’s
visit, completely
carefree, so carefree
the whole world’s
come into focus –
I’m so drunk
I’ve sobered up
and see

I’m my own
friend, in
a world
where tar
is setar,
friend
is me, I am
the world,

no world
at all, a placeless
place.

Look! No
things but
in ideas! –
No possessions
here, nowhere!
I’m the sultan
of nothing.

I don’t wipe
tears for no reason.
No solution’s
better than
this insanity.

Why don’t I feel
my own pain?
I’m patient,
physician
and cure.

For unknown eons
I wandered
the stars
for the sake
of my friend,
and broke
my own heart
searching.

Unbelievable!
For eons
I failed
to realize
the lover
and beloved
live together,
here, the same
place,
nowhere.

Mazun,
I degraded
myself.
I chose
to be in love.
I gave
my soul
to my friend,
and it became
the beloved
of itself.

Love’s Religion (D-S 27)

I left my city
long ago
because of you.

And all this time
by myself
I’ve nursed a pot
of flowers
with tears –
don’t take them,
they’re mine.

There’s nothing wrong
with a powerful man
seeking conversation
with a poor man –
but a poor man
who can’t help
wanting to be king
is tortured.

My own desire
arches up the stars,
but my luck
has bottomed out.
Now only death
can cure this pain.

Why is the hound-faced
professor following me
up and down the street,
asking me about faith
then telling me I’m wrong?
He can’t leave it alone.

I tell him:
Religion is desire itself,
the love itself,
the beloved, alone.
He doesn’t hear.

I cut down a side street
of my own, and leave him
pulling his beard and mumbling
and waving his hands
at the sky.

I remember her laughter,
incredibly sweet –
I didn’t love for nothing.
I remember summer nights
of never thinking
a single thought, and
living in her love.

Her shiny black hair
falling near her eyes
beckons to me.
How could I
ever have abandoned
the scent of that hair?

Now if the tall, beautiful peris
come for Mazun’s soul
he can’t help it, he’ll go.

He’s stuck his head
and luck in their gorgeous path
by talking too much of love.

Love’s Religion (D-S 27)

I left my city
long ago
because of you.

And all this time
by myself
I’ve nursed a pot
of flowers
with tears –
don’t take them,
they’re mine.

There’s nothing wrong
with a powerful man
seeking conversation
with a poor man –
but a poor man
who can’t help
wanting to be king
is tortured.

My own desire
arches up the stars,
but my luck
has bottomed out.
Now only death
can cure this pain.

Why is the hound-faced
professor following me
up and down the street,
asking me about faith
then telling me I’m wrong?
He can’t leave it alone.

I tell him:
Religion is desire itself,
the love itself,
the beloved, alone.
He doesn’t hear.

I cut down a side street
of my own, and leave him
pulling his beard and mumbling
and waving his hands
at the sky.

I remember her laughter,
incredibly sweet –
I didn’t love for nothing.
I remember summer nights
of never thinking
a single thought, and
living in her love.

Her shiny black hair
falling near her eyes
beckons to me.
How could I
ever have abandoned
the scent of that hair?

Now if the tall, beautiful peris
come for Mazun’s soul
he can’t help it, he’ll go.

He’s stuck his head
and luck in their gorgeous path
by talking too much of love.

Holy Night (D-S8)

I’d just as soon tonight
would never end –
The friend has lit
the house like candlelight –

Her face is gracing
everything –
no sun or moon
rise need recur –

Her eyebrow curving
like black letters
in a holy book –

Her breast seen edge-on
in the candlelight,
the scent of it –

The musky fragrance
of her hair
has filled the room
like incense –

And her braid is looped
around my neck,
its scent alone
has done me in –

Her face leans
close enough for me
to see the slight sweet down
of her upper lip –

It tastes of rose
and sugar, sweeter
than I need
or can bear –

Like thirst slaked
after desert heat,
my hand finds
the smoothness
of her skin –

The smoothness
of her breast –

The scent of musk
impenetrates
and permeates
my fingers –

She shifts and smiles,
I pull her nearer,
can’t let go –

And when she speaks
her eyebrow arches,
clever, sweet
and voiceless word.
(OR for last stanza:
And when she speaks
her eyebrow arches,
clever, sweet
and voiceless
pre-eternal word.)

She falls asleep
in silence in my arms,
in deepest night
when darkness feels
eternal. All endures
persistently through death.

Let every heart –
prays Mazun – have
the friend
in every moment.

Image by Kambiz Najafi

Mazun – An Introduction

The translations here are co-translations.
The first draft of this introduction, and the translations of 12 qazals (“love songs”), were written for the 1999 NEH Summer Seminar on Islamic Mystic Literature. First the qazals were translated  from Qashqai Turki to Persian with the help of a kind Tabriz-born colleague and interlocutor in Seattle, who preferred  to be anonymous. I did a rough translation of these poems from Persian to English, and then different translated poems were edited by various participants of the seminar in Chapel Hill. Kambiz Najafi, a Qashqai poet and literary critic in Firuzabad, later found an error in one of the translations and it was then corrected.

I would like to thank all those who participated in this co-translation process.

Twelve Qazals (Love Songs) by Mazun and Their (Literal) Translation in English

1) I Don’t Know What I Am

2) What Is, Is in Love

3) Existed

4) A Blessed Night

5) My Pain

6) Love’s Religion

7) Insanity’s Home

8) Each Person Has a Different Path to the Friend’s Neighborhood

9) Who Is Here? How Is There?

10) Beloved’s Manifestation

11) Why?

12) Do You Remember?

Image by Kambiz Najafi

English Poetic Renditions of Nine of the Above Qazals By Mazun
“The literary versions of the poems given here represent an effort to convey the general sense of the originals, and are not direct word by word translations. They are worked after the fashion of John Moyne and Coleman Barks, who made “versions” of Rumi. These are “versions,” or renditions, of Mazun’s poems; they frequently depart from the original Turkish phrasing, and in places imagery is reworked, expanded or contracted in order to bring as clear a sense of the poem’s feeling as possible, as opposed to its particular words or phrasing, which are in fact translatable from Turkish to English only in very clumsy ways. These versions of Mazun’s poems seek to convey graces from the originals in contemporary English phrasing and poetic conventions. These renditions of nine poems are based on the literal English translations of Mazun’s qazals.

D. Wilde – Fellow, 1999 NEH Seminar on the Literature of Islamic Mysticism, U. of North Carolina.”

No Idea – Mazun – D. Wilde’s Poetic Rendition

What Is, Is in Love – Mazun – D. Wilde’s Poetic Rendition

Holy Night – Mazun – D. Wilde’s Poetic Rendition

Love’s Religion – Mazun – D. Wilde’s Poetic Rendition

The Place of Insanity – Mazun – D. Wilde’s Poetic Rendition

Pathways – Mazun – D. Wilde’s Poetic Rendition

Manifestations of Love – Mazun – D. Wilde’s Poetic Rendition

Why – Mazun – D. Wild’s Poetic Rendition

Do You Remember – Mazun – D. Wilde’s Poetic Rendition

What Is, Is in Love (D-S6)

Like a moth circling a burning candle,
I love my friend’s face.
Give me your hand,
and nothing else.

If my body were dissected
joint by joint, my love
of my friend would leak
from elbow, wrist and knee,
and nothing else.

Before the clocks of creation
began to tick, God asked everyone:
“Am I not your lord?”
and like a choral symphony
we all replied in unison, “You are!”
and nothing else.

When the drums of that reply
are faintly heard, an echo,
then the friend is tested
by his enemy – he hears
and speaks of love
and nothing else.

By darkness, light. By light,
darkness. One drills down
for gems; and one looks up.
The kings and sultans, presidents
and ministers through all eternity
have long since turned to dirt.
But spirits descended
from every lover who ever lived
still walk the earth.
What is, is in love,
and nothing else.

Holy reverence to my father,
who told my teacher: “Give him
your hand and guide him
through love’s lessons,
nothing else.”

Like the windswept barren desert,
Majnun’s tears.
Nothing else.

If Mazun dies dirt-poor, no worry –
on his tomb write:
In this place lives love,
and nothing else.

No Idea (D-S5)

Whatever peace I had,
my friend has long since
boiled away.
I’m blind drunk
and reeling like a man
who stared too long at the sun.

I can’t tell the cup
from the wine from
the saaghi – they’re all
the same to me,
I’m so in love.

What I am
I have no idea,
or what I was before
I was,
what anybody was –
what we were before
we were
escapes me too.
I don’t know, even,
if I want to sober up.

I was carried, pushed and pulled here
on a web of roads I can’t remember
now, and never knew the reason.

I haven’t come to cause confusion –
this isn’t nonsense – I’m trying
to distinguish details.

I’ll keep calling Hu from here until I die.
“What is ‘life’?” I say, and
“What is ‘honor’? What’s ‘disgrace’?”

I’ll tend this garden ’til I die
and revel in the work.
That’s why I’m here.
Not to close the festival down.
If love’s a scandal,
what is it then, that holds
us all together, top to bottom?

I haven’t come to make this world my home –
I’m on my way to where I came from,
nowhere. Drunk I came and drunk I got,
and drunk I’ll go,
so soused
I can’t tell sweet from cyanide.

I haven’t come to sniff out every aster,
rose and meadow blossom one by one,
but be a nightingale to one enormous flower –
goldenrod, a form of sunlight,
maybe Queen Anne’s lace, a moonlight –
all one flower.

The gardener roars in vain
at the loss of a single blossom.
The nightingale, completely free,
illuminates the summer-yellow
field of flower
whole
with music.

I haven’t come to brood and sob.
I play my tar and sing.
Music’s my
intelligence, too bright to bear
the weight of sorrow.

“What is ‘sadness’?” Ma’zun asks.
“And what is ‘grief’?”