Translating the Garden

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Translating the Garden U . . 

   , 

Copyright ©  by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition,  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box , Austin, TX -.  The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of / .– () (Permanence of Paper).

   --  Ghanoonparvar, M. R. (Mohammad R.) Translating the garden / M. R. Ghanoonparvar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.  --- (cloth : alk. paper) . Persian language—Translating into English. . Translating and interpreting. . Language and culture. . Literature, Comparative. . Maskåb, Shåhrukh. Guft va gå dar bagh. I. Maskub, Shahrukh. Guft va gu dar bagh. English. II. Title.  .  '.—dc 



Diane

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Contents Acknowledgments Prologue

ix



. Invitation to the Garden



. Renditions of the Garden



. Reflections of the Garden



. Artificial Paradise  . The Garden of the Soul . The Garden in Exile Epilogue





Dialogue in the Garden Notes  Bibliography Index









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Acknowledgments For many years, different friends and colleagues, among them Ali Jazayery, have asked me to write a book to show the actual process of translation. As dedicated teachers, what they meant was for me to prepare more or less a handbook for beginning translators on how to go about translating. I am sure that I have failed to fulfill their expectations, but I hope this book will help students of translation to become familiar with the experience and what is involved in the process of practicing the art of translation. This book is the result of many years of thinking about translation and translating. Over the course of those years, I have benefited from the ideas and insights of many professional translators and, perhaps more importantly, my students in translation seminars. I am indebted to all the translators (Ali Anooshahr, James Clark, Dick Davis, Faridoun Farrokh, Zjaleh Hajibashi, and Franklin D. Lewis) who participated in the two panels at the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the American Literary Translators Association to which I have made reference in the first chapter. Their talents and examples in the portion of the text that they all translated provided me with their insights, which have helped me become more aware of my own shortcomings in translating and writing about the process. To all of them I owe my profound gratitude. I would especially like to thank Zjaleh Hajibashi for reading the manuscript and making many helpful suggestions. Similarly, I am most indebted to Franklin Lewis for his insight and most useful corrections and suggestions.To Faridoun Farrokh, I am grateful for his continuous assistance in the various stages of writing this book, and I treasure his friendship. Shahrokh Meskub deserves my utmost gratitude for his immense kindness in answering my sometimes irrelevant and tedious questions regarding his writing over the past decade.

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My wife, Diane, has been involved in every detail of this project and my intimate companion on the excursion through this ‘‘garden’’ and the ‘‘garden of life.’’ Dedicating the end result to her is but a most inadequate expression of my gratitude and love. I am most thankful to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas and its dean at the time, Sheldon Ekland-Olson, for providing me with a dean’s fellowship, which enabled me to take a semester of sabbatical leave to work on this book. I would like to acknowledge the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas for making available various travel grants to attend conferences and workshops related to this project. I would also like to express my appreciation to Jim Burr, the humanities editor at the University of Texas Press, for his encouragement and diligence in the publication of this book. Thanks also to Ashley Schaffer, editorial assistant; Jan McInroy, manuscript editor; and Letitia Blalock, who copyedited the manuscript.

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Prologue This is not a book about translation, nor is it a book about translating. But it is in some ways about both. Neither is it a book of translation, though it is. And this is not a book about literary criticism or a book of literary criticism, though in a way it is both. In the same vein, this is not a book about translators, or me as a translator, nor is it a book about translation theory, though its core may be a theory or theoretical. My argument, at least the ‘‘logic’’ of my argument, may stem from my Moslem roots and some of the ideas and notions with which I was inculcated as a child and adolescent. Islam, I was told, began with a negation: ‘‘la elaha ell-Allah’’ [there is no God but God]. First it negates, then it asserts. And in a sense, now that I have stated what this book is not or may not be about, I can say that it is about the act of translating, the actual process of translating, the personal experience of the translator with a literary text, the intimate relationship of the translator with a literary text, the intimate relationship that is established between the translator and the text, the unfolding of the text in the process of translating, all of which, I contend, results in a close, critical reading of a literary text that may not be, in fact is not, possible for even the most careful reader, perhaps not even the creator of the text. For another person to have a similar experience, he or she must also undergo the same process of translating, which would not be the same, but a different, albeit similar, experience of the text. My attempt in this book is twofold. As have most academics in the field of comparative literature, I have worn different hats, so to speak, as a teacher, literary critic, and translator, among others. In a sense, this book is an attempt to combine these diverse roles (which in daily academic life are in fact combined and intertwined) and to examine, or rather to practice

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in writing, the ways in which the translator in me helps the literary critic, and vice versa, while both help me as a teacher to communicate my understanding and experiences of literature to my students. Secondly, in light of the claim that the experience of a translator with a literary text is unique in the process of translating, an experience which is elusive to readers of the completed translations (including the translator), I attempt in this book to record one single experience of the translating process, with the hope of inviting the reader to look over my shoulder, as it were, to observe the process and the act of translating and thereby to participate in this act of close reading and production of meaning. I also hope to show how and why in practice every translation is inevitably a failure, with occasional moments of success. For this experiment, I have chosen a relatively short Persian-language work of only about ninety pages, titled Goftogu dar Bagh [Dialogue in the Garden], by Shahrokh Meskub. As I translate this text, I try to record at least parts of my own ‘‘dialogue’’ with this text, although I am quite aware that it is at most a partial record of one translator’s, or reader’s, interaction with one literary text. As any translator would concede, translating, especially literary translation, is not just the act of rendering words, phrases, and sentences from one language to another; rather, it involves the translating or transmitting of culture. A metaphor often used for the translator is that of a conduit, which is somewhat deceptive yet accurate, if we take into account that the essential components of the conduit—in other words, the cultural and educational background and all that contributes to the intellectual and emotional composition of the translator—affect the material that is transmitted through this conduit. In the course of the present exercise, I also try to describe, as much as is pertinent, the key components of this conduit. The chapters that follow are more or less arbitrarily divided. While in the first chapter I record an instance of group translation of a small portion of Dialogue in the Garden, the text I translate dictates the content of other chapters. Dialogue in the Garden appears deceptively simple, but it is a culturally complex work. Using the format of a conversation between a writer and a painter, Meskub delves into the Persian psyche and explores Persian perceptions of art, literature, nature, identity, spirituality, and the world in general. It follows that the act of translating this work inevitably represents an exploration of my own perception of these concepts in the

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context of Meskub’s exploration of the Iranian psyche. In the epilogue, in addition to discussing the relationship between reading and translating in general, I also address issues of particular interest to translators, such as editing and decision making, after the process of translating ends. With the exception of Persian terms and names that have standardized English spellings, the transliteration of all Persian words and names is based on Persian pronunciation.

U1 Invitation to the Garden Some years ago, in the course of writing an article that was mainly an explication of a very well known Persian poem called ‘‘Tavallodi Digar’’ [Another Birth], by Forugh Farrokhzad, I began examining several translations of the poem in English, hoping to use an already existing translation to help with the explication of the poem, which I was writing in English.1 By the time I had completed my comparison of the various translated versions, I also had begun to see that despite the failures and successes of each translation (including misreadings), indeed because of them and in them, there had emerged an explication of the poem on various levels, including many of the linguistic and cultural nuances in every word, image, line, and stanza. More important, in the differences between the translations, I could clearly see a rather distinct articulation of the struggles, trials, and tribulations—in short, the experience—of several translators of this specific literary text and indeed the experience of all translators in the process of translating. At that time, of course, I confined my remarks about the different translated versions of the poem to a few long footnotes dealing with words, images, and lines that seemed to have been an unarticulated bone of contention among the translators.2 I had then alreadydecided that I should begin to translate the poem in question and at the same time share with others my own frustrations as a translator, as well as the experience of the poem, a process that I had decided would be the most thorough, careful, and perhaps enjoyable explication of ‘‘Another Birth.’’ Later on, however, I came to the conclusion that one poem alone could not be used as a suitable vehicle, for it would not provide an ample context for my purpose. I turned my attention to those short stories, novels, and plays in Persian that could be used to elaborate linguistic and cultural aspects. Together, these

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works with the aforementioned poem sufficed to show the act of translating as critical reading. Choices, choices, choices! This is often the most frustrating task for a translator, not just deciding between various words with different connotations in the process of translating but even making a choice about what to translate. My own frustration, of course, at this stage was not unlike that of a young man determined to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after but who cannot decide on the companion to receive his love and share his life. I am using this metaphor of marriage because in some sense what translators do, particularly translators who undertake long projects such as novels, is not unlike committing oneself to marriage. True, it is not on a permanent basis, but still a translator spends several years of her or his life ‘‘married’’ to a particular text. In recent years, every time I have picked up a four-hundred-page novel that I like, which the restless translator in me wants to translate and share with English speakers, the specter of my advancing years appears before me with the question, ‘‘So, you are going to spend three or four years of your life on this project, which is now, without exaggeration, a good chunk of your life. Do you really want to do this? Are you really ready to make this sacrifice?’’ Sometimes the restless translator wins; on other occasions, the specter gets the upper hand. For the purposes of my intended project, I settled on a ‘‘temporary marriage’’ 3 (I suppose this is the closest I will be allowed to get to my Shi’ite roots) with a beautiful text I came across, called Goftogu dar Bagh [Dialogue in the Garden].4 In November , while attending a conference, I saw the author, Shahrokh Meskub, who generously gave me an autographed copy of Dialogue in the Garden, which had been published in Tehran in the summer of .5 I had known the author casually for some years and was familiar with some of his work. Meskub had a reputation as a well-respected nonacademic intellectual and writer. His books included thought-provoking observations about such important Persian classics as the Shahnameh [The Book of Kings] and addressed questions pertaining to Iranian identity, nationality, and language.6 I had never thought of Meskub as a writer of fiction and actually, before reading the book, I simply did not consider the possibility that Dialogue in the Garden was a work of fiction. On the plane back to Austin, looking through a number of books that I was carrying back with me from the conference, I came across Meskub’s, and because it

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was short I decided to read it en route. With the first sentence of the book, I realized that Dialogue in the Garden was not what I expected. He begins: I went to see Uncle Farhad’s paintings. He has been painting gardens and puts his perception of the garden in the paintings, on small and large canvases. I sat in the studio and he showed them one by one. He would remove one and then place the next one against thewall in my view. None of them was the image of a garden with a specific design and structure, layout of flower beds, trees, branches, leaves, and birds, with a pool and wattle, vines and climbing roses, weeping willows, and fountains.There was more an impression of a garden in the diverse colors/colorfulness of a few lines/strokes. . . .7

This is certainly not the beginning of a conventional scholarly discourse, a book of criticism, the kind of book readers of Meskub would expect. Is it an autobiography? Perhaps not in the conventional sense. But the question of genre aside, Meskub’s language has a certain literary quality evident in this opening paragraph, which is perhaps due to the writer’s manipulation of Persian word order and syntax, the unconventional uses of punctuation, etc., that give the text a certain poetic quality.8 And the question or the challenge that immediately confronted the habitual translator in me was, How would one render this into English? Most professional translators are incapable of reading a text without subconsciously translating it into another language, which, I must confess, can be an annoying habit. This is rather different from what is normally done by beginning language students who, when reading or hearing an utterance in a language other than their native tongue, translate it in their minds into their native language to understand it. In my own case, as a translator whose native language is Persian, this is not true at all, especially because my translations are routinely from Persian into English. Here it is the habitual translator in me who translates the Persian text into English, not because I do not understand the Persian text, but because of the challenges and possibilities that the text offers in the process of being translated. Parenthetically, however, I must confess that occasionally there have been Persian texts I have had to translate into English in order to comprehend them.9 As I continued reading Dialogue in the Garden (and translating in my mind), the usual challenges presented themselves. Some were those simple-looking, lexically concrete words that are supposed not

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to present problems to the translator in regard to finding an equivalent in the target language. The most prominent and obvious example in this text is bagh, the Persian word translated as ‘‘garden’’ here. Bagh in Persian conveys several meanings, some of which overlap with the connotations of the term ‘‘garden’’ in English. But, on the whole, these two terms often seem to signify quite different concepts. For weekend outings to the countryside, Iranians usually say they are going to a bagh. In this case, the term usually denotes a fruit orchard with high clay walls in the country. But there are also famous fenced-in baghs that may or may not contain fruit trees. The term ‘‘garden’’ in English, on the other hand, may sometimes connote the latter meaning, but it is also used for a flower bed, etc. Meskub’s use of the term bagh, as we shall see, is somewhat problematic in the Persian context and perhaps in the English context as well. But my hope is that in the process of this reading/translating of the book, the word in Persian will eventually dictate its own equivalent and connotations or denotations in the English translation. Not too far into the book, after the first five or six pages, which may serve as a sort of introduction, the actual dialogue between the uncle and the nephew begins. By the time I had read a few pages into the dialogue, I had already decided that this was a book to translate. As I read, I felt that Meskub had captured something in the Persian psyche that few other authors have, particularly in this fashion and in this century. Before the plane landed, I had finished a quick reading and even fished out a few sheets of paper from my briefcase to try my hand at translating a few paragraphs of this book that I had imagined would be quite easily rendered into English. But I soon experienced what might be called ‘‘translator’s block.’’ The text was not as easy to translate as I had thought it would be. It presented me with problem after problem, and I decided to seek help. I selected about one and a half pages of the second paragraph, which is nearly three pages long, made photocopies of it, and sent them to a dozen translators and colleagues around the country. I proposed two workshops, one for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference and another for the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference. The translators would have the choice of participating in one or both workshops. I suggested that those who chose to participate, all of whom were experienced translators, prepare their own renditions of the passage and bring to the workshops sufficient copies for the panelists and audience.

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Most recipients of the request agreed to participate in one or the other of the panels. For my part, I read the book a second time and simply translated my suggested passage, albeit to my utmost dissatisfaction. The passage selection I had made was in some ways quite arbitrary. I chose the second paragraph because that was where I began to encounter serious problems. I was sure that there were probably more challenging passages in the book, but at this point I settled for overcoming the immediate obstacles. Before citing the different translated versions, I would like to begin with a line-by-line explanation of the choices I made in my own rendition, thereby trying to convey some of the problematic aspects of the passage that the translators would face. Let me also add that at this point I am simply putting aside a discussion of numerous problems, lexical and otherwise, that I encountered in the first paragraph of the book, which I have alluded to above. The first sentence (although grammatically not a sentence, since it does not have a verb but ends with a period) is as follows: A garden in the mind with the long line of the horizon on the upper part of the painting near the sky, a low, thin band of sky, and the wide open plain in the foreground.

Besides the term ‘‘garden,’’ which I briefly discussed earlier, and skipping the preposition, ‘‘in,’’ the problem for the translator here has to do with the term zehn, which I have translated as ‘‘mind.’’ Dictionary meanings of zehn are ‘‘mind,’’ ‘‘opinion,’’ and ‘‘memory.’’ Obviously, ‘‘opinion’’ is not the meaning conveyed in this sentence, and ‘‘memory’’ may also be set aside for now, although it can produce a legitimate reading in the context of the entire book later on. Of course, the term ‘‘imagination’’ may also be useful, but given its connotations in English, it could alter the meaning of the passage altogether and seduce the reader into a reading that may not be what the Persian text conveys. An ‘‘imagined garden’’ may be useful and somewhat accurate, but I decide to choose ‘‘mind,’’ which is less restrictive, as is perhaps the Persian, zehn. The phrase ‘‘with the long line of the horizon on the upper part of the painting’’ follows without any punctuation. The first question is, Should a comma be inserted after ‘‘mind’’ and before the preposition ‘‘with’’? I decide against it for now, since the comma would dramatize the previous phrase without including what fol-

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lows. ‘‘The long line of the horizon’’ makes sense for now, and perhaps so do the words ‘‘on the upper part of the painting.’’ The word tablo [from the French tableau] is used for ‘‘painting.’’ Should I use something like ‘‘canvas’’? But the term ‘‘canvas’’ may not convey that in Persian tablo is also used for ‘‘painting.’’ This is immediately followed by ‘‘near the sky,’’ then we have the first punctuation mark in the paragraph, which happens to be a comma. I could insert two additional commas, one after ‘‘a garden in the mind’’ and one after the word ‘‘painting.’’ But without the commas, the Persian text has an almost stream of consciousness flow that punctuation disrupts. Parenthetically, in Persian, punctuation is a relatively recent introduction and does not precisely follow Western, particularly English, conventions. Few writers use punctuation precisely and consistently, or even in accordance with the conventions that have developed in Persian writing in the past half century. Meskub is among the writers who try to make use of punctuation marks consistently. The phrase that follows the first comma and in fact describes the sky consists of one noun and two adjectives, which would seem to be simple to translate but is rather problematic. ‘‘A low [as opposed to high, or short as opposed to tall], thin [or narrow] sky.’’ What are my options here? ‘‘A short, narrow sky’’ does not make much sense, nor does ‘‘a low, thin sky.’’ I go back to the text and remind myself that this is a description of a part of a painting or a series of paintings. The sky is not a real sky and not necessarily a realistic representation of the sky in the painting. How does one describe this in words? Should I translate it as ‘‘a low, thin band of sky,’’ which, by the way, also adds another, perhaps unnecessary, comma to the text? Will this latter phrase capture the Persian phrase with all its idiosyncratic usage and clear description of what kind of sky it is? I decide to leave it for now and wait for the panel discussions and the versions provided by others to resolve the problem. I know this is avoidance behavior on my part, but I join in the practice of many translators who often do the same. The next and final phrase of the first sentence, which follows another comma, is quite straightforward. I translate it as ‘‘and the wide open plain in the foreground.’’ The only obvious shortcoming that I see with my rendering is that the Persian version consists of three short, simple words while my English translation is much longer. Besides, the word that Meskub uses for ‘‘foreground’’ simply means ‘‘in front,’’ and my choice of ‘‘foreground’’ sounds somewhat technical. But I have to settle for it, be-

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cause in this case, or maybe all cases, conveying the meaning should take precedence over brevity. I have finally arrived at the second sentence: ‘‘I saw the paintings one by one.’’ Looks simple enough, doesn’t it? It is not! The first problem is the verb. Meskub uses the very common verb that means ‘‘to see.’’ He uses the tense that can be described as ‘‘habitual past’’ but is sometimes used as ‘‘past continuous.’’ In other words, setting aside the problem of the word tablo, which was mentioned earlier, I could translate the sentence as, ‘‘I was seeing the paintings one by one.’’ But this does not sound right, and I am almost tempted to use the verb ‘‘to look’’ instead. Why did Meskub not use the equivalent of the verb ‘‘to look’’ or ‘‘to watch’’ in Persian? I search for a verb that is more neutral and allows me to escape being entangled in the difference between ‘‘to see’’ and ‘‘to look’’; I choose ‘‘toview’’ and settle for simple past tense in English, since it is not as restrictive as the Persian simple past tense and allows for some continuity. I translate the sentence as ‘‘I viewed the paintings one by one’’ and retain Meskub’s semicolon after it, which is followed by ‘‘they were all alike, and yet each a different garden.’’ I could argue for ‘‘another’’ instead of ‘‘different,’’ but for now I settle for ‘‘different’’ and insert the second period in the paragraph. There is a tendency in Persian to start sentences with the equivalent of ‘‘and.’’ In some cases, as in the case of the next sentence, it could merely indicate the continuation of thought. Most translators from Persian often prefer to omit the ‘‘and’’ in English, and for now I conform to this convention and follow suit. The problem, however, in the next sentence is not with ‘‘and’’ but essentially with the main verb. The verb is bazgu-kardan, which literally means ‘‘to retell,’’ but obviously, as we shall see, this meaning does not work here. I could simply use ‘‘to tell,’’ but I am concerned that it is not quite accurate. So I choose ‘‘to recount’’ and translate the sentence as follows: ‘‘I will recount some of them in the order in which I saw them and on the basis of my unorganized notes.’’ There are a number of other problems and inadequacies in my translation of this sentence that I will overlook and return to the main problem of the verb. What is the narrator recounting? Apparently, he is referring to the different paintings of the garden, but can one recount paintings, or is it descriptions of the paintings based on his ‘‘unorganized notes’’? I am tempted to abandon ‘‘to retell,’’ ‘‘to tell,’’ and ‘‘to recount’’ altogether, thinking that Meskub did not think about the meaning of the verb he was using and chose the wrong

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word. I think the verb that should be used here is ‘‘to describe’’ or ‘‘to explain,’’ regardless of the Persian original. I seek help fromWebster and read the definitions of the various verbs. ‘‘To recount’’ may be a more accurate translation, but it does not convey the precise meaning I am looking for in English. I settle on ‘‘to relate,’’ although with some hesitation, and leave ‘‘recount’’ as another possibility along with ‘‘explain.’’ This practice, the inclusion of a number of possible equivalents of a word or even a sentence, is one that I often follow, hoping for an epiphany later. But essentially I have found that this practice is merely procrastination on my part, and epiphanies do not happen as often as translators wish them to happen. To my dismay (I am not sure why I am dismayed), Meskub does not end the aforementioned sentence with a period, but after a semicolon he continues the next sentence with another ‘‘and’’ that I leave out: I will have to alter even more in words the garden that had been altered before in the journey from nature to imagination and from there to the painter’s canvas, and say that there was a mountain and high sky.10

One could, of course, edit this part of the sentence and change, for instance, the phrase ‘‘and from there to the painter’s canvas,’’ but at this point I am reluctant to do so because the Persian phrase az anja (literally, ‘‘from that place’’) registers ‘‘imagination’’ as a location and by extension does the same with ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘painter’s canvas.’’ By editing and altering the text to the form I mentioned, this point could be lost altogether. The verb I have translated as ‘‘alter’’ in two instances is somewhat problematic. The choices are ‘‘change,’’ ‘‘metamorphose,’’ and ‘‘transform.’’ ‘‘Metamorphose’’ or ‘‘transform’’ may be good choices for the first instance, but there is intentionality in the second instance, which can be expressed better by ‘‘alter.’’ Nevertheless, I am not too keen on using two different verbs, since firstly Meskub has used the same verb in both instances and secondly the use of the same verb retains the continuity of the process of change from the first stage to the second and then to the third. Without any warning, the fourth sentence shifts into the present tense. I justify this shift by saying that the garden has already gone through a transformation from nature into imagination and from imagination into language, and since the words (describing the garden or gardens) are present on the page at this moment before my eyes, the present tense helps convey the painting of the garden (or paintings of the gardens) to the reader

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directly and unmediated. I translate the sentence as ‘‘The mountain dominates everything and at the foot of the mountain, down there, a small hut is hidden.’’ One could insert an additional comma after ‘‘everything,’’ but I leave that to a later revision. I do not like the sound of the last phrase, ‘‘a small hut is hidden.’’ In Persian, it literally reads, ‘‘a small hut has become hidden,’’ which is a form that generally functions as the passive voice in Persian, but in this case, if for instance it were a human instead of a hut, one could say that a person was hiding or hides. But if I translate it as ‘‘a small hut hides,’’ the reader would be expected to ask, ‘‘Behind what?’’ But there is a period at the end of the sentence, after this phrase, and I decide to use it to end my translated sentence, even though the next sentence begins with ‘‘Behind the . . .’’: Behind the long, drawn trunks of the trees, the hut is visible.

Firstly, the hut is hidden, but it can also be seen. If I can combine the two sentences, it may read better, but I would have to leave out either that the hut is hidden or that it can be seen.11 As I try to visualize the hut hiding behind the trees, I think perhaps I could describe it as ‘‘half-hidden,’’ whatever that means. But then I would be deviating a little too far from the original, which is not in conformity with my general philosophy of translation. I could also change the syntax of the latter sentence and say, ‘‘The hut is visible behind the long, drawn trunks of the trees.’’ But the contradiction between this and the previous sentence would become more evident and it would not really help the situation that much. Another problem concerns the adjectives ‘‘lonely’’ and ‘‘drawn,’’ the meanings of which are not quite clear to me in this exact context, but because of the further description of the trees in the next sentence, I leave them as they are for now and move on: The thin vertical lines of the trees, as thin as reeds, but erect and firm toward the stifled and sunken sky, cut the hut.

Leaving all the adjectives aside, my immediate problem is ‘‘cut the hut,’’ which is a very literal translation of a phrase that does not seem very precise in Persian either. Clearly, the picture is the hut in the background with the trees before it, hiding vertical strips of the hut. One solution may be to add ‘‘into strips’’ at the end, which is somewhat more descriptive but does not quite solve the problem.

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It is when I come to the next couple of sentences that one of the previous problems is solved: The hut is there, but not the trees. It is a treeless garden with a rectangular, simple hut, without any door or windows; this garden is burnt.

Now I understand and recall: This is not a painting of one garden. We have already been told that there is a series of garden paintings: ‘‘They were all alike, and yet each a different garden.’’ So, in one painting, the garden is hidden, we cannot say behind what; and in another it is visible behind the trees. Since I have made this discovery, I go back to my more conservative practices and avoid using my translator’s license too liberally in editing Meskub’s text. The confusion I had earlier in regard to whether the small hut was hidden or visible becomes clear now: In one painting, the hut is hidden from view, and in another it is visible. Also, at this point, I think about a possible shortfall of the process of translating as critical reading. Translators sometimes become so entangled in the web of words, phrases, equivalents, connotations, and denotations in one sentence that they lose sight of the larger picture of the text. On the other hand, there is perhaps a greater danger in the practice of translators who essentially read an entire long sentence, even a long paragraph—and I have known many who use this method—and then write their own version of it, a paraphrase of sorts. The product of such a translation technique is something that is distanced from translation proper, if I am permitted to think that such a thing exists—and verges on a sort of creative writing, though inspired by another piece of writing in another language.12 So, to articulate a dictum that has been more or less implicit in my translation activities: Certainly for the first draft, stick to an almost literal (albeit not necessarily literal to the extent of being silly) translation. With this dictum in mind, I proceed with the next two sentences: Tall, indistinct, entangled grasses can be seen in the rays of flames; a fire must be burning somewhere the reflection of which is cast on the naked body of the garden, or has the copper sun at sunset entered and filled the garden? Autumn and the flames of burnt branches and leaves?

There are two words in Persian both of which I have translated as ‘‘flame’’ in these two sentences. In the first instance, Meskub uses the word

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sho’leh in the phrase ‘‘the rays of the flames’’ (or actually, ‘‘the rays of the flames of fire’’). I am not too sure about ‘‘rays’’ either; perhaps it should be ‘‘the light reflected by the flames of the fire.’’ The second instance is in the second sentence, and the Persian word in this case is zabaneh. I am not at all certain if ‘‘the flames of burnt branches and leaves’’ makes any sense, since if the branches and leaves are burnt, there should not be any flames. Zabaneh is from the word zaban, which literally means ‘‘tongue,’’ and I imagine that the flames of a burning fire resemble fiery tongues. I think about the term ‘‘blaze’’ and try it out in the sentence: ‘‘Autumn and the blaze of burnt branches and leaves.’’ This still does not solve the problem of the contradiction I mentioned. Or is it figurative? There is actually no fire in this case and the colors of autumn in the branches and leaves look like flames, even though they have been burnt. It still does not make much sense, and I abandon the problem at this point. With the next sentence, we are obviously led to other paintings: The hut is always the same, unlike the garden.

I suddenly focus on the word ‘‘hut.’’ In Persian the word is kolbeh, which can be translated as ‘‘hut’’ or ‘‘cottage.’’ I even think of other synonyms such as ‘‘shed,’’ but that is certainly not the right word. I go back to the first paragraph of the book, looking for some clues to the location of the uncle’s garden. It could be anywhere in Iran, but somehow I picture it in the northern provinces and picture the kinds of structures that would be found there. I look up the words ‘‘hut’’ and ‘‘cottage’’ in Webster and decide that the definition for ‘‘hut’’ is closer to what I need: ‘‘a little house or cabin of the plainest or crudest kind.’’ So I settle for ‘‘hut’’ and decide that this word will create the closest impression of kolbeh in the English reader’s mind. But there is more about the ‘‘hut’’ in the next sentence: The hut has no windows, an enclosed square structure, complete in itself, like a shelter, a place of refuge within reach, yet inaccessible, the fleeting abode of the soul!

For now, I am following Meskub’s punctuation faithfully. For ‘‘inaccessible’’ I could also use ‘‘out of reach,’’ but then I look at the unexpected last phrase, ‘‘the fleeting abode of the soul,’’ and I decide not to be too neurotic about the differences between ‘‘inaccessible’’ and ‘‘out of reach.’’ The description of the hut ends here with a function assigned to it: ‘‘The

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fleeting abode of the soul.’’ The word ruh can be translated not only as ‘‘soul’’ but also as ‘‘spirit’’ and ‘‘psyche.’’ And I am not sure if a fanatically secular writer like Meskub would want the religious connotations of ‘‘soul.’’ Besides, what does the phrase mean? The adjective farrar, which I have translated as ‘‘fleeting,’’ somehow reminds me of a poem by Emily Dickinson, ‘‘A Narrow Fellow in the Grass.’’ With that poem, the word ‘‘evanescence’’ flashes to my mind. But this is not the same thing. The Persian-English dictionaries (which I learned a long time ago not to trust) give me ‘‘volatile,’’ ‘‘fugacious,’’ and ‘‘transitory.’’ The first is obviously wrong in this case; I do not like the sound of the second; and I am hesitant about the third, though ‘‘transitory’’ adds a dimension to Meskub’s phrase that he may (or may not) have intended. I also think of ‘‘ephemeral,’’ but when I look up the definition in the dictionary, I discard it along with the rest. I finally arrive at the next and final sentence of the panel assignment: Sometimes the garden is the stalks of wheat or rushes and the wind, the wind that has taken the whole hut and leveled everything.

I look back at the sentence; it reads okay. But I have left out a prepositional phrase at the end because I have a difficult time translating it and because I can justify leaving it out by saying that it is redundant. The phrase is ‘‘in its blast.’’ It just does not sound right, and by using the verb ‘‘leveled,’’ I decide, the intended meaning is already implied. As I set the translation assignment aside, I look at a few sentences that continue the passage and realize how arbitrarily I had chosen the cutoff point. But I suppose practical considerations would have to be given priority, and armed with the translated passage I left for the ALTA and MESA conferences and the imminent panels. At that point, of course, I had not seen any of the translations of the other panel participants, which I present here in no particular order: The suggestion of a garden, the long line of the horizon, towards the top of the canvas, next to the low stripe of sky, the open plain in the foreground. I looked at the paintings one by one. All of them were pretty much the same and yet each one had a different garden. I’ll describe a few of them exactly in the order I saw them, on the basis of the random notes I made at the time.

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The garden which underwent a transformation in transit from nature to the imagination, and from there to the painted canvas, will, of course, be further altered by my description. I say it was a mountain and a tall sky. The mountain dominates the landscape and, down below, at its foot, there is a small hidden shack. Through tall thin trunks of the trees, you can see the shack. The fine vertical lines of the trees, thin as reeds but straight and up-raised into the low, oppressive sky, cut through the shack. The shack is there, but there are no trees—it’s a treeless garden with a simple square shack, without door or window.The garden is a scorched one. The tall grasses, smudged and run together, are visible in the glow of the flames. There must be a fire burning somewhere, as its reflection stretches across the bare land of the garden. The rays of a coppery sun as it sets illuminating the garden? Autumn and tongues of leafy flames and branches? The shack is always the same, in contrast to the gardens. Just a windowless, four-sided shack, complete unto itself; a kind of shelter, a haven close-by and yet out of the way, a refuge for the soul. Sometimes the garden is full of stalks of wheat or sedges and wind, a wind that blows the shack down and everything else in its path. ( ) 13

It was a fantasized garden with the horizon pushed up all the way to the top of the canvas, the sky reduced to a narrow strip, and a wide open field of view in the foreground. I checked other canvases one by one. They all looked the same, and yet each one was a different garden. I will describe some of them in sequence as I viewed them, basing the description on the casual notes I jotted down. Inevitably, my impressions will diverge from the sensory perception of nature communicated to the artist’s imagination and thence transferred onto the canvas. I say that depicted on canvas is a mountain and a lofty sky. The mountain dominates the landscape. At the foot of the mountain there is a shed, half hidden behind the trees.Tree trunks are straight and perpendicular and as delicate as reeds reaching toward the dim and leaden sky. In their straightness they seem to cut up the shed into pieces. Yet, glanced from another angle, there are no trees, only the shed. Actually, it is a treeless garden with a lone simple square structure of a shed that has no doors

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or windows. This garden has recently burned down. A riot of tall, untended grass is visible in the glow of what is perhaps a fire somewhere beyond the borders of the canvas reflecting off the denuded garden? Or is it the autumn that has burned off the edges of leaves and tips of sprigs? Unlike the garden that mutates from canvas to canvas, the shed is constant. It is a solid, seamless edifice, impenetrable and self-contained, a shelter both accessible and beyond reach, an elusive sanctuary of the spirit. Sometimes the garden is a surge of wheat stalks or a canebrake in the wind, a wind that has blown off the shed and is making everything lean in the direction of its bluster. ( ) 14 A garden in the imagination with the high line of the horizon at the top of the painting near the sky, and a low, narrow sky, and the open field in the foreground. I saw the paintings one by one. They were all alike, and yet, each was a different garden. And I shall recount some of them according to how I have seen them, and according to those same indiscriminate notes that I have scribbled; and the garden that has twice undergone a metamorphosis in its journey from nature to the imagination and from there to the canvas, I will metamorphose even further and say that there was a mountain there and a high sky.The mountain dominates everything, and at the foot of the mountain, down below, hides a little cottage. Behind the slender and elongated tree-trunks, the cottage catches the eye. Thin as a reed, but steadfast and straight, the thin and perpendicular line of the trees has split the cottage in the direction of the suffocated sunken sky. There is a cottage, but there are no trees. It is an orchard without trees with a simple, four-cornered cottage that has neither a door nor any clefts on its frame. This garden has burned. The tall, faded, entangled weeds can be seen in the rays of the flames of a fire. There’s got to be a fire lit somewhere, a fire whose reflection has fallen upon the naked body of the garden. Is it the copper sun of sunset that has come into the garden and filled it? Or is it autumn and the blaze of seared leaves and branches? The cottage is always constant, unlike the garden. The cottage that has no windows is a quadrilateral enclosure complete in itself like a shelter and a shield of life that is at once both at hand and yet inaccessible—the fleeing abode of the soul. Sometimes the garden is the wheat or osier stems, and the wind is a wind that has

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carried the house and the cottage away, and has laid things flat in its blowing. ( ) 15 A garden in the mind with a high horizon line at the top of the picture close to the sky, and an open plain in front. I saw the pictures one at a time. All of them were alike, but with all of this, each one was a different garden. I will say some of them again in the same order that I saw them, and on the basis of the same disorderly notes that I have taken. In explaining, I necessarily transform the garden more, which on the journey from nature to the imagination two times over, and from there onto a painter’s canvas experienced a metamorphosis. I say it was a mountain and a high sky. The mountain dominates everything. And at the foot of the mountain, there below, a small hut has been hidden away. The hut could be seen behind narrow, long trunks of trees. The thin and vertical lines of the trees, as narrow as a reed, but straight and firm, in the direction of the suffocated and collapsed sky, have cut the hut. The hut is there, but the tree isn’t. It is a garden without a tree, with one simple, square hut, without a door or window. This garden is burned. The tall grasses, obliterated and running together, can be seen in the radiance of a fire’s flame. There must be a fire alight somewhere such that its reflection has fallen on the bare body of the garden. The copper sun at sunset that has come into the garden and has filled it? Creeping, a twig of the branch and the leaf have burned? The hut is always uniform, contrary to the garden. The hut, without a window, is one enclosed lean-to and complete in itself. Like a refuge, a lifeline close at hand and beyond reach. Shelter for the volatile spirit! Sometimes the garden is stalks of wheat or bulrushes, and wind. A wind that has taken the house, all of the hut, and has laid low the things with its own gust. ( ) 16 A garden in the mind, with the long line of the horizon at the top of the canvas near the sky—a squat, narrow sky—open field in front. I looked at the paintings one by one; they were all alike, yet each one was a different garden. I shall review some of them in the same order I saw them, according to the notes, not ordered, that I took. With this expression, the garden—already transformed twice in the traverse from nature to imagination and from there onto the canvas surface—I will inevitably

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transform further saying that there was a mountain and the tall sky. The mountain dominates everything and at the front of the mountain, at the base, a small cottage is hidden. Behind the long, slender trunks of trees, the cottage appears. The fine vertical line of the trees, delicate as a flute but straight and solid, in the direction of the oppressive low-hanging sky, has set the cottage apart. There is a cottage but there are no trees. It is a treeless garden with one simple square cottage that has no door nor window; this garden is burnt. Tall grass, blurred and matted, is visible in the flicker of the fire’s blaze. There must be a fire burning somewhere whose glow has illuminated the naked body of the garden; the copper sun at dusk that has come into the garden and flooded it? Fall, and the flame of the burnt branches and leaves? The cottage is always the same, unlike the garden. The windowless cottage is a closed box, complete in itself; like a sanctuary and safe retreat, near at hand and out of reach, shelter for the soul’s escape! Sometimes the garden is stalks of wheat or rushes and wind, a wind that has borne the house, the whole cottage, away and flattened everything in its blast. ( ) 17 A garden of the mind, made with a long line representing the horizon, near the top of the picture, and a narrow stretch of sky, and an open plain in the foreground. I looked at all the pictures one by one; they were all of the same kind but despite this each one showed a different garden. And some of them I can describe as I saw them, based on the confused observations I made at the time; and gardens seemed from nature, while traveling were transferred to the imagination and thence onto canvas where they took on a different appearance, which I necessarily change further in the telling; but I can say that there was a mountain and a high sky. The mountain dominated everything, and at the foot of the mountain, at the bottom of the picture, a little hut was hidden. Behind the tall, thin tree trunks a hut could just be made out. The thin vertical lines of the tree trunks, slender as reeds but straight and strong, cut across the hut and rose up towards a heavy, lowering sky. The hut is there, but there are no trees. It’s a treeless garden with a simple rectangular hut without a dooror window; this garden is burnt.Tall grasses, blurred and tangled, are visible in the firelight; the fire must be burning somewhere so that its light can fall on the naked body of the garden; is it autumn

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that flickers over the branches and burnt leaves? The hut is always the same, unlike the garden. A hut with no windows, four closed sides, sufficient unto itself; like a refuge, an asylum for the soul, near at hand and unreachable. An abode for the fleeing spirit! Some times the garden is wheat stalks or bulrushes and wind, a wind that has swept away houses and every hut and flattened everything in its path. ( ) 18

Before ending this chapter, I was inclined to put on my translation critic’s hat and discuss the pros and cons of the various versions. But since I am back from the conferences and involved in the translating process, I have decided to discard that hat. I would imagine that the readers who take the time to read and compare the different translations of this passage will get a better sense of the original, as I have also learned from the efforts of the various translators. In different meetings and conversations with the translators of this segment, I felt a sense of solidarity; we all commiserated about the difficulties we had encountered in our renditions of the Meskub passage. The others, of course, do not have to concern themselves with the remainder of Dialogue in the Garden. That task is left to me, by choice.

U2 Renditions of the Garden It is early December and I have just returned from San Francisco, where the Middle East Studies Association conference was held. The panels at the American Literary Translators Association and MESA were both quite stimulating. I do not think that as a group, or rather two groups, we solved any of the major problems regarding the translation of the passage, but group discussions of this sort often function as group therapy sessions for translators, like myself, who frequently lose their self-confidence, feeling utterly helpless and incompetent to properly translate the simplest of sentences. In addition to group discussions of the kind we had in the form of the two aforementioned panels, I have also used the group format in my graduate translation seminars with relative success. I usually choose a literary text, a short story, or a play, for instance, and ask the participants in the seminar to prepare a translation of the first couple of pages of it. In our weekly meetings, we read each sentence and the various translated versions and democratically vote on the best and most accurate version after detailed discussions. This kind of collective effort is rewarding and a wonderful hands-on teaching device for graduate students in the early stages of their training as translators. But because production is quite minimal, this method is not practical, since my intention is also to prepare a publishable translation of the text by the end of the semester.1 To address this problem, after the first couple of sessions I assign a page or so to each student to translate for the following session. Each translation is then read line by line and commented on by all participants. At the end of the semester, I collect all the translated assignments, which by then include the revisions suggested by participants. I edit the final version of the text for accuracy, fluency, and

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style and submit it for publication with the names of all students who have contributed to the project. Group translations of this sort are primarily a teaching device, and even the publication of the collective product is aimed primarily at encouraging students to continue translating and building their self-confidence.2 However, outside the classroom, group translations are not practical, and successful translations of major works are generally achieved through the efforts of individual translators. I have gone to some length describing the limitations of group translation efforts in order to stress the role of individual creativity in translation. As I look back at the portion of Meskub’s text which was translated by several individuals, and particularly as I look at the sentences that follow that portion and contemplate the problems that I will be facing and my own inadequacies in handling them, a sense of loneliness overtakes me, and I begin to consider abandoning the project altogether. I compare this sense of loneliness with the proverbial loneliness of any writer facing a blank sheet of paper. The differences are very clear. The challenge to the translator is essentially how to solve a problem or series of problems. In other words, the problem is concrete and defined in the form of the original literary text. The translator’s task is to use creativity, knowledge, craftsmanship, experience, and everything else he or she has at his or her disposal to solve that problem. By contrast, the challenge to the writer is that the problem itself is not concrete or defined. In some respects, I determine that the latter is a worse kind of loneliness, and I decide that I can handle my translator’s loneliness and resume the task of tackling the Meskub text. The comparison also reminds me that in my own academic pursuits, I usually have one or more translation projects underway, in which I take refuge whenever I am stuck while writing an article or a chapter for a book. In fact, translating has always functioned for me as a therapeutic device in handling my writer’s block. And since I am at that point here, I take my usual refuge and return to translating. I reread the translation of the passage with which I have already struggled. The narrator’s description of the paintings of the garden continues as follows: this garden is a form given to dream; it is the form of dream and imagination,

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What I hesitantly translate here as ‘‘form’’ is surat in Persian. Surat is what I call a chameleon type of word. It changes color in every new context and yet it is still the same lizard. The dictionary generously contributes the following meanings to my confusion: ‘‘face,’’ ‘‘figure,’’ ‘‘form,’’ ‘‘effigy,’’ ‘‘picture,’’ ‘‘image,’’ ‘‘list,’’ ‘‘statement,’’ ‘‘bill,’’ ‘‘circumstance,’’ and ‘‘case’’ (in addition to numerous other possibilities when the word is used in combination with others). Even ‘‘appearance’’ is a possibility, which brings to my mind the word ‘‘manifestation.’’ On the other hand, there is something of the word ‘‘facade’’ in it. As I said, it is a chameleon. My first—and rather automatic—choice, ‘‘form,’’ makes sense, but I fear it conveys something that may not be what I infer from the original Persian. ‘‘Image’’ and ‘‘picture’’ may work in one of the two phrases, but they are not precise either. I am tempted to use ‘‘face,’’ and as I test it in the sentence I like it more and more. How frequently a literal translation is the best! this garden is a face given to dream, it is the face of dream and imagination/fancy,

(In this and other cases, when I find that two or more words seem to fit, I use a slash to keep them in the text until the time comes to make a final decision.) The description of this particular garden does not end here. I am becoming convinced that Meskub uses periods to separate descriptions of various paintings. The two sentences that are separated with a semicolon and end in a comma continue: and the hut sits right at the top, on the mane of the hill and the wind rushes to it from two sides and the stalks and tips of the branches of the trees—lines that can be guessed to be the stalks or tips of the branches of vegetation—bend toward this shelter planted at the top of the elevation, and from the bottom of the painting, the ground pulls itself up.

As I read the passage in Persian, it is so utterly confusing to me that I decide to translate it quite literally. But as I return to it a couple of days later and read the text, it becomes more clear to me: ‘‘This garden is a face given to dream, it is the face of dream and imagination/fancy.’’ I picture the painting in my own mind. I think of it as a fuzzy landscape, perhaps reminiscent of Claude Monet’s ‘‘Japanese Footbridge’’ series of paintings. It is a sort of silhouette of a garden, the outlines are not quite clear or distinct. And as

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I reread the phrase between the two dashes, ‘‘—lines that can be guessed to be stalks and tips of branches of vegetation—,’’ it becomes more clear to me. The narrator who is looking at the painting can only guess that the lines are stalks and tips of branches of vegetation.With this in mind, I move to the next few sentences, which seem to describe a nightmare rather than a dream: The painting has an unusual background and depth, at several different levels, one higher than the next. The sky is invading the earth with a black wrath, what a horrifying dream! It has left no room/space for the house and trees, it has come down all the way to earth and the earth, frightened and gaunt, hides like a thick strip at the bottom of the painting.

At this point, I am more or less clinging to a literal translation, particularly because I am not certain whether or not the next sentence or couple of sentences continue the description of the same painting. The hut sits in the background, the tips of the branches of the trees are bending from both sides toward the hut, the tips of the branches cannot be distinguished from one another; an entangled, dark mass, behind which a darker mountain is stretched out/lying down.

As I continue translating, I notice the personification of inanimate objects. In the previous sentence, we have the sky invading the earth, and so on, and in the latter sentence the hut ‘‘sits’’ and the mountain is ‘‘stretched out’’ or rather ‘‘lying down.’’ I also determine that, given the fact that the sky ‘‘has left no room/space for the house and trees,’’ the latter sentence describes a different painting. I am also somewhat concerned about the word ‘‘house.’’ Meskub uses khaneh in Persian, which is not the same as kolbeh [hut]. Moreover, whereas English uses the singular form for one item or object and the plural form for more than one item or object to express generic concepts, Persian uses the singular form in both cases. So, I could translate the same phrase as the sky ‘‘has left no room/space for houses and trees.’’ In this case, the phrase would merely indicate a general observation by the narrator and not refer specifically to all the paintings in general, each of which includes a hut, trees, etc. But I decide that this would be too confusing and assume that in this instance, the narrator simply refers to the hut as the house.

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The beginning of the next sentence immediately presents me with a problem that not even my literal translation can solve.The particular word that concerns me is kutah, which literally means ‘‘short.’’ The phrase is, ‘‘the sky is short,’’ which does not make much sense. The antonym of the adjective kutah in Persian is boland, which can be translated as ‘‘tall’’ or ‘‘high.’’ Since one could say that the sky is high—a ‘‘high sky,’’ in the case of this sentence—I would have to translate it as ‘‘The sky is low.’’ I am not too certain of this translation, but I continue: The sky is low and no light shines from anywhere but/and in spite of this a grey and [???] cold light has engulfed the illusive/haunting garden; like a fog in the fields/meadows or a sadness in the soul.

With the last phrase in mind, I think about that famous American movie Play Misty for Me and am tempted to change ‘‘fog’’ to ‘‘mist.’’ The blurriness of the paintings becomes more and more psychological (or is it spiritual?) as the narrator asserts his commentaries in the descriptions. In the next sentence, two different paintings are described briefly. The sky is threatening, dark, rainy and the earth is black and in another, the earth is a narrow strip.

I have supplied the translation with an additional ‘‘is’’ which I feel is needed. As I try my hand at the next sentence and find that verbs are left out in the description, I am tempted to take out the ‘‘is’’ I have added to the previous sentence. Twilight at dusk, the sky wide, vast and aggressive, between these two thin transparent lines, the horizon can be seen far away; with the figures of a few lone trees.

‘‘Twilight at dusk’’ may be redundant, but so is the Persian phrase gorg-o mish-e ghorub, literally, ‘‘the wolf and ewe of sunset.’’ And since I am losing that image in Persian, I allow myself to be redundant until later on, when some editor in a publishing house objects to it. I am not quite certain whether the next few sentences still continue the description of the previous painting. And at this point, I decide that, as is my wont, I will not try to clarify it for the reader in English. Let us all be confused democratically. The garden is on the horizon: distant, at the dividing line of the sky and the earth. When you are on the earth, the garden is in the sky and

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when you are in the sky, on earth; but neither in this nor in that does it fluctuate on the slippery border of both.

In the war between these two languages that are ‘‘hardly on speaking terms,’’ 3 I have generally followed Meskub’s unconventional Persian punctuation. In the case of the punctuation after ‘‘The garden is on the horizon,’’ however, I come down on the side of English conventions and change Meskub’s semicolon to a colon. I also decide to keep this option open while translating the remainder of the text. Compared to the next sentence, the above passage was pretty straightforward. I picture the painting as I did with the others, and some sort of image is created in my mind. This I take as a good omen and delve into the problematic description of the next garden. ‘‘I saw a garden which was all sky and passage of the sky.’’ No period yet and the description is not complete. The main problem is the word asmangodar, which I have translated here as ‘‘passage of the sky’’ for no apparent reason and without trying to make sense. The word looks simple enough. It consists of the noun asman, which means ‘‘sky,’’ and the suffix godar, for which the dictionary provides words that generally mean ‘‘passage.’’ In Persian, especially in this century, there has been a tendency to make new words by adding prefixes and suffixes to common words. The result is sometimes readily understood and at other times quite baffling. Asmangodar is one of those words which somehow every native speaker reading Meskub’s book in the original reads over as if he or she has understood it, but usually that is not the case. I consult half a dozen bilingual and monolingual small and large dictionaries and for godar I essentially find the word ‘‘pass’’ or ‘‘passage.’’ ‘‘Sky pass’’? It sounds like something, but I am not sure what. I contact friends and colleagues around the country, but their answers, which are quite baffling, do not satisfy me. I remember that I know the author, who lives in France, and decide to go directly to the source. So I wait for a solution, but at the same time I think, What if it were a, let’s say, twelfth-century text? Would I have to seek the services of a medium to contact the author for clarification? The telephone is nearby. I should be more practical and wait until I have all of my questions before I contact the author, but it is one of those situations when I know I will not be able to sleep for several nights before I have the answer. I dial a number in Paris, where Meskub lives now. He chuckles (probably about my ignorance) and says that it is the same word as the Arabic phrase khat

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ol-ra’s. Since I have heard this term, which he describes as a ‘‘hunter’s term,’’ I thank him, hang up the phone, and go back to my dictionaries. For some strange reason, none of the bilingual dictionaries list the Arabic term. However, putting together a combination of the Persian and the Arabic terms, I decide that it should mean ‘‘skyline.’’ I am almost certain. I go back to translating the sentence and for now change ‘‘passage of the sky’’ to ‘‘skyline.’’ I saw a garden which was all sky and the skyline, wavy, more or less level, at the bottom. The mountain, mild and modest, had kindly given as much room to the sky as it could. The tips of the branches of a few trees blown by the wind and bent, were moving upward toward the calm/placid and colorless sky.

There are still two more sentences that I think should follow the description of the same painting, but I stop here to figure out, literally picture in my mind, how tree branches can bend upward toward the sky. I cannot picture it and leave it with a large question mark placed above the sentences of the paragraph, on part of which I had sought the collaboration of other translators, as follows: The reflection of the earth could be seen in the dusty/hazy air. The air had become the same color and of the same material/texture as the earth.

The word I translate here as ‘‘dusty’’ is khaki in Persian and does not have the negative connotations of ‘‘dusty.’’ I am tempted to change ‘‘dusty’’ to the English borrowed term ‘‘khaki’’ or even ‘‘earth-colored,’’ but neither works well in the sentence. ‘‘Hazy’’ may be another possibility, but it somehow seems cleaner than ‘‘dusty.’’ Better to be satisfied with the negative connotations of ‘‘dusty’’ and hope for the best. As I look at the first sentence of the next paragraph, I notice that the last sentences of the previous paragraph were in the past tense. I wonder if the writer’s decision to have a paragraph is as arbitrary as the change in the verb tenses. This is not an empty speculation, since paragraphing in Persian, similar to the situation of punctuation, also often follows no particular established convention. I am somewhat puzzled in this case, but translating must go on. The garden has no doors/gates or walls; it is as open and wide as the plain and wherever a path is shown, the garden is there, it has no path.

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I think about using ‘‘fences’’ instead of ‘‘walls,’’ but then I think, if this is a Persian garden it probably has walls. The term that Meskub uses in Persian is dar-o peykar, which literally means ‘‘door and body/figure.’’ I am also not too clear about the word ‘‘path.’’ The phrases ‘‘a path is shown’’ and ‘‘has no path’’ are enigmatic, but I have no solution because I do not really think I understand them in Persian. I place a big red question mark above the sentence and hope for revelations in the future. Only the wind is the guide. It shows the direction and leads the eye to that side.

These two sentences complete the description of one painting.What I find interesting is that I actually can visualize the painting despite the fact that I do not understand its description. From this point on, the descriptions become more general; they are more collective descriptions of a number of paintings rather than individual ones: In some of the paintings, the mass of trees fills the back of the hut; the hut, which more and more assumes a square shape, stands alone in the middle and is at odds with the surrounding space.The colors are black, lead grey, lemon, dull brick and dirty red.

Why does Meskub not use yellow for lemon or a specific color for ‘‘dull brick’’? There are Persian equivalents for these colors, and for this reason I remain faithful to the oddity of his selections. Black and lead grey dominate and then earth tone.The sky is earth tone, something between earth tone and turbid pink, the colorof earlyevening air, before snowfall.

I face the word khaki again, and this time I decide that ‘‘earth tone’’ works. There is little light; the crescent of the moon can only be seen in one place reflected in a small pond and a faint light is sprinkled around. Garden at night, moonlight, and hidden growth in the darkness.

Again, I am not sure what the last phrase means. At least in English ‘‘growth’’ could mean vegetation, but I am not certain that is what the Persian phrase means. Roshd-e panhan dar tariki could mean ‘‘secret/hidden growth [not vegetation] in the dark’’ or it could, with a little stretch of the imagination, mean ‘‘the growth of ‘secret’ in the dark.’’ In either case, I will

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have to leave my big red question mark over the phrase.The next sentences again remind me that the descriptions are now general, not specific: The light in most of the paintings is on the line of the horizon and the garden is mostly there. The sky, trees, the earth, all are burnt brown and in the middle, a large white square appears in place of the hut; the hut has become a large white square.

With this description, I begin to visualize a series of paintings, a progression, as it were, like the various frames of a motion picture film. No particularly difficult translation problems present themselves, but I have learned byexperience that quite often when a translation seems easyand moves forward smoothly, I am either missing something or messing something up. Most of these gardens have mountains; they are mountain gardens. The earth is a mixture of dead and stifled brown and orangewith vaguewindstricken waves and a white square in the middle.

The adjective I translate as ‘‘dead’’ is rang mordeh, which literally means ‘‘dead color.’’ I search a thesaurus for a word that has the idea of ‘‘dead’’ in it, since the word seems to stand out in Persian. But the effort is in vain. The garden is empty of humans/deserted, no one! There is no man/ human in the garden, the garden is in man.

It is always the simple common words and concepts that stump the translator, and I am stumped. The term I have translated as ‘‘human’’ is adam in Persian, which in addition to ‘‘Adam’’ in everyday use means ‘‘human being,’’ ‘‘person,’’ and is gender-free. The word is used three times in the above sentences, the last two instances of which are problematic. I think in the first instance ‘‘the garden is empty of humans’’ works to some extent. Prior to politically correct times, in English one might have used something like ‘‘Man is not in the garden, the garden is in man,’’ in which case at least the latter part would convey the intended meaning, even though ‘‘Man is not in the garden’’ could be misleading. I try to solve the problem by writing down a variety of translations of these sentences to see what might work: . There is no one in the garden, the garden is in man. . There are no people in the garden, the garden is in the people.

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. . . .

Translating the Garden

One is not in the garden, the garden is in . . . . You are not in the garden, the garden is in you. There is no human being in the garden, the garden is in human being. There is no soul in the garden, the garden is in . . . .

I give up. One sounds more inadequate and silly than the next.That is why they call it trial and error; one tries and one errs. They are all wrong, every combination. I have given up the idea of using the same word in all three instances. My modest goal is to find a way just to render the meaning. But I fail. Reading the translated sentences several times gradually makes all of them sound nonsensical. I will have to test them on others. For now, I leave a blank space on the page and continue translating the text. A picture/An image in the mind that can be seen with the internal eye. The background is lime green and a thick entangled row of trees. From the top of the mountain, a dark light peeks through and the mountain is black and the blackness is thick and full. The mountain seems quite depressed/forlorn.

This personification of the mountain completes the paragraph. I assume that paragraphing here means we are going to have the description of another series of paintings. Here the hut is no longer a hut and it has transformed into a dark mirror or an increasing/growing square that sits in the middle of the painting on the mountains and hills and plants and trees, a pure abstract form that has imposed itself on nature, a form fabricated, artificial.

Persian has a tendency to use a string of synonyms to convey abundance of something or for emphasis. In this passage, the pairs of synonyms kuh and kamar and dar and derakht have this function, which I have translated as ‘‘mountains,’’ ‘‘hills,’’ ‘‘plants,’’ and ‘‘trees,’’ respectively, even though kamar literally does not mean ‘‘hill’’ and dar does not literally mean ‘‘plants.’’ With some reservation, I leave these translations and decide that I am not losing a great deal. Entangled in the strings of synonyms, however, I have completely overlooked the enigmatic phrase ‘‘increasing/growing square.’’ At this point, I find it too depressing to try to make sense of this phrase.Thus, I translate the remainder of the paragraph in almost one breath, hoping that the completion of the descriptive part of

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the text will give me some inspiration to revisit my translation and by filling the gaps and the missing parts achieve a sense of closure in this section. It seems that craftsmanship and technique are making it too cramped for nature and pushing it out of the scene; nature intends to be uncompromising, stern clouds crumble, pregnant infertile clouds that do not rain but head downward with bellies protruding; they want to cover up and annihilate the square that has risen up ostentatiously and belligerently in the midst of the battlefield. The garden has become a scene of conflict between nature and form and form is red; it has caught fire or is fire itself that wants to set everything ablaze.

Yes, there is some sort of closure for me. The text at this point is marked with an asterisk, which I decide to retain in the translation. The last segment, like the entire introductory portion with which I have struggled for many long hours, requires much work, including deciphering the oxymoron ‘‘pregnant infertile clouds.’’ I finger through the pages of the translation. No epiphany at all. And I still am not distanced enough from the process of translating to do any revisions and editing. But I am close enough to the process to recognize that the thoroughly incomplete and imperfect product shows only the surface of my experience with the text. As I record this experience, I realize that as a translator of this particular text, in the process of translating I have only touched the surface of the experience with the text. The experience of the process of translating is perhaps akin to what William James called ‘‘stream of consciousness.’’ 4 The notion of stream of consciousness implies all that goes on in one’s mind at any given moment and from moment to moment, which is obviously unlimited and impossible to record. Fiction writers who have borrowed the idea in their stories essentially impose order on the chaotic, unorganized, disorderly, and seemingly unrelated thought processes of the fictional characters. Similarly, my record of the process of translating is merely one strand of my own mental interaction or dialogue, if you will, with the text in that process which by the very nature of keeping records is put in some sort of order but is by no means a complete one. Within the context of my actual (and not recorded) stream of consciousness while translating this text, the text itself has begun to unfold, rather systematically. I tend to liken it to a rolled-up Persian carpet, one end of which I hold; and as I unroll it slowly,

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Translating the Garden

I give myself time to look at all the patterns and details. To continue with the same metaphor, I have only unrolled the border of that carpet in the introductory descriptions of the garden paintings, and of course I have not described much about the patterns, details, color, etc. of this border. Once the carpet is fully unrolled, it is often hard to remember the importance of the border to the entire design of the carpet. The border of a carpet is not unlike the frame of a painting, which often enhances the painting but is overlooked. In this case, however, I think the introductory section of this text works as the frame of the entire dialogue, but it may be more. I should make a mental note of this.

U3 Reflections of the Garden F. S. F. S. F. S. F. S.

When I finished viewing, I said: Uncle Farhad! Your garden is not happy. Yes, I hadn’t thought about that. It has no color either. It is not as colorful as flowers and vegetation but it is not colorless either. Of course, but it is more in different spectra of earth tones, even your sky is the color of earth. Perhaps, but I don’t think about color when I am working, it comes by itself. But what about when it is finished? It isn’t finished yet. You have not, in fact, come out of your garden these few years.

It is early summer when I resume translating. In the interval, there have been obligations and commitments which I have more or less fulfilled, and I am rather happy to return to Meskub’s text, to return to the ‘‘garden.’’ As I begin the translation of the dialogue, I remember that several years ago I had seen an article or a piece by Meskub in a Persian literary journal published in the United States, which as I recall related to the text I am using in my project. I search for and find it. It is, in fact, called ‘‘Goftogu dar bagh’’ [Dialogue in the Garden] and consists of a page of introductory remarks and a portion of the book. The prefatory remarks are mainly a synopsis of the book with which Meskub prepares the reader for the portions he has selected to present in the journal prior to the publication of the book. Because of the way he describes the book in this preface and his specific remarks about the concept of the garden, I am certain that I will have occasion to return to this article and make use of it in my understanding and translating of the text. For now, however, what attracts my

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Translating the Garden

attention is the first sentence, which may help me formulate the tone of the dialogue in English. The sentence is: ‘‘Dialogue in the Garden is a long internal dialogue with the self in the form of an imaginary, open conversation between a writer and a painter.’’ 1 I am not going to discuss the problems that I encounter in translating this sentence. What concerns me here is, firstly, the identification of the nephew as a writer, which I do not think is explicitly stated in the text. I had also almost assumed that the initial S (which is, in fact, ‘‘Sh,’’ since Persian uses a single letter to represent this sound in English) meant the first letter of ‘‘Shahrokh,’’ which is Meskub’s first name. In the sentence I quoted from Meskub, he refers to the character in question as ‘‘a writer’’ and not ‘‘the writer.’’ In other words, even if he is using himself as a model for the nephew, he is fictionalizing him. With all this in mind, I am also tempted to change the initial of the nephew to ‘‘Sh,’’ but then I decide that it may add to the confusion. Meskub’s statement ‘‘a dialogue with the self ’’ indicates to me that I may not have to concern myself with trying to create different voices for the two characters involved in the dialogue in terms of speech patterns, style, and so on. This is usually a major concern for translators, especially in regard to novels and plays. I have had my share of struggles with speech patterns in past translations, which I would often have to read aloud to some innocent victim to get her or his reaction, comments, and assistance.2 In the present case, I am assuming that I may be exempted from this task. In terms of speech patterns, F and S sound similar in Persian, and hopefully I will be able to render their speech accordingly in English. Thus, I continue with the translation of F’s response to S’s statement ‘‘You have not, in fact, come out of your garden these few years’’: F: More than a few years. To tell you the truth, it began in childhood, from ‘‘the garden of Alizadeh’’ in Lahijan;3

I stop the translation of the sentence and debate with my ‘‘self ’’ whether I should use the possessive apostrophe or ‘‘of,’’ as I have. I have never been too fond of the apostrophe for this purpose, and so I stick to the ‘‘of ’’ construction, especially when I recall the English translation of a novel by Giorgio Bassani: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.4 I think the translator has made the right choice, rather than having translated it as ‘‘The Finzi-Continis’ Garden.’’ I continue after the semicolon:

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The garden was stretched out on a mild slope with its back to the hill and its front facing the road; several rows of thin, tall white poplar trees,

I have to stop and check several dictionaries for sepidar, which I translate as ‘‘white poplar.’’ I have never been very good with the names of trees and plants in any language, probably because I generally cannot identify them in nature. For sepidar I have a choice between ‘‘poplar’’ and ‘‘aspen,’’ and I am not sure what the difference is. I look up the terms in the largest monolingual encyclopedic Persian dictionary available to me, Loghatnameh-ye Dehkhoda, which basically offers a description of a variety of trees and also a Latin term in a footnote (which I have learned not to always trust). I also check the terms ‘‘aspen’’ and ‘‘poplar’’ in Webster’s and come to the conclusion that ‘‘poplar’’ is safer to use, since it is the more generic term. I continue translating after the comma: not too close to one another, had reached out to the sky and their small, thin silvery leaves trembled in a constant breeze from the sea. The whisper of the sea has the sharp and acrid smell of iodine and the taste of salt, as fresh as water and as vast as the sky. The moist scent of the sea passed through the garden; in flapping its wings it turned over the light and shadows of the leaves and settled in the lap of the hill.

Some of the metaphors Uncle Farhad uses in his artistic description of the garden of his childhood are quite idiosyncratic and almost incomprehensible to me as I translate them literally. I am tempted to change ‘‘the whisper of the sea’’ to ‘‘the breath of the sea’’ or ‘‘the sea breeze’’ in order to make the phrase compatible with ‘‘the acrid smell,’’ but I resist the temptation. And I am not sure about how the ‘‘moist scent’’ of the sea is ‘‘flapping its wings’’ or what exactly the phrase that follows it means. I can make conjectures and try to change these phrases into meaningful utterances, but I think I will leave this until the time comes when I will have to face them in one of several phases of editing. In the next sentence, Uncle Farhad’s description is in the present tense: When the wind blows, light waves/dances on the leaves and has a silvery shimmer, a mixture of green and white, which at times appears to the eye to resemble shattered glass sprinkled with water.

I encounter several problems in this sentence, such as ‘‘shattered glass sprinkled with water’’ for the Persian khordeh shisheh-ye abzadeh and ‘‘ap-

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Translating the Garden

pears to the eye’’ for becheshm miayad, but I decide that I can make this ‘‘sound English’’ later. The next sentence has some of Uncle Farhad’s more idiosyncratic, artistic descriptions, which I already decide cannot be changed too much, since to do so can change the entire picture. The ground in the garden was covered with short, thick tea plants, with dark, green, meaty leaves full of blood, and it was solid green, so green that it looked black, like when from the shore, you watch the dark blue of distant waters.

At this point I am wondering whether my earlier conclusion that the speech patterns of the painter and the writer are more or less the same is correct.Well, yes, the speech patterns of the two characters may be similar, but the differences between the way S and F express themselves may be those between a painter who visualizes things in colors, light, and shading and the writer who may express himself in more abstract terms. I make a mental note to myself and continue with the nephew’s response: S: I have seen tea gardens; vibrant plants, which are so full and overflowing/exuberant as if they are about to spill over; they have more life in them than they have leaves and flowers.

I suddenly realize I feel more comfortable translating the idiosyncratic descriptions of the painter than the abstract (though seemingly more expressive) observations of the writer. I set aside all the other problems that I have in S’s response and focus on the Persian word jan, which I have translated as ‘‘life’’ here. This is a word that will be haunting me on numerous occasions throughout Meskub’s text, because although it seems to convey a rather specific notion in Persian, once you try to translate it, it assumes different meanings in various contexts. My bilingual dictionaries give me the words ‘‘life,’’ ‘‘soul,’’ ‘‘power,’’ ‘‘main point,’’ and so on. And the monolingual dictionaries do not add anything to my own sense of the word, which is something akin to ‘‘life force.’’ The word has rich connotations, particularly in Persian Sufi (mystical) literature, with which I will have to deal later in Meskub’s text. For now, however, I convince myself that ‘‘life’’ is a good enough equivalent for jan in this context. F: The ground of the garden was covered with these plants. From the entrance gate, a gravel-covered avenue began with rows of poplars. In the

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middle there was a round pool which the avenue encircled—from both directions—and went straight to the landlord’s house.

All Persian houses up to not very long ago, and many of them to the present day, have a courtyard pool, or in Persian, howz, which is not usually for swimming. A howz often has goldfish in it, and until not long ago, prior to the introduction of urban utilities and running water, it was used for many household water needs, including washing dishes and clothing, or watering flower beds. The problem with the term ‘‘pool’’ in English is that nowadays it resurrects the image of a swimming pool in a backyard; and ‘‘pond’’ to me represents something more natural, less symmetrical and constructed. Even though I think in another context earlier in this translation I used ‘‘pond’’ as a translation of this word, here I reluctantly choose ‘‘pool’’ (or should I use ‘‘ornamental pool’’?), while I am also aware of other words, such as ‘‘fountain’’ (in a specific sense), which may complicate matters more. A second feature in this garden that is very pleasant to look at and more pleasant to live in, but troublesome to translate, is emarat-e arbabi, which I have rendered as ‘‘landlord’s house,’’ which does not quite denote the meaning in Persian. In the Iranian feudal system 5 of the past, buildings ranging from simple structures of a couple of rooms to elaborate villas were constructed by landlords in rural areas and used as summer residences or for occasional visits to the villages. These buildings often remained vacant for months, even years. ‘‘Landlord’s house/residence’’ may suggest a permanent residence, which may not serve my purpose here. I also think about phrases such as ‘‘landlord’s country home/summer home,’’ but for now I should keep my options open. F’s response continues: Flowers were planted only around the pool and it was filled with fiery geraniums.When you looked from a distance, greenery surrounded fire and fire surrounded water. S: You remember the garden from that time with all these details? F: No, I have constructed it in my memory with these details. I am describing it to you so that you can also construct it the way you want to.

I am already realizing that Meskub’s endeavor in this book is not confined to a particular garden or even the idea of the garden. I flip the pages back to the second paragraph of the book, which began with ‘‘A garden

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Translating the Garden

in the mind,’’ and think about the variety of translations made by my collaborators, which include: ‘‘A garden in the imagination,’’ ‘‘It was a fantasized garden,’’ and ‘‘The suggestion of a garden.’’ In some ways, all of them would work, and I still retain my own: ‘‘A garden in the mind.’’ I continue translating: The two-story landlord’s house and the vast veranda in the front was a couple of stairs above the ground. At the edge of the veranda, on both sides of the entrance, two round pillars supported the upper-floor balcony. S: If I had made the garden, I would also have planted a cypress or a weeping willow tree between the pool and the building. F: Provided you would not place a stream and a jug of wine next to it.

The painter’s objection to ‘‘a stream and a jug of wine,’’ of course, indicates his refusal to conform to the clichés in Persian miniature painting. The writer is aware of this and completes the picture with: S: And a disheveled old man with his head bent, his hand stretched out and his pleading look at a girl or a boy standing at the side with a body curved and a jug in hand, meaning the poet and the cupbearer.

Despite the fact that this cliché of Persian miniature painting is not favored by the painter, Meskub uses it lateron in the dialogue to examine important aspects of Iranian art and culture and, by extension, the Iranian psyche. I also remember another successful use of this cliché by a prominent Iranian writer, Sadeq Hedayat, in his novel The Blind Owl (),6 in which he uses it as a central motif. There is certainly an allusion in Meskub’s book to The Blind Owl. As an artist, however, F does not seem to be interested in the cultural nuances of such clichés. His garden, as he explains, is his own creation, his own individual vision: F: My vision of those years is not drawn from cliché miniature paintings. The building is also simple, like the garden itself; every floor has four windows which are rarely opened.The lace window coverings are never drawn aside.

The Persian word I have translated as ‘‘vision’’ actually means ‘‘dream,’’ but in this context I am deviating from my literal translation philosophy,

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since I think ‘‘vision’’ works better in English. I am also hesitant to use ‘‘window covering’’ for poshtdari, which I looked up in a bilingual dictionary, but I am not sure if it does actually describe the cloth covering of old-fashioned pane windows. Another question mark over the ‘‘window covering’’ will do for now. S: No one lived there? F: Yes, ‘‘Alizadeh’s lonely wife.’’ Her man is dead. S: So it resembled more a ghost house.

In translating the dialogue between F and S, I realize that the nephew’s question and comments about the uncle’s childhood garden are in the past tense, whereas the uncle seems to insist on using the present tense. The distinction is obviously important, since for the painter the vision of his childhood garden is not merely a remembrance, but as he has indicated earlier, it is a garden that he has constructed in his mind and it is visually present before his mind’s eye. On the other hand, the writer-nephew seems more interested in a narrative of a past event, as it were. I specifically focus on this point here, because sometime earlier I had read this passage to an Iranian friend whose one observation was that Meskub does not seem able ‘‘to keep his tenses straight.’’ In any case, F continues his description in the present tense: F: No, it seems a little eerie at night, when moonlight pours on the ground of the garden from the terra-cotta-tiled roof or through the claws of the rain, the light in one of the rooms is flickering.

The ‘‘terra-cotta-tiled roof,’’ a term which I use reluctantly, is actually what they call a Spanish-tiled roof in the southwestern part of the United States. In terms of describing what the roof is actually made of, it is accurate to say Spanish-tiled roof, but obviously in the context of Iran it may be misleading. This is one of those instances that one could do more damage by trying to use common expressions in the target language. F’s description continues: The house sits under the sky and among the trees facing the sea and the sea is hidden on the other side of the horizon. On dark nights when there is no/devoid of moonlight, distant stars watch the sleep of the/sleeping garden, which is green in the darkness and listens to the whisper of the

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Translating the Garden

waves and speaks to the wind; it is afraid of autumn and despondent because of the silence of winter and sometimes in hot weather awakens perturbed by the terror of thirst, its body burning in its branches and leaves. No one knows what the sleepy garden sees and what it has in mind.

The painter’s description of his childhood garden is not a static vision. It is alive, and hence he describes it as going through seasonal and other changes. Perhaps that is why S’s comment is finally in the present tense: S: Your childhood garden has lonely nights. F: It is alone/lonely night and day, because in my past—in one of the stops/ houses on the road—it was left behind and has been distanced as much as several years.

The painter’s seemingly simple explanation confronts me with several problems and decisions. The main one concerns the Persian word tanha, which in this instance denotes the meanings of ‘‘alone’’ and ‘‘lonely.’’ In S’s comment prior to this explanation, ‘‘alone’’ would simply not work, and other choices such as ‘‘solitude’’ and ‘‘solitary’’ may be a little too farfetched. But my choice of ‘‘lonely’’ adds something that may not be what the painter (or the writer) has in mind. From the context, though, I am almost tempted to choose something like ‘‘empty’’ or, better yet, ‘‘uninhabited.’’ I decide to postpone this decision until later, when I have become more thoroughly familiar with the painter’s character and thought processes.The writer’s observations, as has been the case before, are more abstract, more philosophical. S: From this perspective, the garden is always distant from us; even though it is in us, it is not within our grasp. The garden blooms in spring; by the time one reaches autumn, it is already over for the garden. F: The problem is that always when the season has passed, one remembers spring. S: Because in youth, the garden is in a state of becoming and blossoming.

As I try to solve the problem of the word javani, a noun in Persian for which neither ‘‘young age’’ nor ‘‘youth’’ is an adequate term, I look at the next sentence and decide that the problem of javani is minuscule in comparison. In my previous readings of the book, I had encountered the next

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sentence without concretely grasping the meaning and imagined that I would somehow find a way around it (which is what sometimes translators have to do). And now I have to manage a way around or through it. The garden is in the body and the body is not a place of awareness.

My main concern, of course, is the term tan, which in this context I am translating as ‘‘body.’’ Given the fact that in the next sentence the word ruh (‘‘spirit’’ or ‘‘soul’’) provides the contrast, translatingtan as ‘‘body’’ can be justified. But if my memory of previous quick readings of the text is accurate, I will also have to think about the use of this term in other contexts, such as bagh-e tan, ‘‘the garden of the body,’’ which I cannot quite relate to yet. But, as with every other problem, I procrastinate. It sprouts in the soul when the body is disintegrating. Awareness comes when the garden is gone. Only awareness of the garden, the memory of it, remains in the mind.

The Persian word yad, which can usually be translated as ‘‘memory’’ or ‘‘remembrance,’’ is a very useful word in Persian, since combined with other words it can convey a whole range of concepts, such as ‘‘to give memory’’ (to teach), ‘‘to take memory’’ (to learn), ‘‘to bring to memory’’ (to remember), ‘‘to take from memory’’ (to forget), and so on and so forth. But when it is combined, as in the case of the last translated sentence, with khatereh (an Arabic loan word), which more or less means the same thing (‘‘memory,’’ ‘‘remembrance’’), it can drive picky translators up the wall. Literally translated, the last sentence is: ‘‘Only awareness of the garden, its memory/remembrance remains in the memory.’’ When I look back at this almost meaningless, redundant utterance and then at the Persian original, I realize that the Persian conveys an idea that neither my silly literal translation nor the one in which I translate khatereh as ‘‘mind’’ contains. Privately, I am a bit embarrassed for having explained to my language students who asked why two or more synonyms are often used in Persian in a row, that it is because Persians love synonyms and that they think synonyms sound good.7 Is there any reason for Persian to borrow a word from Arabic for which it already has a term? Apparently there is. Even if the word appears to have the exact same meaning, it is put to specific uses in the language that borrows it. And so, with this lesson in mind, I resume translating.

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F: So, this awareness must be coupled with the regret of passing and loss. S: And the impossible longing to refind/rediscover what is lost and is present in us. Hands are empty of it and eyes are filled by it. That is why the longing for it will not let go. F: Especially for us drought-stricken people. S: Essentially, the existence of the garden is more meaningful in contrast to the desert. Where nature is generous, with flowers, plants, colors, and water, one is less concerned about the garden. A garden is manufactured and crafted nature, a picture that we create of ideal nature somewhere, in some corner on a piece of earth.

As I translate S’s pontification about the concept of the garden and its importance to people of the desert, I remember the comments made in an interview by a prominent Iranian writer, Moniru Ravanipur, about the desert and the contrast between the southern deserts in Iran, where she was born, and the lush greenery of northern Iran near the Caspian Sea, where she had visited. She says: When I was up north [by the Caspian Sea], after the first couple of days that I looked at the greenery, I was tired of it and put on my sunglasses, because I could not fathom the purpose of all that greenery.8

Further on in the same interview, she points out how important and meaningful even a single tree is in the middle of the desert to the people who live there. But I also think about the famous gardens in Iran, in both modern and ancient times. Before I translate any further, I feel I need to sift through a book or two about Persian gardens—about the garden of Pasargadae, Cyrus’s palace, which I remember having read somewhere that he designed himself—and of course about the curious word ‘‘paradise,’’ a word that many languages have borrowed directly or indirectly from Persian. How necessary this inquiry is for my project of translating Meskub’s book, I am not sure. But I am sure it will help me approach the subject with more sensitivity. As I browse through books on ancient Persia, I come across many passages that combine the notion of Paradise with the idea of what a garden means or has meant to Persians. ‘‘The Persians,’’ we are told, ‘‘gave the world the word ‘paradise.’ To them paradise was paradeisos— or enclosure—a walled park or garden. In their arid land, a well-watered

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green space filled with trees and shrubs was to be savored and enjoyed.’’ 9 At Pasargadae, Cyrus the Great had a throne placed at a palace portico, ‘‘so he could gaze down a large inner garden, divided into quadrants perhaps intended to reflect the empire’s four quarters.’’ 10 Xenophon, who is credited with having been responsible for the introduction of the word ‘‘paradise’’ to European languages, tells the story of Cyrus the Younger (Son of Darius II), who personally guided Lysander, the Spartan general, through his garden at Sardis. One writer relates the story as follows: Lysander was full of admiration for the beauty of the trees, the accuracy of their spacing, the straightness of their rows, the regularity of the angles, and the multitude of sweet scents wafted to them as they walked, but when he exclaimed on the skill of the Agent who had measured everything so exactly, Cyrus proudly replied that the whole of the measurement and arrangement was his own work (somewhat nettled, I suspect, at the attribution of credit to the wrong man), and that he had even done some of the planting himself. ‘‘What, Cyrus?’’ exclaimed Lysander, looking at him and marking the beauty and perfume of his robes, and the splendour of the necklaces and bangles and other jewels he was wearing, ‘‘did you really plant part of this with your own hands?’’ Cyrus assured him that it was so. Never, he said, had he sat down to dinner when in sound health, without first working hard at some task of war or agriculture.11

Among this writer’s many observations about Persian gardens and the utility of gardens in Persia, I particularly find myself in agreement with what she calls ‘‘the whole meaning’’ of a garden to ‘‘a Persian’’: It is not a place where he wants to stroll; it is a place where he wants to sit and entertain his friends with conversation, music, philosophical discourse, and poetry.12

In an introduction to a book on Persian gardens published in  in Iran, prominent Iranian historian and writer Bastani-Parizi contrasts the concept of the garden in the West (especially Europe) and in Iran and articulates certain notions about Iranian gardens that I see as relevant to my project. He writes:

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A garden is one thing in the West and another in Iran, because the basis for creating it is different. There [in the West], they must dig into the forest, cut the excessive branches of the trees, plant lawns, design flower beds, and plant flowers and domesticated grass in place of forest trees. Besides, even their forests are gardens. . . . But in Iran, a garden suddenly appears before your eyes in the middle of a dry, barren sand desert, like a painting surrounded by walls that contain it like a picture frame. There [in the West], the main focus is flowers and grass with fruit trees being secondary; here [in Iran], flowers and grass are secondary and fruitful trees the main focus.13

Bastani-Parizi further comments on the decorative aspect of gardens in the West and their economic as well as climatic use in Iran and observes: That is why in a village in Iran, a garden shows off like a jewel. It is unique. It is brilliant. It delights the eye.The distance between a Persian garden and the outskirts of a village is the distance between civilization and barbarism. It is the distance between heaven and hell. The reason that Westerners cannot believe Paradise to be a garden in contrast to the fiery hell is that they have never gone from hell to heaven. They have passed through the oak trees by the Seine and walked toVincennes Park; they have turned from Luxembourg Park to Montessori Park; they have started strolling from Hyde Park and reached Kensington Park.14

If nothing else, my reading about gardens reinforces S’s argument about how meaningful the concept of the garden is, in particular in regions where the desert prevails. Moreover, I also acquire some vocabulary, such as names of trees and terminology about gardens in general, which may be helpful in solving some of the problems I have encountered. Armed with some new words and a better understanding of Persian gardens, I return to Meskub’s text and F’s comment: F: What relevance does all this have to youth, which . . . S: It has relevance to spring. A garden is for growing greenery and flowers, for birds and color, for scents and freshness; all these have a season. One cannot plant flowering bushes for autumn.

Obviously, S is now using such terms as ‘‘garden,’’ ‘‘growing,’’ and ‘‘season’’ symbolically. I wonder if I did not waste some precious translating

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time reading about gardens. If the dialogue is moving toward a symbolic and philosophical discussion, my research into Persian gardens merely served to satisfy my personal curiosity. Translators do not have the choice of changing the text to move in a direction they may prefer, and hence I stick with translating the text as is: F: Do you want to say that spring is the youth of nature? S: I want to say that youth is spring but does not return once it has passed. The seasons of our lives are not cyclical and when/once we understand spring will not return, we want to keep it in our memory and—more importantly—reconstruct it in our imagination. F: And drop anchor in our imagination, settle in contentedly in our youth, which of course we know is not a place we can stay, but we carry the memory along, like a shadow that follows us.

Facing the reality of translating again, I find myself struggling with expressions, some idiosyncratic fabrications of the author that together articulate a notion that I seem to fail to transfer into English, regardless of whether or not I maintain a literal translation or, whenever possible, tax my brain for an equivalent. ‘‘Drop anchor in our imagination’’ is quite literal and I convince myself that it works in English, but the Persian phrases dar javani ja khosh konim and an khaterehra ba khod mikeshim, which are idiomatic in Persian, have quite disarmed me. The first phrase literally means . . . well, if I could have translated it literally, I would have. Here are the literal meanings of individual words, which I am somehow incapable of putting together: dar = ‘‘in,’’ javani = ‘‘youth’’/‘‘young age,’’ ja = ‘‘place,’’ khosh = ‘‘happy’’/‘‘good,’’ and konim = ‘‘we do.’’ Put together, it could read rather nonsensically as follows: ‘‘We do happy/good place in youth/young age.’’ Do not get me wrong, I know what the phrase means in Persian but not how to convey the precise idea in English. I could describe it as ‘‘relax joyfully in our youth’’ or ‘‘take up residence happily in our youth,’’ but none of these would do. The second phrase is a little easier to translate literally, but the results leave a great deal to be desired. Judge for yourself: ‘‘We drag along that memory with us as a spare.’’ It is sometimes uplifting for translators to feel that they fall short of rendering some profoundly meaningful and beautiful line in a poem by a grand poet. Most failures of translators, however, are very much like my example above; they are not very uplifting. The solution to situations like this is perhaps found in the following hu-

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morous anecdote. They asked someone what they call a young cow in his language. He thought for a while and, unable to remember the word for ‘‘calf,’’ he replied, ‘‘In our language we do not call young cows anything; we wait until they grow up and then we call them cows.’’ And I suppose I have to wait, as usual, for these phrases to mature and call them cows. At any rate, while I am writing the translation out in longhand, I will not have to come up with a final decision or solution. That comes at the end—or just before the end—of this long process when I must send a neatly typed manuscript (or is it a computer disk?), with proper margins and all, to the publisher. At that point I will have to eliminate every trace of the question marks I have been leaving behind. Back to the writer’s remarks, which are more abstract but less idiomatic and therefore seem easier to translate. S: A shadow that does not follow us, it is in us and is brilliant. Why do you think we believe that the last home of the good is a garden, the Garden of Paradise, not something else? F: Like what? S: I don’t know, any other imagining/conception/supposition/fantasy/ fancy is possible; natural pleasures or any other feeling/sense, or absolute tranquility, cheerfulness/joy/felicity and salvation of the soul, unity with the whole/universal whole, etc. But instead of all this, involuntarily the image of garden appears in our mind.

In S’s observation, there are particularly two words that require some attention. The word tasavvor, which is an Arabic loan word in Persian, has something in common with theword ‘‘imagination’’ in English, since other derivatives of the same root have the meaning of ‘‘picture’’ and ‘‘image.’’ When I translate it in the context of S’s sentence, ‘‘image’’ and ‘‘imagination’’ do not quite work. The second word is koll, again an Arabic loan word in Persian. It literally means ‘‘whole,’’ ‘‘all,’’ or ‘‘total.’’ In this context and combined with the word vahdat [unity], it has explicit allusions to Sufism. I have used ‘‘unity with the whole’’ (maybe ‘‘universal whole’’) hoping to retain the pantheistic (if that is the right word here) nuances of the phrase. This time, I am not even leaving question marks behind. F: Do you mean our Paradise is to take refuge in water and spring greenery from the dearth in nature, from the dry and burning desert? S: And returning from old age and decay to the freshness of youth, there is neither any passage of time, nor death: invulnerable, eternal youth!

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The two wordstaravat (an Arabic loan word) andtazegi both mean ‘‘freshness.’’ In Persian, synonyms are often used for emphasis, but here I am at a loss for a synonym for ‘‘freshness’’ that would convey the precise meaning, and I simply leave one of them out. The good news is that my reading about Persian gardens was not in vain. Many of the ideas in the material I read concerning Persian gardens relate to the dialogue between the painter and the writer. F: S: F: S: F: S:

Like the garden that ‘‘Jamshid’’ had built. Why should we go that far back? Like the garden of yourown colleagues. Miniature painters? Most of the scenes are based on a garden sketch. A mental sketch or image; a conception of the garden that existed. That’s right; of imagining the garden, the garden of imagination. Even the battle scenes. ‘‘Rostam’’ and ‘‘Sohrab’’ are wrestling to force each other’s back to the ground, but several rows of pine and cypress trees surround them in a circle, and the horses are also father and son, wearing armor and belligerent, and have risen on their hind legs confronting one another.

I suppose if I were to accompany the published translation in person or supplement it with examples of the miniature scenes described in the dialogue, the unsuspecting reader not acquainted with the conventional scenes in Persian miniature painting or, more importantly, the Persian epic Shahnameh [Book of Kings], by the eleventh-century Iranian poet Ferdowsi, in this and many other instances throughout Meskub’s text—as well as any other text translated from an ‘‘alien’’ culture—my task would be more simple and I would not have to resort to lengthy explanatory footnotes. Like many translators, I am also reluctant to violate the integrity of a literary text and disrupt the natural flow of the reader’s reading with cumbersome footnotes or even endnotes. There are times, of course, when the translator can solve the problem by adding a word or a short phrase within the translated text. Generally, however, and in the instances that I have before me, adding words and phrases such as ‘‘King Jamshid’’ or ‘‘the legendary King Jamshid,’’ or ‘‘the epic heroes ‘Rostam’ and ‘Sohrab’ ’’ would not help transmit the information that the reader of the translation requires to follow the text coherently. Hence, in such instances, when I weigh the pros and cons of supplementing the text with

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‘‘accessories,’’ I feel obliged to sacrifice the natural flow for comprehensibility.15 I have often considered this solution an easy way out of a dilemma for a translator, but here it allows me to continue translating. F: In another picture, the field for the same event is the slope of a mountain covered with cypress trees in which the horses gaze in bewilderment at the father’s filicide; but what does all this have to do with the garden? S: The battle occurs in the lap of nature, but it is not a naked and savage nature; the mountain ridge is greenish and the ground grayish violet. Under a bright dark blue sky, a few cypress trees have grown on the mountain slope and one tree standing on the peak has turquoise, fivepetal flowers—starlike—and here and there clusters of flowers, each in a different color and shape, rise out of the ground. The battlefield is in nature but in the garden of nature. F: Where a young champion is killed unjustly, the presence of the cypress may be a subconscious allusion to the continuity of life and a negation of death.

The main difficulty in translating concepts from one language to another, it seems to me, often revolves around the untranslatable nature of—or sometimes finding equivalents for—individual, usually seemingly simple, words. The concept conveyed in the word namardaneh is, at least in today’s Persian, much more complex than its literal translation, ‘‘unmanly.’’ In fact, it no longer has any relevance to the idea of manliness. A synonym, najavanmardaneh [literally, ‘‘un-young-manliness’’], is sometimes translated as ‘‘cowardly.’’ An antonym of najavanmardaneh is javanmardaneh, which in some contexts can be translated as ‘‘chivalrously,’’ provided one would unburden the English adverb of its historical and some of its cultural connotations, even though the word javanmardi has its roots in a tradition of Persian ‘‘chivalry.’’ In the context of F’s statement here, however, I will have to deprive the English translation of that tradition and simply use the adverb ‘‘unjustly,’’ perhaps out of desperation. S: The negation of death in the other world, after death. Dying here and living there; but in what kind of place? In a garden, and especially—in the case of Sohrab—of course, in the Garden of Paradise.16 F: Do you want to say that the predecessors drew the Garden of Paradise even for battle scenes? S: No, I want to say that the idea of the garden, which was embedded in

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their subconscious, influenced everything that they drew; in the same way that the idea of the hereafter exists in the soul of every religious believer and influences his behavior, whether or not he thinks about it. Even the houses and rooms that we see in miniature paintings, despite the straight geometrical, square, rectangular, and diamond shapes, or sky-blue tile work, vases with entwined curved lines, upper-floor latticed windows, alizarin-dyed curtains, images of colorful birds on azure parapets and the arabesque designs of a carpet, the/a white candle in a candlestick next to a long, slender rosewater sprinkler, the/a round fruit bowl with apples, oranges, citrons, or pears, a/the revelry 17 with a brown instrument, a/the kamancheh, a/the golden jug, a/the red handkerchief, and a/the dancer in blue and a few branches of pomegranate blossoms which, scattered, sprouting from the floor of the room, are all, in fact, an internal garden.

My general dilemma in translating the above passage, or rather the long sentence, is whether to use the indefinite article ‘‘a’’ in most cases or the definite article ‘‘the.’’ In many instances, the lack of a definite article as a separate word in Persian—not unlike the absence of gender-specific pronouns—provides the reader with both options. On the one hand, I lean toward using the definite article in English, since the picture the writer describes is in some ways a constant one—the same picture, as it were, repeated, though perhaps partially, in miniature after miniature. On the other hand, I may not be deviating too far from the original if I use the indefinite article in English. This, obviously, is a justifiable case to leave for later editing. Another concern here is the Persian musical instrument the kamancheh, which is a predecessor of the violin and which is still used in classical Persian music. I think about using the word ‘‘fiddle’’ but immediately think about the image it might conjure in the mind of the Englishspeaking audience: a country barn, the fiddler, and square dancing. So I decide against it for the moment. F: Our miniatures are mainly a decorative/ornamental art form, which was mostlyat the service of literature and the illustration of stories, like music that served poetry and still does today and has not found its place without the need for and independent of poetry. In any case, the painter only thought about beauty and took the model of beauty from nature, but not from ‘‘natural’’ nature. Since miniature painting was the art form

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of the royal court and the elite, the painter who himself was in their company and shared their tastes took inspiration from the nature of the same elite, from the garden which was their adorned and ideal nature which they knew and in which they lived. Otherwise, the miniature artist was concerned about neither theology nor realism; he did not have anything to do with either Paradise or nature, nor would he even see a garden in the actual world. Based on his understanding and perception of beauty, he imagined whatever he saw—and more than anything else the garden—more delightful and enchanting and he would draw what he had imagined on paper. The result of this is the dominance of gardens and orchards in miniature painting. The painter not only took the garden from the outside to the inside, but he also displayed the pleasure-ground of the outside field as much as he could; for example, the plain can be seen from an open upstairs window, a cypress tree can be seen next to a stream, two deer, one drinking water and the other watching the first one, the house only occupies part of the painting and the rest is free to be filled with the pictures of willow trees and tall pines, the courtyard grounds are covered with flowers and plants in pleasing colors, a brown stream with round orange stones finds its way through everything, mingling the water, trees and the courtyard, the house has enveloped the garden and the garden has gone inside the house, as if they are embracing each other. The place for/site of other events, too, as much as possible, is in the garden: the dialogue between the prince and the scholar, the meeting of the father and the son, the coronation of the king who sits on a throne in the open space in the garden. Even inside the bathhouse with unrealistic, happy, pleasant and vibrant colors is not unlike the freshness of the garden. I want to conclude that there is another reason for attention to the garden. The painter draws war, hunting, school and other scenes, or he paints a scene of feasting, wine, music and song in the garden; but he has nothing to do with the Garden of Paradise, he is free of such thought.

Translating a long segment, especially when it is uninterrupted and resembles a narrative, has its advantages, but it has its disadvantages as well. The main advantage for the translator is that he or she becomes immersed in the narrative flow and somehow begins to experience the language (which of course has many components, but here I mean the com-

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bined effect of all those components), such that the passage seems to translate itself, as it were. The usual problems encountered in every line do not disappear, but these experiences of relative ease in the early phases of a particular translation project are vital to the success of the end product. In a sense, this experience may not be dissimilar to one that actors often report having, when gradually the character they are playing becomes tangible to them and they sense that they have experienced a metamorphosis, though hopefully a temporary one, into that character. Glad that I do not have to stay too long in an altered state and to avoid the impending crisis, I translate S’s response: S: Of course, I agree that the painter does not draw Paradise; not only does he not illustrate the garden of nature or a ‘‘natural’’ garden, but knowingly he avoids it. He paints the ideal of the garden or the ideal garden— the garden of the soul and the ideal garden is the Garden of Paradise, which is the garden of gardens and the source of that understanding and perception of beauty that you speak of, or even if it is not, it is its ideal example and perfected model: the garden of imagination!

Again the word jan, translated here as ‘‘soul,’’ reappears to haunt me, but despite my reservations about the word ‘‘soul’’ I decide to use it because both the ‘‘garden of life’’ and the ‘‘garden of life force’’ seem to be even more problematic. F: For the most part neither the artist nor his subject matter is religious.

With F’s reference to religion, I begin to feel more comfortable with the use of ‘‘soul’’ for jan, and I think S’s reference to ‘‘supernatural’’ provides a little more justification. S: But the supernatural ideal exists and distances the painter from the garden of nature. On the one hand, it drives him away from wrathful, unkind nature toward a desired nature, so that contrary to the existing nature, he builds and adorns his garden as his heart desires and mind approves, and on the other, the desire of his heart and approval of his mind take him beyond the boundaries of nature and draw him to the supernatural, to the free world of imagination, to an ideal of garden which he has created in his imagination: the Garden of Paradise in the creative imagination!

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As I translate the last phrase, the words ‘‘creative imagination’’ ring a bell in my mind and I begin to wonder if the discussion between this painter and writer are reminiscent of those of the English Romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth. It is, I suppose, customary for translators to write some sort of introduction, whether long or short, to their translations, and I make a note to reread and review the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others. What could Wordsworth’s strolls in the Lake District have in common with this Persian writer’s imaginary dialogue about Persian gardens? F: A supernatural ideal might have left its imprint on the painter’s nature from before, but he is not a captive of the supernatural and may have nothing to do with it. Visualize the atmosphere of miniature painting in your mind; the world is an ideal garden that the painter has nurtured in his soul and brought to the canvas. S: If we make an excursion in this garden of the soul, the mountain is blue, the sky is golden and the Simorgh 18 with its open/outstretched green wings, cinnabar tail and red mouth is in flight. The cypress trees sit on the violet mountain and pink bushes in the lead grey earth. An emerald earth, a white tree and leaves the color of cherry blossoms, and a pheasant on the top of the cypress, and a patch of fiery clouds like a flame in a corner of the sky; and a turquoise horse—unruly and solitary—stands in the middle of the garden.

S’s description of miniature paintings of the garden continues for another two and a half pages. In the first two paragraphs translated above, I have a mental debate with myself as to whether to follow the rather unconventional syntax of the original and ultimately conclude that I should, since, although written in prose, the passage has a poetic quality, which I feel grants me the license to violate some rules. In fact, is it not true that translations violate but also enrich the target language? Blossoms pink, like six-pointed stars but on the tree and the tree on the mountain and the mountain in the heart of the green sky, as green as spring; a garden in the sky and a bloom of azure clouds on it, like a water lily on the water. And in this one the crescent moon among spring blossoms scattered across the purple skyand a clear, azure stream that comes from the sky behind the mountain and runs down from the ridge to the

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ground of the garden, at the feet of a pair of lovers who sit under an arbor free of this world and the next.Two simple-minded lovers unconcerned and tranquil because of the extent of their simple-mindedness. The red ceiling of the arbor with arabesque twists and turns is like an ornate carpet with a crimson background in front of which a tree with burntumber autumn leaves has grown; the purple flowers of the tree embrace the lovers under the arbor. A bird resembling a francolin or partridge sits on the tree, watching the lovers. Behind is a mountain above which the azure sky can be seen. The ground of the garden is shiny black, it sparkles from blackness, white flowers in the background of the garden set light on darkness and in a corner of this darkness, a fire burns like a rose bush. And above, the sky is calm and entirely turquoise. In front, two cypress trees emerge out of the picture even beyond the sky; between them a tree with open branches embraces both, the tree has round red flowers and covers the vivid emerald color of the cypresses with agate-hued petals and a tall, slender pine as tall as the cypresses with green and yellow leaves embodies both spring and autumn. The garden is at times the color of spring and autumn and at other times is not, but it is always the color of the seasons imagined, like a smoky or lead grey earth but more translucent than the freshness of spring. The entire garden full of bushes as tall as a human. The petals green, blue, maroon, and black.The bushes are seemingly wild but have been trimmed and pruned so well that despite their pleasing appearance they seem wild and have not lost their wilderness freedom. In the upper section of the garden, there is a stream with fresh grass on its banks and small flowers as shiny as silver glass beads. Several trees stand by the water, all covered in white blossoms and purple buds. A faint greenblue wave as transparent as clear water can be seen on the moss at the bottom of the stream. At one extreme of the picture, on the edge of the garden, instead of a wall, there is a folding screen the color of ocher bricks with arabesque curves, triangles and raised curved lines reflecting an apple tree with its white blossoms. From above the screen, in a corner of the garden, the blue of the starry sky is visible with the crescent moon dropped at the bottom of a pond like a golden glass. In the middle of the garden, ‘‘Homay’’ and ‘‘Homayun’’ in long floral gowns stand like two stems of flowers; ‘‘Homayun’’ has a goblet in his hand

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and ‘‘Homay’’ a crown on her head; their long gowns have designs of flowers, plants and birds; they are both dressed in spring.

There are numerous vocabulary, syntactic, and other problems that I am sure I will resolve somehow. There are also several phrases the meaning of which I am at a loss to define and must mark for later discussion with the author, whom I hope to see in a few months. And obviously I will have to provide footnotes for Homay and Homayun.19 But the translating of this long passage in which the nephew describes Persian miniature painting sends me back to the introductory part of Meskub’s book, the nephew’s description of the uncle’s paintings: ‘‘They were all alike, and yet each a different garden.’’ The uncle’s implicit claim of originality as an artist is (perhaps implicitly) challenged by the nephew. After all, the painter’s objection to ‘‘cliché miniature paintings’’ may also be summed up as ‘‘they are all alike, and yet each a different garden.’’ In other words, the artist of the past is criticized for adhering to conventions and reproducing clichés or repeating the same or similar images and themes, but the modern artist who follows a new set of conventions (whether those universally established by modernity or in the work of artists individually) is subject to similar criticism for producing other clichés. For me, this idea has literary critical implications, particularly in my own specialized field of research, Persian literature. The shift that one scholar calls ‘‘recasting’’ 20 or ‘‘change’’ and others, including myself, have termed a ‘‘literary revolution’’ 21 in Persian poetry—for instance, from traditional modes (and content) to what Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak calls ‘‘poetic modernity’’—is similar to the shift in other arts in Iran, including that from miniature painting to modern painting. Some advocates of modern Persian poetry accuse traditionalists and traditional poets of lacking originality and creativity (I suppose in the modern sense), while contemporary proponents of traditional modes often view the absence of traditional forms in modern poetry as disorder and chaos. The truth may be that traditional art in general, even when all conventions are followed strictly, does not lack originality and creativity, as the uncle seems to suggest, nor does modernity function without order, even if it does not strictly adhere to traditional forms and conventions, a point which is implicit in the nephew’s argument. As I read the foreword and several chapters in another book by Shah-

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rokh Meskub, entitled Chand goftar dar farhang-e Iran [Discussions on Iranian Culture], I determine that in Dialogue in the Garden, as well as some of his other works, Meskub is trying to establish the link that some Iranian intellectuals think is missing between the Iran of the past (or Persia, asWesterners seem to view the Iran of the past) and the present Iran (which is what Iranians have always called their country). He writes that Discussions on Iranian Culture consists of ‘‘discussions about various manifestations of Iranian culture, including the failure of today’s poetry and poets, and some reference to the distant past’’; and about himself and his relationship to his writing, Meskub, referring to himself in the third person, observes: His love for the culture of this land is the source of the scatteredness of his ideas and emotions, his ‘‘total agony.’’ This ancient culture has many and sometimes contradictory and incompatible aspects and manifestations. Attention to these manifestations is a source of curiosity, because learning about them is a subject of his life and he leaves behind the stages of the ‘‘present time’’ carrying in his backpack provisions from the past. Hence, through a distant and inaccessible time, he looks to his ancestors and searches for his broken ties to them.22

U4 Artificial Paradise My excursions to the earlier parts of the book and its translation, particularly the point at which the introductory pages end and the dialogue between the uncle and the nephew begins, cause me to suddenly notice the shift in the narrative voice. In the introductory segment, S is a firstperson narrator, but as the dialogue begins, S becomes a character, as it were, and an assumed third-person narrator takes over. Here, as a literary critic, I have some concerns which have a direct bearing on the pragmatic aspects of the translation and its publication. I have pointed out the shift in the narrative voice. If I try to justify this shift, I must determine the generic nature of the book, a decision that I have not necessarily neglected but have postponed because I am still uncertain about it. The core question, I think, is to determine whether this is a work of fiction or nonfiction. It does not seem to adhere to the norms of the conventional subgenres of prose fiction. It certainly is not a short story or a novel. And I do not think it can qualify as a play, even a closet drama. But I do not think it is a work of nonfiction either. I reread Meskub’s own description, which I quoted earlier: ‘‘Dialogue in the Garden is a long internal dialogue with the self in the form of an imaginary, open conversation between a writer and a painter.’’ 1 I am unsure if Meskub’s own words do not actually complicate my question even more. Yes, there is the writer, who we are led to assume is Meskub, and the painter, who represents the self (Meskub’s self or alter ego?). And it is an imaginary conversation. If the conversation is imaginary and the characters are fictional (though one is based on the author), we are dealing with fiction. I wonder whether the question I have posed to myself is irrelevant to Meskub’s book altogether. I understand that Meskub is merely using this particular format as a vehicle to satisfy his

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intellectual curiosity, as he states in the introduction to Discussions on Iranian Culture, cited in the previous chapter. But as a translator who wants to tell the publisher what kind of book he has translated (is translating), I am at a loss. In the Western tradition, the dialogues of Plato may be a model of sorts for the book, particularly given the general philosophical nature of the dialogue between the writer and painter in Meskub’s book. I pull The Dialogues of Plato off the bookshelf and spend several hours rereading bits and pieces. In the end, I realize that I have been distracted, becoming a little too involved in Plato, and reshelve the book. What if I dismiss the question of shift in the narrative voice that made me digress and answer the question of the generic nature of the book by categorizing it as an autobiography? Enough digression, I decide, and return to translating the uncle’s comments: F: We only know from the story that ‘‘Homay’’ and ‘‘Homayun’’ are lovers, otherwise they are standing side by side like two strangers and their demeanor does not reveal anything. The woman is looking at the ground, and the man at something else, and their inexpressive faces are set in silence. The kind of love that bursts one’s skin from restlessness and sets the veins on fire, the kind of love that explodes in the heart with the inevitable force of death, can be seen in all the lines of one’s face and the expression of one’s body. But they do not look at each other at all, as if they are embarrassed that their eyes might meet; they are so cold and inattentive, as if they are standing in their sleep.

As a curious reader, I want to see the miniature that the uncle and nephew are discussing. On the last page of the book there is a note marked with an asterisk. (I have been anticipating the appearance of the two asterisks in the text, so that I can check the two notes on that page.) After the Persian phrase for ‘‘see’’ or ‘‘you can see,’’ there is a reference in English, which I duplicate here precisely: MEHMET AGA. QGLU. The landscape Miniatures of an antology [sic] Manuscript of the year  A.D. ( H.) in ars [sic] Islamica Vol. : part  () p.  Chicago University Press.

The only thing that I find encouraging in the bibliographical information is ‘‘Chicago University Press,’’ which could eventually lead me to the book, whatever it is called and whoever may be the author or editor. I assume

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that ‘‘QGLU’’ may be ‘‘Oglu’’ and try to find it in the library catalog, to no avail. I then try to make some sense out of the title, naturally correcting the misspelling of ‘‘anthology.’’ Again, no luck. As I am using a computer connection to the library, I try several other arrangements of the words and spellings, but still no luck. Is it that vital for me as a translator of words to see copies of the miniatures? It may be, but it is not that urgent. I must find a copy of this book, though, because it may even be useful to include something from it in the published translation. For now, I must rely on the descriptions in the words of S and F. S: You are right, they are really asleep. I should say that they are in a metaphoric world. Their reality is another realm. Where they have come from, and if their life is here, the root of their soul is nurtured and it blooms there.

Now that I have translated S’s response, I realize I am not quite certain what he actually means, although in myearlier readings, I had read through the passage without even thinking that I had not quite comprehended it. The difficulty, once again, is in certain key words, terms, or concepts that are either ephemeral or convey a series of ambivalent ideas. The first is the Arabic loan word majaz, which means ‘‘trope,’’ ‘‘metaphor,’’ ‘‘figure,’’ ‘‘allegory.’’ Meskub uses it with the word alam [world], and I translate it first as ‘‘figurative world.’’ On second thought, I think perhaps ‘‘allegorical world’’ or even ‘‘metaphoric world’’ or ‘‘symbolic world’’ would be better choices. For now, I opt for ‘‘metaphoric world,’’ but then comes another problematic term in the next sentence: haqiqat [truth, reality, fact] is from the Arabic stem haqq, which also means ‘‘truth,’’ ‘‘justice,’’ or ‘‘right’’ (as in legal right). Persian has borrowed a host of derivatives from this root —including hoquq [plural form of haqq that means ‘‘law,’’ as in the field of law, or ‘‘salary’’], tahqiq [research, investigation], and mohaqqeq [researcher]—and has added even its own prefixes and suffixes to convey otherconcepts. Here the ‘‘world of truth’’ or the ‘‘world of reality’’ does not quite sound right, and I must change the phrase simply to ‘‘their reality.’’ Going back to majaz, it therefore should be an antonym of reality, but none of the antonyms I can conjure up are accurate. The next term is the word jan. Earlier I argued for ‘‘soul’’ as its translation, in the context of bagh-e jan [the garden of the soul], but here the word ruh [soul] is also used in the following phrase, ‘‘the root of their soul is nurtured,’’

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so I must use ‘‘life’’ for jan. When I put all this together in a combination of different choices, I am still not comfortable with the meaning. I reread the Persian; it somehow sounds right and I assume I understand it, but when I try to explain what S means, I fail. Why is it that we cannot catch the incomprehensibility of such fuzzy sentences that is revealed in translating when we read (particularly in our native tongue)? Is it because we live in an age of speed, information, and speed reading? I try to rationalize S’s statements to find some sort of a solution to translating them. The sketches of the lovers Homay and Homayun in the painting are symbolic representations of the real lovers Homay and Homayun (although their reality is the fictional world created by Khaju-Kermani).2 They come from that reality (of the fictional world). They ‘‘live’’ here (in the painting), but their roots are there (in the reality of the fictional world), where their souls are nurtured. I suppose I could dupe some of the readers some of the time with this explanation, but not all of the readers all of the time. Luckily, in the case of this translation, the author is alive and well and I can hopefully benefit from his input in this instance as well, when I see him soon. Of course, since he wrote the dialogue between the two characters, he has no problem having F respond as if he has followed S’s rationale: F: You are trying to justify the ineptitude of the painter. In my opinion, the human figure is the weakest subject matter in our miniature paintings. Compare it with trees, birds, or horses that are usually unruly, well formed, and magnificent. But the rider on such a horse comes out disproportionate, mostly identical, with distorted eyes and a Mongolian Oriental face. It is as if the painter had not looked around himself, had known humans only from the model that he had been given once, and had always repeated the same figure. Miniature characters lack ‘‘individuality,’’ they are unsuccessful examples of mankind. For this reason each human figure is not a distinct individual, independent of others, with its own characteristics. It is a predetermined prototype. S: Like the portraits of saints. Not only are the characteristics of their faces and bodies not a matter of concern, but either they all look alike or even their faces are covered with masks, because saints are equal due to their holiness. Before eternity and the divine perfection of spirit, the particulars of the mortal body become insignificant and are disregarded.

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I have used the word ‘‘saints’’ for moqaddasan with some hesitation. It is not clear whether Meskub uses the word to refer to Islamic holy figures or holy figures in general. However, to my knowledge, the tradition of masking the faces of sacred individuals is Islamic, or perhaps Shi’ite, given the prohibition against the reproduction of animate objects in Islam. In that case, the term ‘‘saint’’ may be misleading. However, as I glance through the next paragraph, I decide to use ‘‘saints’’ for now, unless I find something to the contrary later in the text. S continues: Of course characters/figures in miniatures are usually not those of saints and their resemblance to one another has a different reason. Essentially, attention to individual characteristics and then drawing an ‘‘individual portrait’’ is for when the concept and issue of the social individual appears; in other words, for a person with his own intellectual environment, personality and rights separate from those of others while being with others. Simultaneously being against and with others; being with oneself and being in the society.Then every face, automatically, becomes important. Prior to the appearance of such a concept, even Christ does not have individuality inWestern culture.The crucified Christ of Byzantine portraits is the symbol of the suffering of the Divine incarnate, or man (the son).

By now, I am almost certain that Meskub’s reference to moqaddasan is more universal and general than specific to the Islamic context. But still no final verdict. F: Yes, in a portrait, man does not lose his magnificence and grandeur. But in our miniatures, even ‘‘Rostam’’ and ‘‘Sohrab’’ resemble beaten midgets more than champions of legends. The inability of the painter in drawing/rendering humans must have another source that I do not know. I do not think you know it either, but you justify it by saying that the painter is not concerned with it here; [and] you resort to the roots of the soul, the celestial world and the like. In other words, are ‘‘Homay’’ and ‘‘Homayun,’’ two lovers who have just come together, instead of other things, concerned about the salvation of the soul and the next world? For instance, about Paradise? S: Like you, I too am not fond of the Mongolian midgets in miniatures. But regarding the painter’s [conception of ] ideal, perfect beauty, I think that idea does its job and leaves its seal on reality. As a result, he sketches a

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garden that signifies another garden, it leads to a place further and beyond. Let me not repeat what I have said, in this miniature painting, reality is not the model and in this sense, nothing is real. F: Is the same true of love? S: The same is true of love; it is not only the lover and the beloved who are asleep. Most of the scenes are of spring, as it were, cleansed/bathed/ washed and asleep in light, and because of sleep, without motion and change: an eternal spring. Despite the lines, specific shapes, sharp colors and bright light, everything is in a dream. Because neither the shapes nor colors, none are what we see in nature. The ideal is what exists in the imagination of the painter, even the black ground at night seems translucent, like a light from behind a thin folding screen, and the night is as bright as day; objects, the sky, the earth and vegetation take on the color of one another.

The nephew’s observation earlier that miniature painters are not concerned about realism seems to go one step further here. Inherent in realism is replication (of nature, in this case), whereas in the miniatures described here there seems to be an attempt at distancing the work of art from nature. What is artistic in the unrealistic miniature painting is perhaps the artificiality of nature and other subjects depicted. The nephew’s argument begins to sound more coherent; Paradise is also artificial and so is the Persian garden. Like the miniature painting, things are borrowed from nature, but perhaps what makes them special is that they are unnatural. F: When the night is as bright as day, difference in time is eliminated. If objects become the same color, forms do not have character and specificity. On the other hand, because the painter is not familiar with perspective, there is no sign of distance and closeness, all objects are placed more or less at the same distance, and hence place also loses its specificity. S: The same undifferentiated times and places mean all times are one and the same and all places one place. That oneness in the mirror of the painter’s eye is manifested in various forms. In the garden, too, the principle is that ‘‘oneness’’ that exudes from the dreamy or as you say sleepstricken mood of these images, like the secret scent of light perfume in the breeze! Where the characteristic of time and place is eliminated and time and place become the same, the place is eternity; it is a place where old age and death do not exist. Now, what garden is it that the painter

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imagines—at least in his own mind? Also, let’s not forget that the distinct characteristic of all these pictures is light. Even when they draw the Water of Life in the Region of Darkness, the Region of Darkness itself is light and the pebbles under the water can be seen (leaving aside that water is light and in this case, too, it is light in darkness).

‘‘Water of Life,’’ or in Persian ab-e hayat or ab-e zendegani, is a concept that is akin to the ‘‘fountain of youth’’ in English. I am obviously reluctant to use the English phrase in this context because of the culture-specific location of the Water of Life, which is the Region of Darkness, both of which phrases require footnotes.3 S’s explanations continue in a new paragraph: In the same way that angels do not have shadows, in miniature painting, there is not light and shadow; everything is light, in the colors and in various forms: colorful malleable light.

In the West, isn’t it ghosts and vampires that do not cast a shadow? I wonder if the same belief also applies to angels, although I do not know of the existence of this belief in Iranian culture. F: In this dialogue, you reach a garden of eternal spring, eternal light, timeless, without old age and death. . . . S: In the world of the imagination! The image of that ideal model has been infused like a light into these pictures and has made us accustomed to the mood and atmosphere of another garden, abstract and to some extent alien to the garden that we see.The garden, and essentially the ‘‘reality’’ of miniature painting, is an abstract and idealistic reality; without shadows, and as a result unencumbered by the heaviness and bulk of daily reality. F: ‘‘Salaman’’ and ‘‘Absal’’ in the Celestial Island may have been illustrated more or less with the same idea you are describing.

I reread the last couple of paragraphs that I have translated, somewhat concerned that the routine of translating may have resulted in some sloppy translations. Yes, there are a number of words such as ‘‘accustomed,’’ ‘‘alien,’’ ‘‘heaviness,’’ and ‘‘bulk’’ that I need to work on, and there is need for the explanation of culture-specific references, but, on the whole, the logic of the discussion between the characters comes across. Immersion in the text in the process of translating is, as I have noted earlier, extremely useful and necessary. Nevertheless, there always exists

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the dangerof oversaturation, on the one hand, and becoming a victim of the routine of translating, on the other, both of which can strip the translator of the creativity needed to generate even a literal translation, one transmitting the general meaning of the original, much less a ‘‘literary’’ text. Though I am not at this point yet, soon I should take a break from translating the dialogue to avoid producing a lifeless translation. S: Thewater that surrounds the island and most of the ‘‘painting’’ is a sharp translucent emerald color under which the fish and plants are visible. Higher up are the colorful rings of passing clouds that are driven in one direction byan invisible but discerniblewind. In the aira white bird with open wings is flying toward the sky, a crane, a heron or a wild goose, a high-flying far-flying bird of this sort! ‘‘Salaman’’ stands holding a bow and watching a pheasant on a tree in bloom. The tree has white and purple blossoms—it is spring—and the pheasant has a long tail, extended red neck and blue back. Behind all this, between the lovers there is a cypress tree on the solid green color on which the images of the bird and blossoms are reflected. ‘‘Absal’’ sits and leans against another tree in bloom.The beloved, the cypress, and a tree in bloom with agate-colored buds and small emerald-colored foliage protrude from one side of the picture and spread over the gilded border which is covered with faint illustrations of foliage. But further, there is a tree that has split the top of the painting, extending even beyond the sky. The green and yellow branches and leaves of this ‘‘spring-autumn’’ tree seem to have opened their wings to go even higher. Everything—colorful and light—faces upward toward a dreamy space . . .

Apparently based on a Greek tale, ‘‘Salaman and Absal’’ is an allegorical love tale by the fifteenth-century Persian poet Jami. Salaman is the son of a Greek king who is nursed by beautiful Absal, who falls in love with the adolescent boy. Fearing the wrath of the king, the couple flee, and after much hardship they light a fire in the desert and jump into it. Absal dies, but Salaman is saved by his father and survives to assume his princely duties and marry Zohreh. This love tale, which is also reported and referred to in various versions, has mystical overtones, an interpretation of which is given by the poet in the last part of the poem.4 As I glance through some references and interpretations of the poem, I find that at least in one of them, Salaman is said to represent Adam and Ab-

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sal to represent Paradise.5 I wonder what the miniature artist had in mind and become more curious to see a copy of the miniature. F: The dream of courtiers and prominent people who could afford to hire painters to decorate the doors and walls of their palaces or to illustrate their books. For this reason, this kind of painting is captive to literature; it either narrates the stories of The Book of Kings and Khamseh of Nezami,6 or the royal hunting, battle and banquet scenes, joyful feasts and drinking parties and portraits of the young and princes. And if there is any idealistic imagination, it is the ideal of these same tranquil clients who want vivid and lively colors, happy, bright and pleasant sketches. The illustrations are saturated with worldly, physical pleasures.

The debate between the writer and the painter goes to the heart of the often internal debate and conflict in the mind of many twentieth-century (and even nineteenth-century) Iranian intellectuals. The overwhelming dominance of mysticism in Persian literature has caused many Iranians in this century to question and even to blame, among other things, social ills and limitations on these ideas. Social thinkers and reformers such as Ahmad Kasravi have even gone so far as to advocate the burning and discarding of such literary texts.7 The uncle’s dismissal of the almost supernatural aspects of Persian miniature painting is a reflection perhaps of Meskub’s own internal debate with his ‘‘self,’’ as he puts it. S: ‘‘The Garden of Paradise,’’ too, is not only not alien to such pleasures, but it is a place in which ultimate physical and spiritual pleasures are among its eternal blessings. For the painter, every scene is an instrument to transfer his sense and perception of ideal beauty to the canvas. The perfect happiness of the body and soul is in another world and, consciously or subconsciously, he wants to achieve some sense of it in form and color; for this reason, in painting ‘‘here’’ he has his eye on ‘‘there.’’ He is not concerned with the reality of here, because he is preoccupied by the truth of there and this preoccupation is to such an extent that sometimes only the image of there . . .

Persian word order places the verb at the end of the sentence. With their endings, verbs also often contain the pronoun, which is usually omitted from the position of the subject in a sentence. Hence, when a sentence, as in the case of the restrictive clause at the end of the previous paragraph,

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which is interrupted by F, is incomplete, despite the fact that one can more or less guess how that sentence was supposed to be completed, it does not translate itself readily into a language such as English, in which the subject and verb usually are in the first and second position in the sentence. This can be particularly problematic in situations in which the incomplete sentence is completed later, but as an incomplete utterance at one point, it is intended to create suspense, conjecture, etc. Interpreters at the United Nations, for instance, cannot always wait for a Persian speaker to complete a sentence to render it into English, and therefore usually guess what the subject and the verb could be and begin their sentences in simultaneous translation, sometimes causing a great deal of confusion and having to go back to correct their translations. At this point, I do not see any major problem with S’s interrupted utterance ‘‘that sometimes only the image of there . . . ,’’ but I may have to mark the passage, just in case. F: Every image that he may have of there, still he has taken it through human senses, and from here. Even fantasizing has a source and an origin. S: Of course, but what he takes he has re-created in the mirror of imagination and brings back to this world and he sees here in that open mirror. The result: This ‘‘place’’ is perfect with optional designs, times and places, and with freedom in color and design and with the blessing of light, he creates his ideal garden, the garden of his soul.

I have finally come across a sentence that has syntactical problems, which may be due to an error by the author or a misprint or missing words, etc. By this time, of course, I am sufficiently versed in the debate between the uncle and the nephew and can ‘‘correct’’ or ‘‘alter’’ the sentence in a way to preserve what I would like to call the ‘‘logical progression’’ of the text or the argument.8 As a proponent of ‘‘faithfulness’’ in translation, altering the text is not what I generally favor. But, in practical terms, I could not possibly (at least consciously) reproduce the syntactical errors of an original text in translation, because, as I have noted earlier, when a translation is successful, usually the original author gets the praise for having written a masterpiece, but if it fails or even reproduces the failures of the original, the translator gets the blame. So, I am tempted to issue another decree to myself as translator: ‘‘If the original is broke, fix it with translation.’’ F: Such a painter whose soul lives in a garden greener than the garden of the body and whose world of imagination is [a] happier [place] than

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the actual world is a wishful thinker who knows well how to deceive himself. But the garden of my imagination is right here, in the garden of the body, not the garden of the soul. Have you seen the ‘‘Qasroddasht’’ gardens? In Shiraz at the edge of that city, behind high walls, there is a sanctuary . . .

Meskub’s internal dialogue or debate with his ‘‘self,’’ between the writer and the painter in this text, loosely reflects the conflict between tradition and modernity. To the nephew, the importance of the miniature painter is in being connected with something outside himself, something beyond. To the uncle, on the other hand, his own identity is defined in terms of his own individuality, his own imagination or, as he puts it, ‘‘the garden of my imagination,’’ which is tangible. What Meskub presents here as a debate or a dialogue between the painter and the writer and in terms of their views on art and artistic vision and perception is indeed the debate that has been going on in Iran, in different forms and at different levels, on the social as well as the individual level. The process of transition from tradition to modernity (or should we call it the conflict between these two?) has been underway since at least the early nineteenth century. The occurrence of two major revolutions in this century reflects the political and social aspects of this conflict, but while the Constitutional Revolution of – appears to signal a movement toward modernity, the Islamic Revolution of – has been regarded as a victory for tradition. As is true perhaps in every society, this national schizophrenic conflict exists also on the individual level. The election of Mohammad Khatami as president in the final years of the twentieth century and some twenty years after the Islamic Revolution in Iran clearly shows the Iranian schizophrenic identity crisis on the social, political, cultural, and individual levels. Khatami is often described as a ‘‘modern cleric,’’ which may be an oxymoron, since the clergy are regarded as among the guardians of tradition. His popular ideas, too, are indicative of this Iranian schizophrenia. On the one hand, he emphasizes religious faith, reliance on God, and spirituality, but on the other, the mottoes of his presidency consist of freedom, civil society, and political development. He dresses in the traditional garb of a Shi’ite Moslem clergyman, but he speaks and often behaves socially as a modern intellectual and politician.

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Like many Iranian thinkers and writers, Meskub has been preoccupied with this schizophrenic collective and individual conflict or identity crisis, and he has sought answers and solutions by writing books such as Iranian Identity and the Persian Language.9 As I resume translating the dialogue, I remember being told bya psychologist friend that ‘‘an identitycrisis occurs when one’s identity is threatened,’’ and I wonder about what actually has been threatening Iranian identity. S: There was a sanctuary. F: There was a sanctuary . . . sheltered from the chaos outside. When you open the door, you step into a vestibule or under a false arch with stairs on both sides, and possibly a hexagonal reflecting pool and the shimmering of wateron the scales of a few red goldfish that continuously slide along the turquoise-colored tile at the bottom. There is shade, water, and the tranquility of the fish. In the damp cool shade, you rest to take a breath of fresh air and are cut off from the thirst of the sun and the fever and frenzy outside. Then, the graveled avenue begins with pine trees standing on both sides awaiting the newcomers, with a patient and calm whisper in the breeze. The avenue leads to an open space with a mound overflowing with violets, begonias, petunias, wallflowers, dahlias, and a few corn poppies and other annual flowers, each lasting a few days. The borders of the mound and around the flowers are covered with short decorative boxwood. The continuation of the avenue on the other side of the open space, a little further, the landlord’s building with a vast veranda, halls on both sides, sash windows with colored glass and an open and cheery appearance. S: Which garden and what time period are you talking about? F: About the timeless garden, about ‘‘Alizadeh’s garden,’’ about two slender, tall cypress trees and a few purple and amber jasmine plants, and about the reflecting pool in front of the house, the length of the veranda, with a short rim, shallow, a wide stone fountain in the middle and the sky in the mirror of the water, about Judas trees, mimosa trees, and acacia trees and avenues that stretch from the open space to the four corners of the garden and divide it into several sections, each part with free designs and willful lack of restraint is broken into other plots and flower beds covered with plants and saplings. One corner of the garden is taken over by four or five aged plane trees;

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the trees are planted in a circle so that in the middle, under the canopy of their branches and leaves, a cool shady area oblivious to the flame of the sun stretches out on the ground; this is the cozy corner, a place to lie back and rest from the fire and chaos outside.

I am not certain how a shady place or a shady spot ‘‘stretches out’’ on the ground, and in this case it is not only the English translation that seems odd, but I have problems with the logic of the Persian original as well. A second point of confusion is the word bonehgah. Boneh literally means ‘‘goods’’ or ‘‘supplies’’ and the suffix gah indicates ‘‘place.’’ The compound, therefore, means something like ‘‘supply room’’ or ‘‘supply area.’’ In a garden there may be an area where certain probably nonperishable items can be stored, but as I look at the next two paragraphs, I conclude that something like ‘‘cozy place’’ may be a meaning of bonehgah, with which I am not familiar and was not able to find in any of the Persian dictionaries.10 The high veranda overlooks the garden and from there one can view the flower garden in the middle and the reflective pool—the heart and the mirror of the garden—and touch its scattered shell and its color and smell. But in the cozy corner, one can take refuge. Against the raw and rough nature outside, the cozy corner is a place of refuge in the shelter of the garden.

The painter’s use of words is somewhat baffling to me, but I continue: S: This is a cozy, secluded corner, a safe place to meet a friend, a confidant, a kindred spirit.

As I look at the first two or three words in the next sentence, I see the word howzkhaneh, for which I know of no equivalent in English. Previously, in this and other translations, I have reluctantly translated the word howz as ‘‘pool,’’ ‘‘pond,’’ or ‘‘goldfish pond,’’ hoping that in the context a reader unfamiliar with traditional Iranian houses and courtyards would still envision something resembling what is pictured in the mind of readers familiar with Iranian residential architecture. Going back to the compound word howzkhaneh, as it becomes clear more or less when one reads the entire next paragraph, it is a sort of basement room in which there is a pool in the middle with goldfish and a fountain usually used during hot weather as perhaps the only cool place inside the house (and not the courtyard,

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since in Iran the courtyard is also considered a part of the house) for the family to gather and to rest. After all this description, and even assuming that I should provide some sort of footnote in the translation, I still have to provide some sort of descriptive phrase in the translation of the text. I look through several European accounts of travel to Iran in past centuries, hoping to find an equivalent some writer might have used, but to no avail. In many such instances, European travelers and scholars simply transliterated culture-specific words and described them. Here, of course, I am not sure I should allow myself the liberty of the easy way out, that is, transliterating howzkhaneh. Obviously, a word such as ‘‘aquarium’’ (which is, by the way, suggested by some bilingual dictionaries) is inaccurate and misleading. Hence, for now, I will have to settle for the ‘‘goldfish-pool room,’’ as odd as it sounds. F: Like the old goldfish-pool rooms, an azure pool, stone overflow gutter, and a fountain in the middle that continuously drives the water into the overflow gutter, and course plinth tile work, faces of kings and princes, Jamshid of the Pishdadi Dynasty and Keykhosrow of the Kiani Dynasty, Anushirvan of the Sassanian Dynasty, and Homay Chehrazad. The arched-brick ceiling and the freshness of the water and seclusion of the house sheltered from the shameless sun of long summers. In the Mahalleh Now District of Isfahan, there is a Safavid house with a hexagonal stone pool with four triangular flower beds that . . .11 S: There is no longer any sign/trace left of either those gardens or these houses, except in memory, in history. F: If there were, we would not long for them. I am speaking of the ideal, of what does not exist. Does the garden of your miniature artists exist? S: No, but it did. As long as their garden existed, they did too, and as long as they existed, their garden did too. F: Yes, but in the world of the imagination. S: Creative imagination, orderly and more luminous than light and more real than existing reality. But the garden of your imagination . . . F: Has burned but with its green longing . . . S: The vague longing of a seed that continues to struggle to pull itself out of the ground, but they in their own luminous garden . . . Have you ever noticed that the sun usually is not shown in miniature painting? The painter does not paint the sun, but there is always sunlight.

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F: There is no sun, but there is sunlight? What are you trying to say? S: I am trying to say, like when there is no moon but the atmosphere overflows with the exuding fluid moonlight. F: When there is no moon, of course there is no moonlight either. S: But there is in the imagination of the painter. The world of his imagination is luminous. The abode of light is in his imagination, not in the sky. That is why the paintings are sunlit, even without the sun, even at night and in darkness. F: Perhaps, but luminous darkness is not real. S: Perhaps it does not exist in actuality, but it is real, because his darkness is the source of the Water of Life and the Water of Life is the substance of the illumination/luminescence of the soul and belongs to the clearsighted ‘‘Elias,’’ not ‘‘Alexander,’’ even if he is the king of the whole world.

The two words vaqe’iyyat and haqiqat, the first denoting ‘‘factuality’’ and ‘‘actuality,’’ and the second ‘‘reality’’ and ‘‘truth,’’ are often used synonymously in Persian, but in a context such as we have here the distinction becomes important. I can somehow get around the problem of translating F’s last statement, in which he uses haqiqat as ‘‘luminous darkness is not real,’’ which provides the necessary justification for S saying that ‘‘Perhaps it does not exist in actuality, but it is real.’’ S, of course uses vaqe’iyyat for the former and haqiqat for the latter.The overlapping of these two words in Persian usage is the core of the confusion here, which also exists sometimes in English when ‘‘real’’ and its derivatives are used interchangeably with ‘‘actual.’’ In addition, the word haqiqat, from the Arabic stem haqq, which connotes ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘justice,’’ and by extension ‘‘God’’ in the Islamic and particularly Sufi context, among other things, rings a warning bell for me to use more caution in my choices. But I decide that in this case I have numerous choices and will be able to transmit in English the basic distinction that S explains. About the phrase ab-e hayat (which occurred earlier in the text) that literally means ‘‘water of life,’’ I am still debating whether or not to use the familiar phrase ‘‘the fountain of youth.’’ The references to ‘‘Elias’’/ ‘‘Elijah’’ and ‘‘Alexander’’ may provide me with an answer. I recall that in Iranian folklore, both the prophet and the conqueror are associated with ab-e hayat. Elias is supposed to be immortal and Alexander is said to have

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launched his military expedition to Asia in search of the fountain of youth. Naturally, however, while Elias maintains a positive image in Persian folklore, Alexander is not held in such high esteem by Iranians, who know their ancient history. With regard to the Hebrew prophet, on the other hand, I recall that legend had it that if one would sweep a portion of the street or alleyway in front of one’s house for forty days, Elias would come to her or him and grant her or his wish, a practice that I had seen myself as a youth. I resolve to check the Bible as well as Persian folklore sources. F: These are not gardens anymore, theyare spiritual states, or, I don’t know . . . salvation of the soul and such things. S: It is the garden of the soul. The world of the painter’s imagination is free from the bright sun and the moon. And this drives him toward a sort of absolute beauty, free from factuality. His perception of ‘‘beauty’’ materializes in the garden that is the figurative form of flowers, plants, water and trees in an abstract space. In some miniature paintings, this abstraction is conscious; the painter wants to paint the paradise of the celestial world and for this reason he uses his physical eye/the eye of his head as long as it serves the eye of the heart/mind’s eye.

It is tempting to use the idiomatic phrase ‘‘mind’s eye’’ for the Persian cheshm-e del, but I resist this temptation, since the word del is in some respects more complex and even alluring than the word ‘‘heart’’ in English, and in this case I feel it is more complex than ‘‘imagination,’’ which ‘‘mind’s eye’’ would suggest.12 F: Are you talking about the miniature Ascension?

The Arabic word me’raj literally means ‘‘ladder’’ or a means of climbing. However, in Persian me’raj generally refers to the popular Islamic belief that the Prophet Mohammad visited the heavens and the celestial world. I could be a little more descriptive in the translated text and use ‘‘the Prophet Mohammad’s Ascension,’’ but, as I look at F’s furtherexplanation, I decide not to pad the text. A footnote, however, may be necessary here.13 S: Why Ascension? F: Because in it, angels with open gold and orange, green and blue, white and violet, and saffron and purple wings on the background of the night’s azure, star-studded sky have surrounded the ‘‘Prophet’’ who

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is riding Boraq,14 ascending to the upper heavens/sky. In the nocturnal/night sky, with intertwined patches of clouds, the halo of a full moon has a liquid brightness. The Prophet, who has passed the horizon of the moon, is wearing a green cloak, and Boraq, with a feminine face and a crown on its head, traverses the galaxies lightly and easily. A flaming golden light surrounds the Prophet and Gabriel, and candelabra of the same kind are hanging from the roofless sky; the miniature painting is in fact a flower garden of light on a clear, bright night. S: Perhaps, but this is not what I wanted to say. There are other paintings that portray a glorious celestial earth, mountain after mountain, the entire high Alborz Mountains and the sacred peaks, the nest of ‘‘Simorgh’’ and ‘‘Zal,’’ and the prison of ‘‘Zahhak,’’ with snakes growing out of his shoulders, a land in the sky, the place of the god of water and the source of waters and rivers, and a tree in the heart of the wide sea, the cure of all pains and the embodiment of the seeds of all plants, including the paradisiacal cypress of ‘‘Zoroaster,’’ the ever-green, ever-young tree, eternal spring, safe from the ravages of time, and clusters of grapes which ‘‘God created out of happiness.’’

The duality and the conflict in the Persian psyche surfaces, implicitly or explicitly, in many places, even when one least expects it, as it does here in the case of the dialogue about Persian miniature paintings between an uncle and his nephew.The duality, of course, remains in the Iranian collective psyche from ancient times, in pre-Islamic Iran, in Zoroastrian beliefs, and in the dichotomies of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, truth and lie, good and evil, light and darkness, and so on. In that belief system, the existence of one side of the dichotomy necessitates the other, and the conflict between the two is in fact the force and source of life. The Islamic-Arab invasion of Iran in the seventh century .. and voluntary or involuntary conversion of the populace from Zoroastrianism to Islam also caused a different sort of duality and conflict in the Persian psyche. Although Iranians became Moslems, by and large, and even helped the spread of their newly adopted religion to other parts of Asia, there still remains a sense of nostalgia in regard to Zoroastrianism and pre-Islamic Iran, as well as an often explicit, always implicit, resentment of the new religion they have ultimately so enthusiastically embraced. To an Iranian reader, not only the content of this segment of the dia-

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logue but even the vocabulary that F uses to describe the painting about Mohammad’s ascension to the heavens is different from the words used by S to describe the miniature painting of the ‘‘celestial earth,’’ with explicit references to the other side of this duality and conflict. But since any attempt on my part as the translator to find analogous vocabulary in English would either fail or at best be misleading, I decide to rely only on the content of the dialogue and hope for the best. F: The two miniature paintings in the Shiraz anthology of the early ninth century ..?

Meskub’s text at this point is marked with an asterisk, which directs the reader to the end of the text and the rather cryptic endnote which I quoted earlier in this chapter. For translators, sources that are provided by the author of the original text in the target language script should be helpful, and are indeed helpful when they are accurate. In a case such as we have here, however, given all the misspellings and other problems, I am not sure how helpful this note may be. In any case, it sends me back to the library to resume my search for the above-mentioned volume. S: And those colors and designs/sketches that can only exist in the world of imagination, in imagining Paradise. F: In The Ascension, the artist has painted his own dream/vision, but in these, the dream/vision of the ‘‘Prophet’’ has been painted. S: The faithful’s dream of beauty. ‘‘Zoroaster’s’’ garden of the soul is even more lofty/exalted and abstract. His garden is in the thought and the mind, in awareness and visitation. And he wants God to understand God and asks the Creator: Who is the creatorof the earth and the sky, the moon, the stars, water, light and plants? Oh Creator, make me aware of Thy words and Thy language and show Thyself. He prays at the threshold of ‘‘Goodness’’ and ‘‘Truth,’’ which are manifestations of God, to be bestowed the gift of visitation.

One problem in the above passage concerns the first phrase, which I have translated as ‘‘the faithful’s dream of beauty.’’ If the Persian phrase were translated literally, it would be ‘‘the dream of the faithful that appeals to beauty,’’ which would be as meaningless in Persian as it is in English. With a bit of trepidation, I decide to alter the text and avoid being blamed

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for what seems to me to be a meaningless utterance. And I do so partly because of other, perhaps more important, concerns at this point in the translation. Despite my earlier argument about trying to retain Meskub’s punctuation in the translation, I am now far enough into the text that I have decided to abandon my faithfulness for the sake of clarity. In this and the following paragraph, there is also a shift from a more or less educated colloquial Persian into a more poetic style, in a sense emulating the conventional language of sacred texts. The use of ‘‘Thy’’ instead of ‘‘Your’’ is an attempt on my part to replicate this change. Oh better than all! Come to me and bestowa glance upon me. Oh Mazda! Oh Truth and Goodness! Reveal yourselves to me that I may see the soul of my soul.

Here there is another shift, which may seem odd upon first reading but has to be retained. Even though Goodness and Truth are described in the previous paragraph as manifestations of God, they are personified in the penultimate translated sentence and the plural verb ending (indicated by the second-person pronoun in English) is used in the last translated sentence. I am also somewhat at a loss as to what to do with the phrase jan-e ruh, since I have more or less translated both terms separately as ‘‘soul’’ and am not sure whether ‘‘soul of my soul’’ is what is meant by the Persian phrase. I continue with the translation of the rest of the paragraph: I want to know and see.Thou bestowed a glance at/upon me and I knew with the power of thought and saw with the eye of the heart. My Paradise is a mutual perception and visitation. And if I perceive and see Thee, it is because my thought and vision are one with ‘‘Good Thoughts’’ and ‘‘Truth’’ (both of which are manifestations of Thee). In me there is something of Thee that I perceive and see Thee by Thy blessing. Because Thou art thought and light, and I perceive Thee by thought and see Thee by light. And now, he who sought to see the land of Good Thoughts, Words and Deeds with eyes rests in the luminous House of God and becomes immortal in endless eternity, joy and happiness. Oh, Ahura Mazda! Once I knew Thee, I saw Thee engaged in the first creation and found the beginning of time to eternity within myself.

Like ‘‘eternity,’’ which is ‘‘endless time’’ (and without beginning), the Arabic word azal means ‘‘beginning of time without beginning.’’ But the use of

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this long phrase in the English translation for the short azal may be somewhat overstretching the text, and therefore I decide to accept the loss. At this point, too, I am becoming uncertain about the use of ‘‘thou,’’ ‘‘thee,’’ etc., but the final choice has to remain until editing. F: This is no longer a garden, because a garden, besides all else, is the abode of beauty. In it, man reconstructs nature with his perception of beauty, not this one which is alien to design, form, color and smell, to the freshness of water and the freshness of Spring!

The word ‘‘spring’’ in English, with at least three meanings, is reminiscent of the word shir in Persian, which, depending on the context, could mean ‘‘milk,’’ ‘‘lion,’’ or ‘‘faucet.’’ In regard to ‘‘spring’’ here, what is intended is the season, but the phrase before it, ‘‘the freshness of water,’’ may mislead the reader to read it as a spring of water. Should I add the word ‘‘season’’ at the end to prevent a misreading? I decide instead to capitalize the word. S: That is why I speak about the Paradise of Him Who is the soul of the garden and not its body, the garden of the soul, not the garden of the body. In His Paradise, the principle is awareness and visitation, beauty is secondary to knowledge. But since seeing beauty is possible under the rays of light, in His Paradise, the source of beauty also flows. F: Your Prophet wants to see the land of Good Thoughts, Words and Deeds. Through the eyes of wisdom he sees awareness, knowledge or other concepts of this sort. His Garden of the Soul is too far, it is an unattainable ‘‘utopia.’’

The terms nakoja and nakojaabad [literally, ‘‘nowhereland’’] are inventions of the twelfth-century Persian mystic and philosopher Shehabeddin Sohravardi. Although the concept is akin to the English term ‘‘utopia,’’ I use the latter with a certain degree of caution until I check the differences between them with a specialist colleague. On Sohravardi, whose name appears in the next paragraph, I will need to add a footnote. S: But ‘‘Zoroaster,’’ contrary to ‘‘Sohravardi,’’ 15 does not live with regret and yearning for the ‘‘utopia’’ from which he is separated. This vast earth with its fecund pastures and plantations is a generous angel and one of the physical manifestations of Ahura. His Paradise, despite its remoteness, is under our feet.

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The Zoroastrian deity, creator of the world, and spirit of good, Ahura Mazda, is referred to in Persian through variations of the term as ‘‘Ormazd,’’ ‘‘Mazda,’’ and ‘‘Ahura’’ without confusion for the Persian reader. In English, Webster’s records both ‘‘Ahura Mazda’’ and ‘‘Ormazd’’; however, under the former entry, we are sent to the latter.To avoid confusion in the translation, I decide to use one term consistently for all variations, and even though ‘‘Ormazd’’ may be the preferred term in English, I choose ‘‘Ahura Mazda,’’ which is the more complete form. F: I don’t know, but I am a painter and my awareness and knowledge come from my eyes and hands; I become intoxicated/inebriated with the garden of the body, not what you call the garden of the soul or the abode of the soul and other things, a garden that can be seen and touched and with which one can become a friend and companion, watch/observe its morning, greens and running water and go into ecstasy. My ideal garden is the paradise of a prophet who is in love and a poet king who was himself lovesick and whose beloved was the most beautiful garden in the world. Has it ever happened to you, as well, that you see a woman one day and suddenly feel as if you have been waiting for her your whole life? Wishing to meet someone who would be like the garden in the color and scent of the night, with the simple health of plants and the beauty and fluidity of water, with hair like the entwined branches of a myrtle tree, luxuriant. And eyes, a spring in the distant solitary nights of the mountains. A familiar but exotic beauty, embraced by the mystery of darkness, with the warmth of body and scent of love and a mixed aroma of cherry and apple blossoms, pungent acacia and the bitter, moist scent of boxwoods, and the expectant look of autumn for the flower of the beloved’s face, and the extinguished sun close to dusk, fled from the heat of the sunlight and arrived at the shimmering breath of water and grass, and wet leaves and full veins, and the green shell of a garden that seems black in the dusk, a breath sheltered and free from the fever and frenzy of the times, resting for a moment in one’s own time and reposing in one’s own place, as if on the pleasant meadow of the world, you are King Solomon:

F’s poetic vision has enchanted but also troubled me as I attempt to translate it. It sends me to the Bible and the Song of Songs of Solomon. And,

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in fact, the continuation of F’s section appears in bold and, according to a note at the end of the book, it is from the Song of Songs. The question here, of course, is whether I should translate the segment from Persian or merely quote from an English translation of the Bible. Another question is, which Bible translation should I use? The first version I check is the King James. I search for matching verses, words, images. I find a few, but the English text and the Persian text do not quite match. I check another English version. The problem is the same. I wonder what Persian translation of the Old Testament was available to Meskub, or whether he translated it himself, possibly from French. The Persian translations of the Bible I know were mostly by British missionaries. In that case, I would guess that the King James Version should be the source of the translation. As I reread the Persian version, and again the King James and other versions, I locate phrases and verses here and there that seem to match the Persian, but I cannot find a section that matches the Persian text thoroughly. I reread all the versions and realize that segments of the Persian text match the English versions, but Meskub’s does not follow the linear structure of the songs. Moreover, there are several portions of the Persian text that I cannot find in the English versions at all. Given the long history of Jews in Iran, which dates at least back to the Achaemenid dynasty (– ..), translations of the Old Testament into Persian from the Hebrew by Iranian Jewish scholars certainly exist. Was the text taken from one of those translations? I need to take a break and talk to some Biblical scholars.

U5 The Garden of the Soul Tall and splendid with entwined locks, black as a raven, and a countenance like a garden of balsam and a mound of herbs and hands like gold rings, illuminated with chrysolites, and a bosom like transparent ivory, bejeweled with topaz, and legs like marble pillars standing on pedestals of pure gold, a face like Lebanon and cedars in the green garden of the ‘‘poet of Damghan’’ (red rose and the locks of boxwood, birds in love with the nightingale in the garden, and the dove in the field, and the partridge in the mountain, and the fleeing rain cloud in the field). ‘‘Solomon’’ son of ‘‘David,’’ who knew the language of the birds and, in the blink of an eye, traversed time and place, the king of demons and fairies and fire and wind and water . . . but lovesick! Strengthen him with raisins and refresh him with fresh fruit because he is lovesick and smitten by the beloved. Now you are beautiful, oh my garden, oh my beloved! You are beautiful; your very figure is like unto a palm tree, and your breasts like unto clusters of grapes. I said, I will climb the palm tree, I will take hold of its branches. How very delightful is your love, how much better is your love than wine, and your fragrances than all other fragrances. Oh my flower garden! Honey and milk are under your tongue, and the fragrance of your garments is the fragrance of Lebanon. My beloved is a fountain sealed and an enclosed garden (a garden of emerald and rubyand the spring garment of cypress next to the stream with jasmine, lilies, and eglantine, and the song of the nightingale in love).

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Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphor and nard, nard and saffron and trees of frankincense, myrrh, and aloe and all the finest spices, a fountain of gardens and a well of living water and flowing streams. Arise, oh North Wind; and come South Wind, and blow upon my garden that its perfumes may spread abroad. Oh my beloved, and oh my flower field! Arise and come, because now winter has passed and rain has done and gone. Flowers have appeared on the ground and the time of melodies has come and the song of the dove is heard and the vines have bloomed and the wine of the poet has a pleasant aroma (the daughters of the vine, the clusters of grapes, the fertile/fruitful breasts of pregnant virgin maidens and the blade of the gardener and the cutting of the bodies of the prisoners of the vat, and a cover on top, like a lock on a door). Oh my beloved, and oh my fair one! Oh you dove that has a nest in the crevice of rocks under the cover of granite, show your face to me and make me hear your song, because your song is pleasing and your face is beautiful. Who is this that comes forth with the dawn and is as beautiful as the moon and as resplendent as the sun, as awe-inspiring as an army with banners? A poet king and prophet is the captive of her locks, and she is an enclosed garden and invisible fountain. I have come to my garden, oh my beloved, oh my bride: I gathered my myrrh and my spices, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, and I drank my wine. In my garden, the mandrakes give forth fragrance, all manner of pleasant fruits—oh my beloved—I have kept in store for you. Oh lovers, freely eat, drink, and be merry.

The translation of the above segments of Solomon’s Song of Songs is a combined effort of the forty-seven scholars who participated in producing the King James Version, as well as those who collaborated on other versions. I have made an attempt to incorporate the vocabulary, and sometimes the punctuation, of different versions in English to create a montage based on my rendition of Meskub’s rather enigmatic and certainly problematic selection.This was a decision I had to make after reminding myself that I was translating, not the Bible or even a section of the Song of Songs, but segments of the poem, possibly altered and tailored to fit the painter’s

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tangible but idealized vision of the garden.1 The contradiction between the words ‘‘tangible’’ and ‘‘idealized’’ is precisely what the nephew focuses on as he responds: S: What does not exist in the image of your garden is joy, drinking and merriment. Sometimes the trees are uprooted, the house is invaded by thewind, rain is lost, a flood pours from the sky, and it is stormy.What astonishing distance between what you wish and what your brush draws! Your imagination and your hand are quite distant from one another. F: Not very much. In fact, as far as one season. My gardens are born in autumn but always nurture the futile thought of spring in mind. S: Perhaps for this reason they embody the seed of a paradoxical yearning: a spring that has gone, a spring that has not come. As if the wind, in almost all the paintings, drives forth the moonlight, color, trees, sky, and finally time and distances them away from us. Everything is fluid except for light that is present, albeit coy and faint. If you have noticed, everything is translucent, like nocturnal blue, the vastness of the field or the other side of the glass. Among all fluid things, the light is suspended in space, like rain.

Once again I reread the nephew’s description of the uncle’s paintings in the beginning of the book in order to visualize the paintings and make connections to their discussion at this point in the dialogue. Unlike the miniature paintings they discuss earlier, I should assume, the uncle’s paintings are fictional and do not actually exist. I reflect on the difference between the visual medium (of painting) and the medium of language through which a certain idea or image is transmitted to the audience. I think about the medium of film, and how most readers of a story are never satisfied when it is turned into a movie. The reason may be that pictures limit and confine to fixed images what can be imagined by reading words. I also think about the long tradition of illustrations provided in volumes of classical Persian poetry. I reread a section of ‘‘The Black Dome’’ by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami, for which I also find a recent translation: I saw a garden pure as paradise Untouched by human dirt and human vice: Thousands of blossoms bloomed, and small streams crept So gently through the leaves you’d say they slept;

The Garden of the Soul A myriad different hues lay mingled there, A myriad scents drenched miles of perfumed air; The rose lay in the hyacinth’s embrace, The jasmine nuzzled the carnation’s face, The blushing Judas blossoms kissed the grass— The sand seemed glittering grains of polished glass, The dust was camphor and the gravel lay Like shining jewels strewn in the wanderer’s way. The flowing streams seemed rose-water that showed Smooth beds where precious pearls and agates glowed— Quick in their midst slim fish slipped playfully Like silver coins in liquid mercury. A massive rampart of bright emerald green Ran round the garden and enclosed the scene; Its slopes were covered with thick, shady trees, Tall, noble poplars, slender cypresses. (Its stones were rubies and when autumn came The poplar’s leaves glowed with the selfsame flame.) Sweet sandalwood and aloe trees grew there Censing with fragrance all the garden’s air. Finding this lovely place I knew the pleasure Of one who stumbles on a hidden treasure: Astonished by such gorgeous wealth I praised The world’s great God, and then explored—amazed And feeding on delicious fruit—each sight That opened like a vista of delight. Until at last light-hearted, tired, I lay Beneath a cypress; there I passed the day Till nightfall came, surrounded by such beauties That I forgot the world and all its duties; I slept and ate, gave thanks to God, and then Contentedly I slept and ate again.2

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With this, I conclude, the medium of language may be more desirable, since it leaves more to the imagination of the reader: blindness is insight. F: My gardens are being emptied, involuntarily, of nature, of the struggle of soil and the hidden fire of growth.

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S: And instead, they are being filled with the memory of time, of the diehard past that does not let go and is present in the present, a present that cannot be captured and is annihilated in light. The fleeing light and time—the nostalgia for time—are the two distinct characteristics of these works.

I am not certain about the actual meaning of the phrase ‘‘a present . . . that is annihilated in light,’’ but not quite being certain of the meaning of a phrase has rarely hindered me from translating it. I have said in the past that I have on occasion used translating as a means to understand texts and ideas that I cannot follow in the original (generally because of certain writers’ inability to articulate and communicate their ideas clearly). But here, such is not the case.3 The words are clear, but the idea is too abstract for me to grasp. So, I leave it to the unsuspecting reader of my translation to decipher this phrase. F: But I want light for the ‘‘mass of greenery’’ and the restless growth of plants, not for showing the passage of time. My ideal garden has body, weight and thirst; it breathes, blossoms, withers, and is afraid of the drought, of the sun furnace above and the burning soil below and awaits a fertile river that springs from the side of the mountain. It travels through distant twisting and turning roads, it passes at the bottom of the valley, among the forests and melon patches—run-down and tired, below the slope of a solitary mountain, it steps into the edge of the desert, but before it is dissipated and sinks into the swamp, it brings along the cool breath of the mountains; on the way, with the veins that separate from the joints of its body, forests and farms are satiated until it reaches the orchards and the courtyard gardens of a green city. Green land, blue sky and a little further, the desert, empty, dry and dusty as far as the eye can see, and scattered diehard thorn bushes, and the ‘‘enchanting’’ garden at the upper part of the river, at the edge of the city. At dusk, you arrive after a distant journey, you have left behind the heat of the desert sun, the garden with geraniums, verbena, jasmine and soaking wet leaves and two long rows of pine trees with round crests on the two sides of a lawn spread in front of the veranda, as if you have reached someone you love and the shelter of whose safe embrace is your abode. The raw scent of youth exudes from her body, the freshness of water drips from her wet hair, she looks at you, she has opened her arms and

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wants you; you embrace her with a painful and pleasing thirst and drown in a pleasant tranquility, your worries go to sleep, you gain peace of mind, like when you reach a place of pilgrimage with absolute devotion.

This last segment, despite the violations of syntax with which I must contend later, seems to have been the least cumbersome, the most easy-flowing translating I have done since the beginning of this project. And when it seems that easy, as I mentioned before, it concerns me. I am hoping that this is the case because I am more than halfway through the first draft of the translation, and I have finally mastered the mechanics of this particular text. With this hope, I continue. S: But this is not what your hand paints. Wittingly or unwittingly, the garden of the soul that exudes from your fingers is burnt. A sort of destruction of the garden, departure and obliteration.

My hope is shattered. The first two sentences in S’s response seem impossible to translate. The first sentence, literally translated, is ‘‘But from under your hand, this does not come out.’’ In other words, this is not what you or your hand produces. I struggle with this seemingly simple sentence but cannot construct an English equivalent that would not sound odd and that would at the same time retain the simplicityof the Persian sentence, without adding several additional words. In the second sentence, the troublesome noun is sukhtegi, which in other contexts could be translated as ‘‘burn,’’ but here that does not work. I want to keep it as a noun, but then I cannot say, ‘‘The burn of the garden of the soul exudes from your hands.’’ The word I am looking for in this context is something like ‘‘burn-ness,’’ but unfortunately the English dictionaries refuse to conform to my neologism. The gerund ‘‘burning’’ is also problematic, but I consider using it as a last resort. I finally make a decision on the spot, shuffle the syntax, change the word ‘‘hands’’ to ‘‘fingers’’ and settle on a sentence that at least conveys the general idea. One of the disadvantages of trying to think in more than one language is that often the syntax of one language seems to take over one’s brain, as it were, and does not allow the syntax of the second language to function to produce a natural-sounding utterance. In sentences such as these, any translator with a modicum of experience knows that one has to move away from literal translation. But in doing so, one often loses a certain aspect,

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perhaps the core, of the original in the rendition. In any case, at this moment I am too close to, and therefore enslaved by, the Persian text. Once I establish a safe distance from the Persian text, I will be able to reword these sentences in the same way that a teacher corrects the sentences and paragraphs written by foreign-language learners in a composition course. The garden is the abode of your childhood which is gone and only its memory remains. You are a painter of the memory of the past. The wind that blows in almost all of your paintings and drives everything, even the earth, to one direction in a way suggests their transiency, and along with transient things, the essence of transiency, time past has also automatically come with it, the passage of time. F: It is possible, but what I intend is to externalize an image that I have inside/within me, to give it a face in colors and form: actualizing something with potential which is gone! S: In your work, things become actualized when they are seen, and seeing is possible in light. Time leaves everything behind except for itself. For this reason, even though it is always passing, it always is, it is a staying wayfarer. Your light too, is the same—even though far—in the faint line of the horizon, and even further but it is a visible concealment.

In the last sentence, or rather cluster of phrases, there is an obvious breakdown of syntax. Either I am somehow misreading the Persian or the utterance fails to articulate what it is supposed to. In most instances of this sort, translators try to impose some logic on the rendition. In your work, things from the past come with a light from the past that despite having passed are still there. Both are somehow mingled; the light has been lodged in time and time has assumed existence in light. The apprehensive, alienated atmosphere of your gardens is created by a sort of marriage of light and time. F: In you there is an inclination for abstraction and, on the other hand, for creating unity . . . the ancient and original ‘‘pantheism’’/‘‘spiritus mundi.’’

Vahdat-e vojud, literally translated ‘‘unity of existence,’’ is akin to both ‘‘pantheism’’ and ‘‘monism.’’ It is in fact a part of the Sufi mystical doctrine, which by and large matches the definition of these terms. Given the history of coinage of ‘‘pantheism,’’ however, I would hesitate to use it (or even

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‘‘spiritus mundi’’) as an equivalent for vahdat-e vojud in a Sufi text. In the present context, on the other hand, I am inclined to think that Meskub’s usage is more general, and a more familiar term to the English-language reader may better serve the purpose. The continuation of F’s comments and also S’s explanations seem to justify my choice. I also sensed this in the discussion with you about the Paradise of ‘‘Zoroaster.’’ Precisely contrary to me—I am alien to abstract light or beauty, to time without a design and color. S: Not pantheism, but a tendency toward the unity of the garden of the soul and the garden of the body. ‘‘Zoroaster’’ yearns for a sort of oneness with existence; man who was first with God and came to the world to help Him yearns to return to the abode of his soul, the garden of his soul.

S’s passing reference to man’s coming to the world to help God is based on the Zoroastrian myth of creation. It is believed that Ahura Mazda, the supreme spirit of good, created Mashya (the first man, akin to Adam) and Mashyaneh, the first woman (akin to Eve), to help Him fight Ahriman, the spirit of evil. At the end of the world, this task will be accomplished and Ahriman rendered ineffectual.4 Hence, Meskub’s use of vahdat-e vojud here is not an esoteric reference to Sufism, even though the term would most likely conjure up Sufi mystical concepts for the Persian reader. F: Which the ‘‘Prophet Solomon’’ found in his beloved and his beloved found in him: the oneness of two gardens, two bodies, unity in love. And the ‘‘Song of Songs.’’

The lack of capital letters in the Arabic script used in Persian seems to have made an excessive use of quotation marks necessary in modern Persian writing. I am becoming inclined to omit Meskub’s quotation marks around terms and phrases, and such proper names as ‘‘Prophet Solomon’’ and the ‘‘Song of Songs.’’ S: In speaking about the unity of the gardens of the soul and the body— spontaneously—another poet comes to mind whose soul itself is a wondrous garden with the flaming fire of love, the intoxicating, boiling fermentation of wine, and the clamor of the lyre and the striking blows of the musician’s hand, which is the source of all blows, and danc-

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ing in ecstasy under this revolving dome, and exile under the rays of the light of ‘‘Shams,’’ and the brilliance of the face of ‘‘Joseph the Canaanite,’’ and good visit of him to whom all eyes belong,5 and a love that boils/wells up from above and below in the spring/fountain of the soul/spirit, and the yearning for the endless green garden with flowers and fruits that cannot be contained in the imagination, and a cypress that has the same fragrance as the stature of the beloved in the flower garden of the heart.

As I attempt, rather unsuccessfully, to translate this part that appears in bold print in the Persian text, I quickly realize that I must try to render it into a sort of Sufi, poetic language. In my earlier attempt at translating Meskub’s seemingly idiosyncratic use of the Song of Songs, I did not encounter problems similar to those I face here. After all, with the long tradition of English translations of the Bible, readers in English readily recognize the style, despite the differences resulting from my attempt to preserve something of the Persian version.To Persian readers even slightly familiar with Persian literature, the references in the passage above, as well as Meskub’s descriptions and borrowings from the poet, are sufficient to identify the poet as Mowlana Jalaleddin Mowlavi-Balkhi, better known, particularly in the past decade or two, as Rumi, who seems to have become the guru of some of the followers of the philosophy of the New Age groups, though he lived and died over seven centuries ago. And there is a distinctiveness about Rumi’s style and language use, as well as a chantlike quality in his poetry, that makes such identification easier but makes its rendition into English extremely difficult. In other words, what is lost in the process of translation is that which helps identify Rumi in Persian. Despite the popularity of some of the translations of Rumi’s poetry in recent years, I do not think they are familiar enough to English readers to make the identification of the poet possible.6 Hence, I decide to simply continue with the translation, hoping that, as has been true in other instances, I will gradually find the right language and style to render this and the ensuing paragraphs. But in the meantime, there are more mundane translation problems. For instance, the word zakhmeh, which means ‘‘plectrum’’ and also what the plectrum does, is a derivative of the word zakhm, literally ‘‘wound’’ or ‘‘injury,’’ which appears twice in a phrase that is itself ambiguous enough. Having learned by experience that I will not be able to

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solve the problem later in a more enlightened and creative way, I decide to wrestle with it, and finally I opt for ignoring the word zakhmeh and try to convey some sense of the original with the word ‘‘blow’’ in English. F: Let go of this discussion because we will be lost in ‘‘Shams’’ and love and ‘‘Mowlana.’’

Shams, who is also mentioned in the previous paragraph, was a sort of spiritual guide for Rumi (who is in this passage referred to as Mowlana, literally, ‘‘Our Master,’’ both of which obviously require the necessary but undesirable footnotes). S: And in the ‘‘Simorgh’’ of Mount Qaf and the ‘‘Homay’’ of the soul, in my ‘‘Shams’’ and my God, oh my yearning for you my cure, your breath my companion and your face spring and your breathing the companion of my morning and evening, oh you my lineage, your love has once again given flight to the soul, one breath intoxicated for you, another breath yearning for you, dead life, despondent soul, these two or three days sacrificed for you, every moment blossoms bloom in offering to you, on earth and in the sky all restless for you.

At this point, I am utterly at a loss. Have I chosen a text that is beyond my comprehension and hence beyond my abilities as a translator? I know from earlier experiences with mystical poetry, and particularly from the massive commentaries written on Rumi, that in Sufi poetry in general and Rumi’s work in particular, not only are the mind and the mental faculties supposed to take a backseat to senses and emotions, but the ideal of the Sufi is to obliterate the mind in order to see God with the eyes of the soul. All this is fine. My concern here is that in the nonmystical world of translators I am merely trying, indeed need, to follow what I have termed the ‘‘logical progression of the text,’’ in other words, the process of simply making sense. I decide I may need professional help from someone with more experience with mystical texts. For now, however, I shall continue with the remaining two or so pages highlighted in bold print. Oh cypress in motion, hidden eye, soul of the world! I placed love mingled in the heart and the heart attached to you in the heart of you who are like life and more pleasing than life in the depth of myessence, like fancy in the heart, like the good vision of the ‘‘shams’’/sun of the

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two worlds. Oh this life-robbing game of yours! The fish thirsting for life in your water of life, I saw you in a dream and drank you like water, oh nocturnal moon of imagination! May you come out from the heart of the sun and dawn in every particle and like imagination pass through scattered me, for being alive without your pleasant face is a death called life. Show me love in the garden of your face that has permeated like spring the body of the flower. F: Are you uttering invocations or incantations?

The first word in S’s response is shatah, which is a term used for utterances of Sufis in a state of ecstasy or in a trance. These utterances are often regarded as nonsensical and blasphemous. One such utterance is by the renowned mystic Hallaj, who is said to have reached a point in union with God sufficient to say ana al-Haqq [I am theTruth (i.e., God)], for which he was sent to the gallows. After spending some time looking up this category of the words ‘‘ecstasy,’’ ‘‘nonsense,’’ and ‘‘blasphemy,’’ as well as all their synonyms, I become certain that a compound phrase is needed in English to convey a semblance of the meaning of shatah in this context. I write down all the words that may be useful in this compound phrase: ‘‘blasphemy,’’ ‘‘profanity,’’ ‘‘ecstasy,’’ ‘‘trance,’’ ‘‘rapture,’’ ‘‘nonsense,’’ ‘‘unintelligible,’’ ‘‘absurd,’’ ‘‘gibberish,’’ ‘‘enigmatic,’’ ‘‘mystical.’’ None seems to help. I wonder if this is similar to what is called ‘‘speaking in tongues’’ by some Christian sects. I examine the word shatah in the ambiguous and rather abstract context in which Meskub uses it and decide, until a later epiphany, to translate the passage containing shatah as follows: S: I speak in unintelligible mystical blasphemy of the light of the Creator and the Creator of light, of the Friend, of the garden of the soul in the breast of the gardener. Dawn and wakefulness and the first light that has appeared between existence and nonexistence and combined the two. Of the sea, thirst and the water that has gushed out from every direction in the courtyard of the house, and the bejeweled cloud in the sanctuary of the soul, and words clearer than eloquence, spring in the flower, and blossoming in the flower garden of the beloved’s body and the falcon of love and the king of the green fortune of the prosperous heart, the splitting of stone and spilling of the blood of the anemone and the burning of fiery water and lighted fire and the good

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wishes of the flame and the shining of life released from the vicissitudes of time, and sitting like a smile on the breath of time, strewn with the flowers of the moon and stars, and a face more beautiful than a hundred fantasies, with secret words to the ear of the soul, telling silence, the mystery of God, and the twin spirit of death in the fountain of life, and joy in the joyful abode of the soul, and a heart with the sorrow of love, visible in the eyes of every particle like the visible sun. ‘‘None in the world is as alienated from the self as love’’ for the world is the prey of the lover and the lover the prey of love, the lady of his soul is the singing companion of the stars in the firmament, the seed of the firmament in concealment of the depths and crevice in the breast of the earth, unfolding like a bud, acquiring the disposition of the garden and becoming scented by its scent, with the flower of the face of ‘‘Joseph the Canaanite’’ in the well of a heart encamped by the sea, flowing like water in the stream of the Friend, drinking from His refreshing bitterness and residing like the cluster of the Pleiades in His sky! ‘‘I cannot be contained in the world because of joy and happiness,’’ for once again love collapsed on that drunken songster, on the cup and the wine and a mirror filled with the face of the Friend. Oh joy of the soul, soul of the world . . .

In translating this long passage, I have suspended all rational faculties, merely resorting to a sort of involuntary rendition and transcription of the words. I am sure that in this passage as well, there is some kind of logical progression of the text, which I must discover, and when I stand back, as it were, and view it in the context of the entire book, I may be able to find some justification. At this point, I also convince myself that I should not abandon the project because of the many difficulties I have encountered, particularly in this passage. It is true that one cardinal rule for translators is that they should understand the original prior to even attempting their hand at translating it. I see certain similarities between the seemingly unintelligible mystical utterances of S and stream of consciousness texts, with which I have had some experience in the past.7 In translating stream of consciousness novels, I have often discovered the ‘‘logic’’ of the enigmatic monologue of a character, for instance, after having translated, edited, and reread it. With this hope, I resume translating F’s indignant response, which seems to articulate my own frustrations.

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F: Enough of the incantations of the lunatics and madmen and words scattered like smoke . . . S: ‘‘Do not mind if I spoke erratically, illogically, and incoherently.’’ F: Riding the unruly horse of the words of ‘‘Rumi,’’ out of control you gallop in all directions. S: After all, not even he could tame this wild horse. F: Let alone you, or anyone else. S: It became entangled and disheveled because it is so massive, it is the forest of the master. I wanted to give some indication of the garden of his soul. F: To the detriment of the garden of the body, to the detriment of the forgotten garden of the nature which is in it, the reality that surrounds him, the nature of his own existence, the veins and sinews and painful pleasure of his body. S: No, in both poets the garden of the soul and the garden of the body have reached unity. In ‘‘Solomon,’’ love for the beloved is so selfless and exalted that it has even gone beyond the boundaries of the soul and physical love has gained spiritual truth. In him, reality is overflowing with dream, but in Rumi, man and the world are immersed in the garden of the soul, his creative imagination encompasses nature and the supernatural and combines them. All is the garden of the soul. F: In other words, for Solomon, his soul is in the garden of the body, and for Rumi, his body is in the garden of the soul. S: In them, reality and yearning and the desert and the garden, nature and imagination, old age and youth, the freedom of dreams and the borders of necessity have mingled and they have become one. Sometimes even death and life in them . . . F: Precisely contrary to us, who are different human beings in a different world, as if we have been halved down the middle. S: Our desire and action, dream and reality have fallen so far apart that they do not recognize one another. We have fallen far from the garden of the soul. F: And we have been uprooted from the garden of the body. S: The ‘‘garden’’ itself, too, where it is the abode of our body—whether nature or society—is torn apart itself and is in ruins. F: And even then we have fallen into the ‘‘torn-apart ruins’’ of others. My

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garden of the body is like paintings of metamorphosed, deformed, and dismembered human bodies in harsh, dirty and repulsive colors. They can be found in abundance in the paintings of this century. They have no trace of classical beauty that is pleasing to the eye, but they are true. S: It is Guernica, bombs fall from above and fleeing people are torn to pieces in the dark. It looks scattered and each portion plays its own tune, but . . . F: Like our conversation, we jump from one subject to another and each time we end up somewhere else.

As the conversation between the uncle and the nephew becomes more coherent again, I realize that in my ‘‘close reading,’’ i.e., translating, of Meskub’s text, particularly in the segments in which I have encountered more problems, I have at times lost sight of the larger scheme or the overall logic and logical progression of the book. In this imaginary dialogue, Meskub delves into the collective historical, intellectual, and cultural memory and psyche of a nation and in some instances the zeitgeist of the contemporary world as it relates to what he perhaps sees as the Iranian-ness of Iranians, and in the course of the dialogue, he strives to define his nation’s and his own identity by describing certain important facets of Iranian history and culture. With this in mind, I feel more comfortable in trying to justify the seeming incoherence of the passages in which he emulates the poetic frenzy of Rumi, which has been regarded as an integral part of that collective psyche. After all, Rumi’s spiritual couplets, the Masnavi, are sometimes referred to as the Persian Holy Writ or the Persian Koran. In any case, I am regaining my confidence as a translator, since I feel the text is now moving in a direction over which I can command some authority. S: No, in my opinion, this conversation is more like . . . Once a few years ago I went to an exhibit, as I entered the hall, in the distance a large painting caught my attention and I could not take my eyes off of it. It was merely three or four large spots of color, each at random and apparently independent of the others somewhere on the canvas, so that they appeared not to have any relationship to one another. But when you looked carefully, the empty, white space between them had created a form that tightly embraced the spots of color, gave them visual meaning and created a unique kind of beauty. The painting was by Matisse and

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this was the first time that I had sensed and understood abstract painting. At any rate, I have digressed from our conversation. I was saying that bombs from above . . . F: So, it is natural for the green garden of my memory to come to the canvas stricken by autumn; especially in exile, where I have even lost that burnt garden as well.

I cannot think of an equivalent for the word ghorbat in English. In various contexts I have translated it as ‘‘exile’’ or ‘‘strange land,’’ but of course was never satisfied with these terms. Gharib in Persian conveys the sense of being a stranger in a strange land, and ghorbat refers to the state of being away from one’s homeland. In different contexts, derivatives of thesewords connote ‘‘alien’’ and ‘‘alienation.’’ I am also intrigued by the possible etymological Arabic root of these terms. The three letters that represent the sounds ‘‘gh,’’ ‘‘r,’’ and ‘‘b’’ can be read as gharb, which literally means ‘‘West’’ (often referring to Europe and the New World), with derivatives such as ghorub [‘‘sunset,’’ i.e., where the sun sets]. In an earlier book, I have discussed the perception of Iranians regarding theWest and how they have traditionally viewed the West as a strange place, a sort of wonderland. I spend several hours digging into dictionaries and other sources and even contact colleagues whose knowledge of etymology far exceeds mine, but I find no clear answer. The question may not be as pertinent to the problem at hand, but I only pursue it hoping to find a more accurate equivalent for ghorbat. Nevertheless, I decide that too much digression from the main task of translating Dialogue in the Garden may not be very constructive. I feel I am wasting time that I should be spending on actual translating. S: I know. Essentially, man today is threatened from the earth and from the sky, from within and without, and has nothing to lean on anywhere. Everyone is alone in himself. No one is even with himself, let alone with others. See what we are doing to ourselves; first, we have pulled down our garden from the world above and now we want to taste all the pleasures of Paradise all at once, while there is still time, before we turn into the potter’s clay.8 We are in such a hurry that we tear ourselves apart and constantly sink into the hole that we have dug under our own feet, we make everyone sink, the garden of the body and nature. F: Why are you explaining the obvious? Others have made a great deal of

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such criticism regarding their own civilizations. What is the need for further . . . S: No, in fact, I was thinking of ourselves during the Safavid period:9 First they came promising Paradise and the near advent of the Infallible Twelfth Imam; once their foothold was firm—especially from the time of Shah Abbas on—they left the advent of the Twelfth Imam up to God but could not give up Paradise. They constructed gardens and buildings from the ‘‘Naqsh-e Jahan Square’’ to ‘‘Zayandehrud’’ to the foot of ‘‘Mount Sofeh’’: ‘‘Hasht Behesht,’’ ‘‘Namakdan,’’ ‘‘Sofreh-Khaneh,’’ ‘‘Haftdast,’’ ‘‘Chahar Bagh,’’ etc. They filled the inside of the buildings and pavilions with images of floral designs, birds, wine, musicians, cupbearers and wine, on the walls, the colorful carpets, the stucco work, and paintings on the ceilings; they created gardens within gardens and drowned themselves among the harem women in wine, hemp juice, hashish, opium, hallucinogenic concoctions, and any other sort of pleasure they could think of, until finally Mahmud Afghan pulled them out of this immense pleasure house and the Paradise in which they had sunk as in a swamp turned into their Hell.10

S’s description of Safavid Isfahan is quite tangible to me, since it is the city of my birth and also because as an undergraduate I worked as a tourist guide and spent many days learning about and explaining that historical city and its monuments to foreign tourists. But Meskub’s passage requires extensive footnotes for readers of English, not only regarding the gardens and the buildings, but also the rise and fall of the Safavid dynasty (– ). In the above passage, I have been forced to use the word ‘‘wine’’ twice in the list of the images that S provides. The reason is that in Persian there are several terms for wine, including mey, badeh, and even the more common Arabic loan word, sharab. Apparently, at one time these different words connoted different types of wine or wine at different stages of aging. Today, however, those connotations have disappeared. My solution here in the final revision is perhaps to omit the first mention of the word ‘‘wine’’ in English. F: Whenever you use Paradise in excess, it will turn into Hell.The gardens of the soul and the body are both extremely vulnerable. Let us return to our earlier conversation. In such a world, we, who have been cast

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out of our hearth and home, are more gardenless in the land of others. This nostalgia for home and soil seizes you, and when it does it does not let go anymore. I knew a sixty-odd-year-old woman who was ill and bedridden. She had an incurable disease which was hopeless, but she did not want to stay in the hospital. She said: ‘‘Take me home, I want to die there.’’ She insisted so much that they finally took her back to where she wanted to go, among the entwined tall trees of a fruit orchard covered with weeds in a village with a few indigent households near the sea and next to the forest, the aimless prowling of a few hens and chicks around the well in the middle of the courtyard, the smoke of firewood, the taste of fresh milk, and the warm smell of the cows’ teats, wet rice stalks, the falling and decaying of leaves and the bareness of trees, long moonless winter nights, the blowing of drowsy wind through the clay tile roof, the painful rebellion of veins and the splitting of muscles, the hard body of the man, restless desire of the woman, and the budding in the thirsty soil of the body, lightning and refreshing rain, and then pleasant languor in the deep sleep of the earth, and love that had united the two like the miserliness of the sky and indigence of the earth and the years of fear and anticipation. For all this, she wanted to die where her man had died. Just as she understood, dying requires its proper place. S: The death of the body in the garden of the soul. F: Should one separate the gardens of the soul and the body at such times, too? S: No, you are right. Dying in the place where we were born and lived, alone, the place of birth and death does not connect us together, an ‘‘eternal’’ place and creating the illusion that some place always belongs to us. Perhaps we want to return to the moment when the two shores of time—coming and going—tie us together, to all times, to that eternal moment.

I reread these passages, particularly the last one, and wonder whether, despite having translated them, I am completely following their logic. I am, however, particularly interested in the direction in which the dialogue is moving, namely the question of ghorbat, the question of being a stranger in a strange land, the question of living in exile, the question of the nature of migration and emigration, questions which have been a preoccupation for me and a subject of inquiry for many scholars, especially in the past

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twenty years or so, when the number of emigrant or exiled Iranians began to increase.11 These questions may not be, and in fact are not, directly relevant to the task of translating at hand, but they are among the reasons for my attraction to Dialogue in the Garden and translating it. Unlike people from many other cultures, Iranians have traditionally been reluctant to immigrate to other countries, especially in large groups. In the New World, for instance, while there are immigrant communities from various parts of the world, including the Middle East, dating back at least to the nineteenth century, until the recent two decades after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in , the number of Iranian immigrants was quite low and there existed no identifiable Iranian immigrant community in the United States or other parts of the North American continent.12 Historically, the only notable immigration of Iranians (of course, excluding the exodus of those who refused to convert from Zoroastrianism to Islam after the Islamic invasion in the seventh century .. and fled to India) was the departure of a number of intellectuals and poets for India when the Safavids established their theocratic rule over the country, making Shi’ism the official state religion.13 Since the Islamic Revolution, the number of Iranians who have left their homeland and settled in various parts of the world, particularly in Europe and North America, has been significant, amounting to several million people, and since this is the first Iranian mass immigration, and a new experience for them, these new immigrants face many of the psychological and cultural challenges common among all immigrant communities. Although by and large these Iranian immigrants are either highly educated or relatively affluent and therefore do not face the economic hardships encountered by many other immigrant groups, lack of historical experience as immigrants as well as their conscious or subconscious efforts to distance themselves from a country, or the government of a country, that is presented in the media as a pariah and sponsor of terrorism have brought them a sense of alienation and rootlessness. As I read through and translate Meskub’s text, I begin to realize that what Meskub presents as the ‘‘loss of the garden’’ or the loss of Paradise and the nostalgic desire to return home, even if it is to die there, is a metaphor for the loss of roots. F: That may be, but this desire has nothing to do with exile, even though it is stronger in us. Not long ago, a note to this effect in a newspaper

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preoccupied me: We are a husband and wife seventy-some years old. We wish to spend the final days of our lives in our own home which we built with a great deal of hard work and to die there; but there is no room in the cage for a sick bird. Finally, there comes a time when one cannot remedy the pain of old age and disability alone. We have no family or friends who can help us. We are very lonely. On the other hand, we neither agree to nor can endure incarceration of the old in rest homes or nursing homes for the elderly and such places. But what is to be done, not everyone is fortunate to die in his own home. Alas . . . S: The time before death has ruined the lives of this poor couple and has driven them out of their place; but we have been cast out of our place in the prime of life and gallop ahead with four horses in our bewilderment. Last year one night I was a guest of ‘‘Vazgen,’’ the former Iranian boxing champion. He ended up in the United States ten or twelve years ago and now lives near Washington, D.C. He talks as if he just left his gang of street-smart roughnecks in the Darvazeh Dowlat area or the Amjadiyyeh Square yesterday, in a thick Tehran dialect. After several years of working as a laborer and errand boy, he finally became a boxing coach for the police and worked for a couple of years somewhere else until one day they told him, thank you, we are out of funds, you are laid off, in addition to giving him a commendation and proposal for a part-time job: a children’s boxing coach, just one or two hours a week.

I stop. The tone and texture of what follows these introductory explanations by S are different from those of the dialogue between the uncle and the nephew previously. The dialogue now turns into a dialogue within a dialogue, and its intellectual and often abstract, somewhat philosophical subject matter becomes more mundane, down to earth, as it were. I review some ten or more pages of the translation, to check its tone and also to see how the dialogue holds together as it progresses from a discussion about Paradise and gardens to the Song of Songs, the frenzied poetry of Rumi, exile and migration, alienation, and now the storyof a former boxing champion. How will an unsuspecting reader of this English translation react to this seemingly incoherent chitchat between two Iranian intellectuals attempting to reconstruct this individual and collective identity? Without providing a long, cumbersome introduction, how can I convey the coherent string that I see clearly is holding the text together, thematically and

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structurally? Once again, I also think about who the audience of this translation may be and what sort of publisher would risk investing precious resources to publish such a text. I suppose, like everything else, translating is also a risky business.What if all the months one spends on a project such as this ends up in the corner of a file drawer for lack of readership interest? Nevertheless, as all translators know, selling the text is a part of the business, and that is often done through transmitting one’s contagious enthusiasm for the work—that very initial enthusiasm that urges, even coerces, the translator to translate a particular text.

U6 The Garden in Exile —Think of it, man, I was a champion for ten years. I won two gold and four silvers for Iran. I’m talking about world, forget national. Rome Olympics, the Asian Games. Now, beginners’ class, and for kids at that! Thanks a lot, give it to somebody else who wants it. Do you know Billy? Billy Andrew? Here, this is his picture, with his fiancée. He’s a coach too. He lives close by on the other side of the river. He’s got a big mansion, he’s a millionaire. I just asked what he did for a living. Surprised, he said: —What does he do? Hey, he was a champion boxer! —U.S. champion? —No, man, world! He’s my buddy. I was his coach once. He gave me the picture himself. Now I’m supposed to be a nanny for a bunch of kids. I said, no way, you can have your job.

I need to devise a specific strategy, some ground rules, for translating Vazgen’s language. As S describes him, he comes from a Tehran working-class neighborhood, apparently a jahel, a member of one of the traditional Iranian urban gangs. In previous centuries, such gangs consisted of brotherhood groups which at times engaged in activities that the rest of the society would frown upon. They also often controlled urban neighborhoods and were sometimes involved in illicit activities. At the same time, however, they were known for their generosity, sense of honor and loyalty, and observing a sort of code of chivalry; hence, they commanded respect from the populace and even civil and religious establishments. Since the early decades of the twentieth century, because many jahel groups also follow the tradition of physical exercise in the zurkhaneh [literally, ‘‘house of strength’’], many boxing and particularly world-class wrestling champi-

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ons have emerged from these groups. The Iranian movie industry prior to the Islamic Revolution utilized jahel characters in movies that mostly appealed to the working class.1 I am not sure if listening to U.S. boxing champions will necessarily provide me with the language that I might use as a basis for translating several pages of Vazgen’s part in the dialogue, but I suppose it is worth a try. —So, what do you do now? —I work in a supermarket warehouse forty miles away, I go forty and come back forty every day. After two years it’s getting tiring. Especially coming back. In those days, I didn’t know the meaning of tired. I swear to you, the more I stayed in the ring, the better I felt. My left would never miss; whoever got it would be down on the ground. I’ve had forty-two knockouts, all with the left. He stood up, assumed a boxing posture, jumped up and down on his toes a bit, gave a left hook in the air, and said: Like this! Akbar the Lunatic in Darvazeh Dowlat . . . He left it unfinished. He turned to one of the guests: —Jalil! Remember the Elephant? Over six-six, chest this wide, arms like a bull’s thighs. Why, forget about him, man. Abdollah the Butcher used to say, Vazgen, forget about boxing. If you’re man enough, let’s wrestle. I would say, Abdollah, come on, count me out . . . When they threw us out of Russia, they had told my father, either become a citizen or get lost. He said that he would get lost.They put him in jail and kicked my mother and me and my sister out. I was four, my sister was nine. When Mama got to Iran, she didn’t knew the language and didn’t have a cent. The relatives were around Reza’iyyeh. My mama raised the two of us on a shoestring by working. I don’t want to say how. My sister came before me. She had had it and didn’t want to stay. She said, I’m a woman and an Armenian, and work in the Embassy, too. No matter what we said, didn’t do no good. She’d lost her mind. She only said she had to leave. I left later, too, because Mama couldn’t stand either of us being away from her. Otherwise, I was doing fine. I had a machine shop with six or seven working for me. Who wants a machine shop here? Everything is mass-produced. When I was settled, I sent for my mama and brought her here, but she didn’t last more than a year because she had been through so much. She’s buried right here. There’s a great cemetery here, very nice, clean, everything just right, with trees . . . it’s for

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everybody, no difference, Christians, Moslems, Jews. I wanted to show it to you before we got home, but I thought you might be tired. I took Mahin. I said, Mama, this is Mahin that you loved so much. She just got here, wanted to see you. I knew you missed her, I brought her for you to see her. She’s gotten married, and this is her daughter. We stood by her grave for a while. Then I said, Mama, I haven’t taken Mahin home yet, she just got here, we’re going. Bye!

Collective identity is a very fragile thing, and its fragility is more clearly apparent when the individual’s sense of collective identity is threatened and shattered.The dialogue between thewriterand painterand their philosophical discussions have also revolved around the notion of Iranian collective identity. But this notion seems more tangible in the reminiscences of a Russian-born Iranian-Armenian boxer, an exile in exile, whose acquired Iranian roots and identity are shattered once again. With these reflections—but trying to avoid being too entangled in the nostalgia, alienation, loss of identity and roots, and other preoccupations of the characters in the book at the cost of losing sight of the task of translating and related problems at hand—I focus on the problem of format in this segment of Dialogue in the Garden. S’s recollected conversation with Vazgen and Vazgen’s conversation with another character (apparently Jalil) do not conform to the conventional English format. I am assuming that the person Vazgen is addressing in the previous segment and following several paragraphs is Jalil. Nevertheless, what seems problematic to me is that a change in speaker in this conversation is merely indicated by a dash. How should I make this clearer in English? As usual, I procrastinate and for now merely follow Meskub’s format. —Those days, I used to go once every two or three weeks to visit my mother’s grave and talk with her. —When you were in Tehran? —Yeah, we had buried her in the Zargandeh Cemetery. I had planted two judas trees by her feet and her head. When the trees bloomed, two pretty-colored live umbrellas would open in the air. It seemed to me that my mother breathed with the trees and wouldn’t be lonely any more. She loved flowers and plants a lot; when she was alive, she was always piddling in the courtyard flower bed. —When you went to her grave, what would you say to her?

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—What would I say to her? Nothing. I just went for a visit. I stood by her feet and tried to look at her in my heart. —For me, it’s like my mama is still alive and is hanging around here. The first time I became a champion and went home with the medal, she burst into tears out of joy. My medals were all left behind in Tehran. They’re gone. By the way, have you seen my son’s medals? He’s a football champion. Come on, let me show you. He’s in the basement. On the stairs, he said loudly: ‘‘Jeff, we’re coming down, I want to show your medals to my bosses.’’ When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Jeff and his girlfriend were sitting in front of the television with their arms around each other. We looked at the medals and went back up. Jalil did not come down with us; he had seen the medals. When we returned to the patio, he said: This Jalil was also a champion. I asked: Champion of what? —Body building. —No, really? Jalil was a man of sixty-odd years with watery eyes the corners of which he occasionally wiped with a handkerchief. —We’ve been friends for many years. He was Ilush’s rival, the male star of Iranian cinema. Jalil had been quiet until then and was sipping his booze. I asked: Did you also come with Vazgen? —No sir, I came two years ago. Because of the kids, first my wife came and then me. And something happened, too . . . He did not say anything else. I asked: Now, what do you do here? —I go to night school. What is this? Door. What is that? Hand. At my age! What is this? What is that? No matter how much I say I’m a user, I’m an addict. No sir, it does no good. —What are you addicted to? With a smirk and a hint, he said: —Grape juice! Haj Agha Mahmud Jalilvand has now become ‘‘Jim’’! In the class, the teacherasked,What’s your name? I said, Haj Agha Mahmud Jalilvand. She asked,What? I said, Haj Agha Mahmu. . . . She said, This is too long, we will call you ‘‘Jim.’’ And I became Jim. They have given me a name. Now, she says, Jim, give me a word starting with ‘‘V.’’ I say, Vodka. One with ‘‘W.’’ I say,Whiskey. She says, One with ‘‘B.’’ I say, Black and White. She says, one with ‘‘J.’’ I say, Johnny Walker. She says,

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You won’t learn English like this. You always say the names of liquors. I wanted to tell her, I won’t learn it any other way, either. —You didn’t say it? —No. —Why? —I didn’t know how. —Then what did you say? —I said, Yes. She is a good woman. She teaches free of charge, for the Immigration Office. Once I bought her a Coke. My wife said: Jalil, don’t take it, it’s not proper. She might think you’re in love with her. I said: In love with her! Whenever I see her, I can’t touch you for a week; it’s enough to make you give up women altogether. What are you talking about? Poor thing is a good woman. But looking at her as a brother, man, she really looks like the mother of Frankenstein. My love is my grandchild, my only love.

Cleverness in translation happens every once in a while, and sometimes finding or making up a word or phrase in the target language cultural context that conveys the sense of the original can be rewarding in and of itself. In response to S’s question, ‘‘What are you addicted to?’’ Jalil says sharbat-e behlimu, which literally means a beverage made with lime and quince juices but implies, at least in this context, that Jalil is addicted to or rather fond of alcohol. To me, ‘‘grape juice’’ seems to have the necessary allusion to his fondness for alcohol. The second example is Jalil’s description of his teacher’s face, which in Persian is madar-e fuladzereh, or the mother of Fuladzereh. Fuladzereh is the name of a monster in a popular nineteenth-century adventure-romance novel. The phrase in Persian could be translated (obviously colorlessly) as ‘‘hag.’’ I think ‘‘the mother of Frankenstein’’ works well as an equivalent, since ‘‘Frankenstein’’ is not too obscure a character in Western popular culture and provides the necessary humor in translating Jalil’s observation. —Girl or boy? —A girl; she’s very cute. Today is her birthday; I talked to her. —Isn’t she here? —No, she’s in Germany. —So, you are away from your love?

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—I couldn’t get a German visa; they wouldn’t give it to me. My biggest expense is the cost of my telephone calls to Germany. —Do you work here, too? —I help my son-in-law. He lays tiles, installs sinks, and I clean up, grout, things like that. My son-in-law is a mechanical engineer. I had a pretty good business myself, too. —What did you do? —I had two or three semis. After a while, I didn’t do the driving myself; my wife was against it. She said: Jalil, you’ve gotten old. But for thirty years, I traveled all over this country. —Which country? —Ourown, all its mountains and valleys, the cold and the heat, every inch of it. I’m a man of the desert, sir, Desert Jalilvand! Vazgen said: Jalil even dreams about the desert at night, he’s in a world of his own. —What world, man, what dream, what desert! He was talking with resentment. Vazgen saw my questioning look. He said: —He’s always quarreling with Morteza. Morteza, you got enough air in the tires, did you check the oil, did you warm up the engine? Where is your head, Morteza? Sonofabitch, didn’t I tell you not to go under the truck without being careful? I asked: Who is Morteza? Vazgen said: He was his helper. —He was like my son, because he was so loyal, he was a gentleman. There was silence. No one said a word. Then he began himself: —He was run over by the truck. Past Khorramabad, near Baba Morad Hill, a heavy snow had fallen. A kind of cold that could kill a cow. Your hand would freeze to the screwdriver. Uphill at the turn, the truck couldn’t pull up in the snow, it would slide, it was about to fall off into the valley. Morteza jumped out to put the fifth gear under the wheel. I don’t know if the truck slipped or he did because he was so nervous. Anyway, he fell under the wheel. The wheel was spinning in place . . . on him. It was my fault. He wanted to go to Kermanshah for a few days. He was a spirited kind of guy from Kermanshah. I told him to go after a trip to Ahvaz and back. I didn’t trust the driver. —After this incident, Jalil turned to vodka in a serious way.

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—Not really, I drank before, too. —Yeah, but not as much. —You see, I’ve got problems sleeping.This makes you sleep deeper. Gotta go, time to sleep. Jalil said good-bye, and we got up too. The evening was coming to an end. This champion in your story has really been catapulted. Love, revolution, death, and perhaps many other things have tossed this desert man out of his garden to the other side of the world and to grouting and construction work. Days in nostalgia for the mountains and deserts, and nights in fear of the nightmare of the same daily nostalgia, vodka, and fear of sleep have replaced the refuge of the soul and body. And the other one, in his old age in a strange land, punches the air with his left hook and knocks past imaginary challengers to the ground. When you lose your abode, you do not know what you are standing on and where. I do not mean a geographical place, it is man’s place in contrast to things, the world around him, other people with beliefs and attitudes and the manner of their existence. Man is a sapling out of season and untimely. He is not in his own time. He is autumn in the middle of spring or vice versa. In your eyes, you who have learned to see in a different light and have tested what you see, if it is not different and strange, it is at least alien and does not stem from the same source as the depth of your mind. Then you invent another reality for yourself and live with it, an artificial environment or space, though compatible with your own disposition and spirit. But because it is fabricated and artificial, it crumbles with every wind and your spirit is disturbed and scattered like smoke.

Several years ago, a prominent Iranian writer, Hushang Golshiri, who had come to the United States for a visit and lecture tour, asked me what kinds of subject matter Iranian American writers are interested in and what they generally write about. After explaining to him that most firstgeneration Iranian immigrant writers are preoccupied with the revolution, particularly the political, social, and cultural changes that have occurred in Iran, he responded that he was sure that none of these works would survive.When I inquired as to the reason for his observation, he said that since

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these writers live outside of Iran, they may intellectually understand the current conditions and changes but are in fact out of touch with the mundane realities that the people living in that society experience every day from dawn to dusk. He further observed that good writers, by definition, should write about what they understand, that is, themselves and their environment. In other words, he said, these writers should write about their new experiences as immigrants or exiled writers in the United States. As I read and translate Meskub’s Dialogue in the Garden, I realize the disguised autobiographical nature of this work. True, it is an intellectual autobiographical account, but it is also perhaps a collective autobiography of sorts. For this reason, many immigrant Iranians (and I would assume non-Iranians) would identify and agree with his assessment. On a personal level, like other immigrants, I also identify with this assessment, and I am reminded that in my daily dealings with Iranian immigrant communities I see many Vazgens and Jalils, though from different backgrounds and classes. What I do not identify with is the discussion between this immigrant uncle and nephew about language. F: As Jalil has been tossed somewhere with a different language that he cannot learn, his relationship with the surrounding world changes. S: The problem is not learning the language, because even if you learn it, you think in your own language and express it in another language. Your language and your thoughts do not coincide. You are like someone walking on stilts, not on your own legs. This way, even if you are in charge of your own narrative and solve this pedestrian concern for daily bread, the narrative of your soul is out of your control and is controlled by the place in which you are. This ‘‘place’’ is a land, sky and nature, a mass of people connected to one another by their own history, beliefs and culture; it is a living sphere. F: Are there not many people who are more alien than any alien in their own homeland? S: Many are alien in their own being, but that is a more serious story that goes beyond our ability to discuss and we will not be able to do it justice. We had better give it up. F: Do you want to say that we are not competent? S: The issue is ability, not competence.We are talking about human beings who have had to end up in the gardens of others.

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F: Well, in that case, I cannot understand why one should not come out of his closed garden, tear its walls down and visit the garden of others as well. What if it is greener and more springlike? Why should you remain confined in a corner of your own cage? Is it not true that ‘‘land and sea are vast and people are in abundance’’? S: Of course a human being usually cannot avoid peeking into the garden of others. It is beyond his control because of the necessities of life, curiosity, the existence of culture that leads to the four-season garden of the world. But the question is whether or not you can become a native plant in someone else’s soil. F: This is a new identity and is different from visiting the garden of others. It is like wanting to change your name or your family, to be born of another mother and speak in another language. It is the negation of the self that few people would want. S: And even if they wanted to, they might not be able to do it. Because a seed that has grown and been nurtured in one climate—I do not mean only geographical climate but also historical climate and cultural environment—may become compatible with another environment and might even become domesticated, but it will not become native. And as long as he has not become native, he is an uprooted person who carries as baggage the multiple anxieties of both places. F: I admit this. When you are not in your own place, your fears and worries are sometimes split, horrifying and confusing, and this subjugates a person’s being more clearly in sleep than in the waking state. S: One night recently in a dream I was passing by somewhere like Ferdowsi Street, near Sepah Square, further up than the former Tudeh Party Club. But it seemed/seems like I am in front of the University and there are demonstrations and I am watching.

As I have observed earlier, the conventions of indirect and direct speech usage in Persian are not always compatible with those of English. In Persian, after a phrase such as ‘‘he said that’’ or ‘‘it seemed’’ the speaker may continue in the present tense in the same sentence without any quotation marks. Commonly, in translating from Persian into English, one would simply change the present tense in such sentences into past tense. In this instance, however, I am reluctant to do so, because the entire dream sequence is in the present tense, and to change it to past tense would remove

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the sense of immediacy. The shift occurs in the sentence, ‘‘But it seemed like I am in front of the university . . .’’ Despite the awkwardness that the shift in tenses from past to present creates in the text, I decide, reluctantly, to use ‘‘it seems’’ instead of ‘‘it seemed’’ and continue translating the remainder of the passage in the present tense. Two or three policemen in civilian clothes are standing in a familiar and casual manner and one of them is an acquaintance. They come forward and ask: What are you doing here? I say: Watching. The acquaintance says: Don’t you know it is forbidden? I say: No, and I am about to leave. They ask: Do you have an ID? I show it to them. A long orange card folded several times. They do not say anything, as if they are asking: What about afterward, this is only foroneyear. I do not understand what they mean; I have another residence permit, this one is for ten years. I show them that too, and stand with peace of mind, because all the documents are in order and are legal. The acquaintance playfully takes that one too and looks at me. Instinctively I figure it out; I search in my pockets for the translation of my birth certificate. I cannot find it. I am nervous, I hand over my old crumpled photograph. He looks at the stamp on the back and puts everything in his pocket. Others come and go, but they are not finished with me and I do not want to show that I am afraid. Why should I be? We chat and I pretend to be unconcerned, but it is of no use. Finally, I begin to protest, why don’t they return my cards? No matter what I say, they respond with pleasantries and small talk. I plead and continue to do so. I get smiles in reply and small talk. I am gradually becoming worried; it is clear that they do not want to give them back and I feel that if I am unable to get my cards back, they will torture me: In a large cellar, like an engine room or steam boiler room, they are torturing two or three people who have round cylindrical bodies that resemble a steam boiler or a huge insect. Their legs and heads cannot be seen. They have been stretched out on stands; their bodies are metal, the color of hot iron, red and inflamed, with violet, lead grey and rust colors here and there. Some of the joints and muscles that are ripped have been riveted together, and other places have been welded. The torturers cannot be seen; only the flames of the welding torches and the fire can be seen. Except for metal harshness and violence, no other emotion—not even anger and hatred—exists. They are

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not suffering pain anymore because they have lost all senses under torture and have fainted. It is as if they have died and invisible, unknown executioners are patching up their torn, broken bodies for no reason. The metal shells of the corpses of the victims whose senses and souls have disappeared lie on the ground. A driver of a large backhoe splits the line of masked spectators and advances forward, the jaws of the shovel open, it bites one of the metal corpses and takes it to the street near the bazaar and places it on the ground. I look and see it is my own paternal uncle, who gets up with difficulty. I am surprised, because he has been dead for years. He grabs my hand and gets up. The acquaintance who has taken my cards, it is him; I see my cards in his pocket. But he does not give them back. No matter how much I plead, how can you torment me like this? I am so-and-so. He gestures for me to be silent and not say anything. He seems strangely tired. I look at the dull whiteness of his hands and he says in a creeping, drawn-out voice: Not so loud, they’ll hear. There is no one to hear. Further away, two French policemen are chatting. No matter how much I say that there is nobody there, it is of no use. He motions with his left hand faintly, frightened and involuntarily, in a way as if he wants to muffle the sound so it stays right by his mouth. I ask: Why are you afraid, anyway? You used to be an athlete, you were fearless, you weren’t afraid of anything. In fact, what can they do to a dead person? He is calm and even perhaps kind, but like a stranger. He explains that he will not bother me. He can, but he says it as though he does not intend to. I ask: Then why did you confiscate my cards? He answers: Don’t worry. Two scarecrows with their heads wrapped in long scarves and wearing wide, old-fashioned dark blue frocks down to their feet are strolling in the street. It is clear that they have come from the farms around the city for some fresh air. Two crows, as black as the first night in the grave, are sitting on the right and left shoulders of each. They are writing like speed writers, hastily and perfunctorily. It is clear that for them writing is the performance of a duty and not worship. Then, a taxi comes. My uncle wants to get in, he can’t. I ask: Where are you going? He does not answer, he only looks at the crows. It seems as if all of his limbs have been misinstalled; the joints don’t work and they have no fasteners and clamps. Finally, he gets in with difficulty. Apparently, he wants to go to Grandfather’s house,

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where we used to always go together. Three or four other people are also in the taxi. Beside the car, I am holding his hand and saying repeatedly: How can you? After all, with me! I am so-and-so. Don’t you see? Finally, he is flustered and says: On my father’s soul, I will give them back, don’t insist so much. The taxi starts to go, but it has no roof. I see inside the car; the greens and vegetables that the passengers have bought are on their laps. People have gathered around me. My cards are thrown out of the taxi. I am sitting on the pavement of the street. My shoulders are shaking from sobbing and I tell the people: You know, we grew up together from childhood, we were always together, we are each other’s paternal cousins.

Whether or not my specifying the paternal part of paternal uncle or paternal cousin is important, one immediate question is that, a couple of pages earlier, the reference was to the paternal uncle, not cousin. I wonder if one of them is a misprint or, in fact, this is the way it should be. After all, I have speedily and without a pause accompanied S in his rather long nightmare and translated it. I must confess that in my earlier readings of Dialogue in the Garden, I had paid little attention to this nightmarish dream and had even forgotten it until I began translating it. Was it because in earlier readings it did not fit my preconceived notions of what the book is all about, or merely because, as always, I was reading this segment as a translator and did not find that translating it would present any particularly insurmountable difficulties? Native language production (and not necessarily comprehension) seems to become somewhat affected, even diminished in some ways, for individuals who have acquired fluency in one or more other languages. This, of course, would seem like a good argument against learning foreign languages, but such an argument is not viable, given the fact that the advantages of learning a foreign language far exceed such a disadvantage. In a similar way, the normal or natural reading abilities of translators, or those I have called habitual translators earlier, may become somewhat affected, even diminished in some ways. Likewise, one could argue that literary critics or theater and film critics also lose their normal or natural ability to read a book or watch a performance without constant disruption by the critic in them. Nevertheless, in the critic’s and in the translator’s case, as in the case of bilingual or multilingual individuals, the gains (we have to believe) far exceed the losses. With this happy

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thought, I go back to translating Meskub’s text, while trying to establish in my own mind the strings that tie S’s nightmare to this Persian garden, which seems to have become ‘‘curiouser and curiouser.’’ F: I guess something strange has happened in you; there has been an earthquake and it has opened a horrible gap between you and your past, an impassable gap with your past, a past that has been annihilated, so that when I ask you, what is the distance between Tehran and Qazvin, without thinking about it you say, it was  kilometers. Do you remember? It is as if because you have been tossed from your place, time and place have also been mixed up; or, no, I should say that a hand has crumpled and torn up the geographical map of your mind. But at the same time, this annihilated past is so strongly present in you that it has demolished your present tense. At times it is reminiscent of a shadow that only prowls about in the graveyard of the past, watching nightmares. S: Not always, on the contrary, sometimes I stroll and explore my dreams and with open eyes dream of union and not nightmare. For instance, in the afternoon of a holiday, in a remote, uncrowded street, when at the side of bare trees, under the grey, grim sky, I want to find my way in solitude on the geographical map of my own heart, I end up in the back streets of ‘‘Darrus.’’ Early, at dawn, it is still dark, but the light is coming softly and frightened; darkness sheds its skin and the nucleus of light—like petals of a large flower as vast as the sky—opens shade by shade and descends to the foot of the wall and the bed of the stream, spreading everywhere. In the courtyard of the house, someone waits, someone dreams of me, and I am gazing at the green of his soil and hear his voice. Like that summer day when my father and I had gone to Golabdarreh. How many years has it been, I wonder. We are walking alongside the garden alleyways at the edge of a restless stream that hits itself against the rocks and pebbles and flees. Suddenly my father stops. I look at him. He says: Don’t you hear? I listen and say: Yes. We follow the sound to the back of the clay wall of a garden in the upper part of the valley. My father says: It is ‘‘Ruhangiz.’’ 2 She was singing of the weeping of the cloud, the rose-colored wine, and the sprouting and withering of grass. We stop for a while. It is a consumed, melancholic voice that comes from the vast silence of the desert and the suffering of a thousand years. You can’t let go, but my father says: Let’s go, your mother is waiting, she will be worried.

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Recently, I asked a traveler: How is Mount Alborz doing? He said: Fine. I asked: How about the sun? He said: It is as always, spreading over the mountain and the mountain striving to reach it; the translucent weightlessness of the light and the hardness of the stone, an eagerness to mingle with both and become one with the height of flight, before the eyes of the distant horizon to the other end of the field and underfoot the shoulder of the valley and the downflow of the stream, covered with aromatic, lusty, brittle grasses and protruding leaves filled with green blood, tall pine trees and a breeze that slides down from the bosom of the mountain, the unruly love of climbing and the painful desire for sleeping with nature. What ascent and descent and heaviness and lightness! One can touch its light because it is so bright and its mountain is so rocky and is more awesome, more magnificent and more of a mountain than mountains. Like the white crown of Alborz in the endless blue. When I stand with my back to the vast dark blue waters of the sea that on the edge become one with the sky, before me the green Mazandaran Forest sleeps on the bosom of the mountain and higher and further, Damavand Peak stands, which can be seen even in the desert. From all that distance! In the level desert on an open bright day, distances disappear, and whenever I want I can go wherever I want and build my garden any way I want. At night I put it to sleep and wake it up in the morning with the breeze. I grow the flowers I like in its flower beds and place strange migrant birds on the branches of its ancient, massive plane trees. I stroll in the shade of its trees, I tear down its walls and stretch the garden to the base of the mountain, to the slope and climb it. At times, I ask myself: Where am I? On the skyline of the Bakhtiari Mountains where, as far as the eye can see, to the other side of the sky, there are mountains upon mountains—Sefidkuh, Siyahkuh, the Kuhrang Heights— and the source of the river, the Zayandehrud . . . or in the back room of a shop next to the well in a dark, private courtyard with high walls? What do you say I should do with myself, to which land should I make my spirit escape?

I suppose different translators develop the necessary skills and aptitude (if aptitude can be developed) for different types of texts. If so, the kind of prose used in these pages of Dialogue in the Garden appears to be what I feel comfortable with, and therefore I can translate it rather automatically, without pondering how every word or phrase should be rendered.

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For this reason, I think, my translation speed has increased. At the same time, I wonder whether by now—that is, while translating the last dozen or so pages of the book—I have finally found the general tone, style, and language of the text, along with an understanding of its thematic content and structure, and therefore no longer question my translation of every word and sentence. I am certainly leaving fewer question marks, both in the margins of the Persian text and in my longhand translated version of the text. But getting too comfortable with translating a particular text is not always a good thing; a sense of apathy can take over, in which case I strongly believe the translator should give up the project. A translation is like a performance; lack of interest on the part of the performer is as contagious as the performer’s enthusiasm. I have sometimes thought of and described the function of the translator as similar to that of a conduit. If I am allowed to continue with this metaphor (or is it a simile?), ideally the conduit should not change the nature of the substance that is transported (or transmitted) through it. But at the same time, and necessarily, the conduit should be compatible with and suitable to the transmission of that particular substance. And the compatibility or suitability may be that very aptitude of the translator for a particular text. The line between this aptitude and enthusiasm of the translator, on the one hand, and the sort of ‘‘artistic creativity’’ that would essentially result in the alteration of the text and an end product to which things have been added or from which they have been subtracted, on the other, is very thin and nebulous. And as I have reminded myself before, it is a line that translators often find tempting and usually not too difficult to cross. Such a temptation, and the inclination of translators toward artistic creativity, may stem from a cultural bias (in many but not necessarily all parts of the world) that separates creativity and skilled craftsmanship and then regards the former at a much higher level than the latter. This bias, I assume, is the source of the general negative attitude of the American academic world (as well as some others), which regards translation as less than a worthy academic pursuit, and the reason that translators (to borrow the phrase from the well-known American comedian Rodney Dangerfield) ‘‘don’t get no respect.’’ With this creative diagnosis, and not wishing to become a target of blame similar to that leveled at literary theoreticians in the past few decades, who have been accused of the narcissistic practice of dwelling on themselves and their own function and practice at the expense of authen-

The Garden in Exile

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tic literary texts and literature, I return from contemplating the process of translating to the actual practice of translating Meskub’s text. F: I do not know about the spirit, but grab onto this pleasant, deceptive thought, or according to Hafez, ‘‘your happy magical deception.’’ S: Do you think I am deceiving myself, that I am happy with deception? F: I do not know, but has it never occurred that you have become helplessly grounded in the nostalgia of the garden of your past? When your time passes here but your life somewhere else, that you are horrified by the thought of there, fearing to lose your balance and fall so badly that you are unable to get up? That you try to bury the past in the recesses of your mind but are unable to do so, because many of those you loved died there, those dead ones are awake in you and that bothersome past does not allow you to see one day further, and you strive to rescue your today and tomorrow from the invasion of the worn-out yesterday and be the commander of your own present? S: Yes, it often happens that a person becomes part of two places and loses both places, as you said: driven and left behind from here and from there. When you lose the meaning of place, you have also lost the sense of time. In the same way that our existence is contingent on time and place, understanding and perceiving these two in the depths of our mind also are each other’s twin and interdependent. Every meaningful and living time has passed in a place, even if we have forgotten that place. Also, when we remember a place in which we have somehow ‘‘lived,’’ where we have experienced death, love, happiness and despair, such specific places also have their specific times that may not be recalled easily, but their remnants in the recesses of the mind do their work. F: In other words, time and place actualize each other’s potential existence. S: More than that, each is the essence and the reality of the other; if you lose one, you become also bewildered and misguided in the other. I know someone from Shiraz whose misfortune landed him in a city in America; alone, unemployed, and in love with the Divan of Shams, ‘‘divination by the poetry of Hafez,’’ watermelons and pomegranates on the eve of the ‘‘winter solstice,’’ the ‘‘setar of Ebadi’’ and the ‘‘voice of Banan.’’ 3 As for the children—who are no longer children—they have become so American, they can hardly speak Persian, let alone understand ‘‘Rumi’’ and ‘‘Shams.’’ And the wife is busy from dawn to dusk working in a beauty salon. I asked the man: What do you do, since you have nothing

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F:

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Translating the Garden

to do? He said: I listen to the news. I asked: What then? He said: Then, again, I listen to the news. There is a radio station here that has news all the time and my job is to listen to it. I asked: But how many times do you listen to each news item? He said: That depends on the kindness of the newscaster. As this man says himself, his life was split into two parts, before the revolution and after the revolution. In the early days, he was worried about the fate of the homeland and waited for the news, hoping to go back to join the two parts of this torn-apart life and regain his wholeness in time and place. For this reason, he was afflicted with the illness of news and awaited every pleasant and unpleasant wind that blew. Later on, when the times did not turn as he wished and despair became long and dark, the affliction of news remained, but the desire to return died and was buried. Now he listens to the news of all lands, peoples and countries equally and, in reality, does not hear the news of anywhere. He is standing in neither his own time nor his own place, he is distraught and bewildered in both. It no longer makes any difference to him where he is, because wherever he is, it is not where he should be; he is not in his garden; his garden has been buried under the rubble of time and his soul is as old as a ghost town. It reminds me of the Bam Fortress. Orof these gardens that I have painted; ‘‘the poor garden of Alizadeh’’— in these paintings—its spring has turned to smoke, and mostly a rectangle, a mere hollow form, remains of it, like an inscription or a tombstone. What has died in you that has this tombstone on it? These sketches and this bare and empty and perhaps grim space are new even to me. A few years ago, my gardens smelled of spring; I am talking about my work in the previous period. I know. Where did this destruction and these burnt scenes suddenly come from? From death. I guess everyone has a garden at the bottom of his heart which is his place of refuge. No one knows about it, only the owner has the key. There, one can have any forbidden thought one wishes. Impossible loves, any impossible desire and any happy dream or fantasy, every impossible thing is possible there, a paradise—or perhaps hell—familiar and cozy that everyone has for himself. This internal garden is often hidden even from its gardener. But he will discover it one day, somehow.

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S: Or the garden will open in him. Like water gushing out in a spring, or the appearance of an image in a mirror. F: Sometimes a sensual motivation or experience opens its doors: traveling, death, pain or pleasure, a tree and the flight of a bird . . . S: Orenmityand friendship, ‘‘Rumi’’ and meeting ‘‘Shams,’’ restless eagerness to see the crystal ball, light and the brightness of the heart’s eye in Zoroaster. F: And death in me! The death of the one that you know tossed me to childhood and youth, the garden of time. When she died, the constant thought of death gradually opened the doors of my internal garden and I saw how green and silent it is, a solitude in ruins! I do not know whether or not you have also had such an experience. S: I have.The first time that I fell in love! I had turned twenty-two or -three, I thought that it had gotten to be too late, that I might never fall in love, that my heart might have died. I would read the poetry of BabaTaher 4 to become sentimental. I was afraid, I was so worried and anticipating that desperately . . . it happened and I fell in love; the proverbial thunderbolt of love. And suddenly I saw an overflowing feeling arise in me, so that the remoteness of the horizon, the sleep of the sun and watching the night, and the thought of ‘‘being’’ would make me cry; this strange incident that happens in the world; the revolving of the earth and time, and being present like a transient—but conscious—existence among permanent—but unconscious—things. A bolt of lightning, a meteor in infinite darkness. A melancholy joy had conquered my being. I had become friends with flowers and plants, felt their pain of blooming and the sorrow of their withering in my body, and the sound of their growing was in my ear.The enthusiasm for seeing and perceiving them exceeded my capacity. I wished to grow with them and die with them. The shell of my soul had cracked and I had been fused with the fate of nature, a sort of atheistic unity of existence!

I have still not resolved, or rather have not yet decided about, the translation of vahdat-e vojud and whether I should render it as ‘‘unity of existence’’ or ‘‘pantheism.’’ At the same time, S’s sentimental and perhaps philosophical account of his first experience of falling in love is conspicuously similar to the experiences described by English Romantic poets. If I accept this similarity, particularly keeping in mind William Wordsworth’s

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‘‘Intimations of Immortality’’ and other poems, ‘‘pantheism’’ may be a better translation.

F: S:

F: S: F: S:

F:

S:

F:

The defenselessness of the plants, their drying out and dying, were in me, and autumn withered in my veins. I had metamorphosed and was finding a newly arrived unknown in myself when . . . death—uninvited and panting—arrived. The same eternal cliché of popular stories and novels, love and death! The story will be complete if you add birth to it as well. Apparently, the constant repetition of a cliché itself indicates the existence of a truth that becomes ordinary, commonplace, and in short cliché because it is repeated so often. In any case, my story, too, is the repetition of the same cliché; love opened my eyes to nature and death, my fear and astonishment (or more precisely awe) at nonexistence, complaining to time that flows in our essence and has nonexistence in its particles. Forgive me for being unable to say it more simply and clearly. In any case, I discovered the love of nature and the magnificence of death that separates, which was hidden in the depth of my being at that time. It was as if a seed germinated, grew and became large; in fact, I saw the two faces of it, as ‘‘Rumi’’ says, ‘‘the secret of the soul of the soul.’’ Still the same garden and the same . . . The same seed but uprooted from its own homeland, that is, its own nature. Like a fish out of water. With the difference being that a human being tries both to keep his homeland—or place of the past—in memory and also to build a new homeland for himself. Living in an artificial homeland is like walking on quicksand; under the feet it is unsteady and slippery, the earth moves with you. You must always search for the road, and for that matter, not on shifting sand that assumes a new landscape every time and misguides you, but, in darkness, by distant stars. In any case, if you want to survive, you must take care of your garden, prune its branches and leaves and water its roots—even though they cannot be seen; it is like a bird, like a human being, it has old age and illness, it has storms and hail, it has thousands of blights. Especially if it is next to the desert.

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S: In the desert, there is another garden which not only does not have/lacks a shelter and a cozy corner but drags the observer out from his abode and, while he is thirsty and spent, decomposes him under the rays of the sun. Near the horizon, in the wavy reflection of the sun, so bright that the long branches of trees next to a fortress or a caravansary, a few houses and a stream and a pond of clear water can be seen, ghostlike, a visage of apprehension, heat, and thirst, yearning for water, habitation and the shelter of the shade, that the closer you get, the more distant it becomes. F: The garden of the heart of the desert: a mirage! S: Or a garden that grows in the desert of the heart: Paradise.

July  Hastily I have finished the last few pages of Dialogue in the Garden. There have been as usual problems, for some of which I have found solutions, though not always satisfactory ones, and many I have flagged with question marks to face later. Experience, however, has made me an optimist, and I know that I will eventually find, if not always the perfect answer, at least solutions that are not too disastrous and embarrassing before the translation is sent to a publisher. Also, in the case of this particular translation, I feel fortunate to have access to the author of the original text, who could at least help with the clarification of ambiguous or enigmatic lines and passages, though not with problems that stem from the culturespecificity of certain ideas or the peculiarities of one language. The draft that I have before me, however, is merely a fuzzy picture, a vague replica of the original. It represents merely the start of a long process which includes reading and rereading both the original and the translation many times, editing every new version at various stages, comparing the translation against the original again and again, somehow finding ways to erase all those question marks, and making decisions about selecting the final version from among all that maze of unfiltered words and phrases.

Epilogue I finished the first draft of the translation of Dialogue in the Garden some time ago and set it aside. After all, there are other things in life, such as buying Christmas gifts (or at least thinking about it) and, of course, preparing course material for the next semester. Among other things, I am preparing for two literary translation seminars, in one of which, in particular, I am planning to share some of my experiences in translating Meskub’s book. As I attempt to put a bibliography together for the seminar, by chance I come across a publisher’s book notice. The description of the contents seems very familiar (but this is the case with most books written about translation by translators). This book, however, seems to create a sense of déjà vu. I immediately order the book directly from the publisher as a requirement for the seminar. It is called Performing without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation.1 The book arrives soon and as I begin reading it, the sense of déjà vu increases. The author states that he is not a translator but a translation editor. And although he seems to be mostly interested in the translation of poetry, many of his reflections reinforce my claims throughout this project. Here is one statement that certainly rings familiar: ‘‘Translation is an active way of reading something closely, critiquing it, and writing it, all at the same time.’’ 2 I have argued earlier that a dangerous pitfall for translators is to forget their role as conduits and instead use the process of translating for fulfilling their own desire to be artistically creative. There are, of course, two problems with this statement. Firstly, the notion of a conduit is at best inadequate and at worst misleading. And I do not think that even if it were possible it would be an ideal situation to have the translator function as a conduit. Moreover, the notion of artistic creativity is somewhat misleading. What I perhaps meant and should have

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made explicit is that the pitfall for the translator is to become negligent of the integrity of the literary text in the original language and attempt his or her own hand at ‘‘rewriting’’ the original story or poem to his or her own liking in the target language. However, in the course of completing this project—and particularly at this stage, when a first draft of the translation is completed—I have become increasingly convinced that translating is more of a creative process than I have always thought or was urged byothers to believe. Group translations may result in the production of an accurate, but not necessarily literary, work in the target language. The exercise that was described in the first chapter, in which several translators produced their own versions of a passage from Meskub’s book, is not, in fact, group translation. In that exercise, the translators produced their own replicas of the original and used their own individual creativity to produce their renditions. A translation critic or a reader may favor one rendition over another, but another critic or reader may prefer another version. There is, I believe, a misguided perception that a good translation is a rendition that, if translated back from the target language to the original, would match the original text. I sometimes use back translation as a teaching and learning device, but I have never come across a text retranslated from the target language back into the original that matches the original version. Does this mean that all translations are bad? I hardly think so. What it means is that the translator’s creativity is an inseparable part of the process, and it is not necessarily undesirable, provided this creativity is used for the purpose of producing a readable and at the same time faithful replica of the text in another language. Multiple translations of a text are analogous to multiple replicas of a painting, reflecting, as they should, not only the skill and artistry of the original artist, but also those of the replicator. Like some translators and most teachers of translation, over the years I have read and taught a great deal of translation theory. Often students and sometimes colleagues have asked me about which translation theory or theories I favor and practice, a question that readers of the present project might well also ask. I usually answer this question with the following analogy: When we are learning to drive, everyone we know, including family members and friends, gives us theoretical advice and lessons. We also study the rules and regulations about what we should and should not do when driving. But when we finally sit behind the wheel and actually

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begin to drive, particularly when we find ourselves in unfamiliar or confusing situations and we are not quite sure what to do yet have to make a decision anyway, neither do we have the time to contemplate nor do we even recall all the lessons and advice. We just do it. In the course of time, we develop our own driving style.This does not mean that we have learned nothing and have not benefited from all the lessons and advice. We have. But we put into practice our own combined and modified method. Similarly, a translator reads and receives all sorts of lessons, theories, and advice, which she or he combines and modifies, often subconsciously, in the process of translating. My motto as a translator and an academic is: The more theory you read and the more advice you get, the better equipped you are to follow your own. Even though, like most academics, I avoid rigid convictions about most things, as a translator, especially when faced with editing—that is, making final decisions about the portions of the text I have left in a state of suspended procrastination, which include choosing among various lexical and other possibilities—I feel obliged to convince myself of much, if not all, of what I have argued in defense of the translator. Armed with the conviction that final decisions must be made, and with a substantial degree of self-imposed confidence, I begin the laborious task of editing. Editing by the translator is, of course, a different process from what a translation editordoes. For me, this process consists of several stages, some of which involve the generous time of others. I make certain that there is a time lapse between the completion of the first draft and beginning this process. The first step is a rather quick reading of the translated text, in which I simply try to iron out the most obvious wrinkles, perhaps even make occasional decisions about the various lexical choices. During this step, I avoid the original text altogether as much as possible. The second step, which involves an unsuspecting accomplice, consists of having that accomplice read the translation to me out loud (slowly), while I check the translation against the original. In the next step, I reverse this order and have someone read the original, while I check it against the translation. Naturally, during these two steps—which can take many long hours and days—I try to make most of the final decisions. In a final reading, before I allow the translation to be seen by anyone outside the circle of my immediate family and close friends, who are completely cognizant of my many inadequacies, I reread the translation, again after some time has passed,

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without the original, but this time more slowly and deliberately, looking for any possible changes and improvements that I can make. And then I prepare a relatively clean copy without any of those preliminary small and large question marks. Obviously, by this time I have also asked the author (if alive and accessible) and others about words, ideas, concepts, and everything else for which my own knowledge has proven insufficient or left me in a quandary. This relatively clean text I then give to at least two other willing accomplices, one of whom knows both languages. The other reader must be an avid reader and above all a frank critic. After I receive their suggestions and comments, I try to incorporate them into the translated text, as much as my translator’s conscience will allow, and then begin the often unpleasant task of trying to convince some unsuspecting publisher—using all the sales prowess I can muster—to publish it. A translation is perhaps like the translator’s child (though adopted) who has now come of age and is going out to face the world, to live its own independent life. Those who will see this child may say that he or she is beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, talented or a nincompoop. But, as is true of a parent, a translator cannot undo what has been done. However, while no parent believes she or he has created an ugly child, the translator is usually convinced of having created a monster. If so, one may ask, as I also ask myself, why bother with translating? A partial answer may be that habitual translators are like compulsive gamblers. They know, at least in the back of their minds, that they are going to lose, but they do it anyway, perhaps for the love of the process and not the outcome. And the process of translating is, I believe, a good example of what Stanley Fish has called ‘‘the self-consuming artifact.’’ 3 Like thousands of dominoes standing on end, arranged in an elaborate design only to be toppled at the touch of a finger—the effect of the collapse lasting for a matter of seconds, as the first domino hits the second, which hits the third, and so on—what is important to the domino artist and the translator alike is the process rather than what is left after the process has ended. The process itself is what is important to them, not the end product. Once the process is finished, what is left—the collapsed dominoes or the translation—is only a reminder of the process. And this is perhaps the answer to my question at this point, as I look back rather nostalgically at the experience and ask myself what I have gained from it.

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What I have gained is the experience of a unique, close reading of a literary text, which I believe is invaluable in an age of speed reading, Web surfing, and even teachers who recommend scanning and skimming texts for information. What I have gained as a translator also is a reaffirmation of my understanding that translating is not merely rendering words and phrases;4 it is translating culture. What I have gained is the realization of Meskub’s perception, that the garden is in a sense a metaphor for culture. Hence, I translate the garden, that is, the Persian garden. As is often true when we read a book, especially in a close reading of a literary work, we identify with what may be called universal human emotions and react to what the writer has captured and expressed, which is shared by people from different cultures and communities. In the process of my close reading of Meskub’s Dialogue in the Garden, I have also identified with and reacted to many of the ideas, preoccupations, and emotions he has expressed and described in the form of this fictional conversation, and I have recorded portions of my interaction with this text. Some parts of this interaction which I have not recorded may be summed up in my perception of immigrants as a special breed. It is generally thought that an immigrant, whether forced by political, economic, or other circumstances or simply because of a desire for change, is uprooted from one culture and planted in another. In reality, however, neither the uprooting nor the transplantation is usually thorough. For a voluntary immigrant as well as a forced exile, the positive side of this transplantation includes enjoyment of what the two cultures can offer. But often this phenomenon, instead of creating a combined or hybrid identity for the immigrant, results in a schizophrenic identity in that, rather than having a sense of belonging to both cultures, the immigrant, particularly the exile, feels that he or she has been uprooted from his or her natural environment, without having been able to establish roots in the other culture. As a voluntary immigrant who has been joined some years later by large communities of Iranians who fled the country after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in –, even though I have focused my attention on the advantages of my own transplantation, the struggles of the relatively more recent, especially older, Iranian émigrés in trying to cope with their new cultural environment have preoccupied me with questions pertaining to immigrants in general, especially questions of identity, assimilation, and theyearning on the part of the forced émigrés to return home someday.The

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story of the boxing champion and his friend in the final part of Dialogue in the Garden somehow fills in the gaps in my mind regarding what Meskub has tried—I believe successfully—to convey about Persian culture. No longer as a translator but now as a reader and critic, I step back to reflect on and to form an overall picture of Meskub’s book in my mind. I explain Dialogue in the Garden to myself as follows: A writer and his artist uncle provide the vehicle for Meskub to contemplate the questions he has been asking himself as an Iranian intellectual, and particularly since he has been living in exile after the Islamic Revolution. His transplantation has helped him to stand back and look at the broader picture of this culture. It begins with the nephew’s looking at the uncle’s paintings, the subject of which is the garden. As a modern artist, the uncle expresses his own individual vision of the garden, his own individual vision of the world and his culture. His aversion to classical Persian miniature paintings, which he describes as clichéd, is essentially directed against the lack of individuality in them. The nephew, on the other hand, sees a reflection of universality in the classical arts, whether miniature paintings of seemingly lifeless classical lovers, battle scenes from Ferdowsi’s national epic, or the artificial portrayal of nature—the garden, that is, Paradise. And he sees this universality in the spirituality of the Song of Songs (the physical aspects of which the painter emphasizes) and in the frenzied chant of Rumi’s poetry. The nephew understands that concepts such as identity, culture, and homeland are constructs, arbitrary and artificial. He is aware that the ideal place, the abode and garden of the soul and the body, which he calls Paradise, is also a construct. He nevertheless comes to appreciate, even enjoy, this human-made fabrication of the imagination, which the uncle calls a mirage and the nephew insists on calling ‘‘a garden that grows in the desert of the heart: Paradise.’’ Earlier in the process of this translation, I commented that Dialogue in the Garden might be in some ways autobiographical; I begin to wonder whether or not the process of translating it, and in some ways reading and adopting it, has become autobiographical for me as the translator. As I look at the backyard of our home, I have a new appreciation of Meskub’s ‘‘dialogue with his self.’’ Landscaping is, in fact, the art of reconstructing nature. While over the course of many years I have tried to create an enclosed garden, with trees and flower beds arranged symmetrically, a re-

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flecting pool, and even a large Persian tilework painting in the classical style of Persian miniatures depicting lovers next to a stream, complete with a jug of wine, my American-born wife, with an ancestral memory of the green environments of northern Europe and the natural wilderness of the New World, has imposed her own vision of the garden—‘‘natural’’ nature— on the landscaping of our backyard. The result is perchance a combined American-Persian vision of Paradise, a garden suitable for dialogue.

Dialogue in the Garden I went to see Uncle Farhad’s paintings. He has been painting gardens and puts his perception of the garden in the paintings, on small and large canvases. I sat in the studio and he showed them, one by one. He would remove one and then place the next one against the wall in my view. None of them was the image of a garden with a specific design and structure, a layout of flower beds, trees, branches, leaves, and birds, with a pool and wattle, vines and climbing roses, weeping willows, and fountains. There was more an impression of a garden in the colors of a few lines . . . A garden in the mind with the long line of the horizon on the upper part of the painting near the sky, a low, thin band of sky, and the wide open plain in the foreground. I viewed the paintings, one by one; they were all alike and yet each a different garden. I will recount some of them in the order in which I saw them and on the basis of my unorganized notes. I will have to alter even more in words the garden that had been altered before in the journey from nature to imagination and from there to the painter’s canvas, and say that there is a mountain and high sky.The mountain dominates everything and at the foot of the mountain, down there, a small hut is hidden. Behind the long, drawn trunks of the trees, the hut is visible. The thin vertical lines of the trees, as thin as reeds but erect and firm toward the stifled and sunken sky, cut the hut. The hut is there, but not the trees. It is a treeless garden with a rectangular, simple hut, without any door or windows; this garden is burnt. Tall, indistinct, entangled grasses can be seen in the rays of flames; a fire must be burning somewhere, the reflection of which is cast on the naked body of the garden, or has the copper sun at sunset entered and filled the garden? Autumn and the flames of burnt branches and leaves? The hut is always the same, unlike the garden. The

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hut has no windows, an enclosed square structure, complete in itself, like a shelter, a place of refuge within reach yet inaccessible, the fleeting abode of the soul! Sometimes the garden is the stalks of wheat or rush and the wind, the wind that has taken the whole hut and leveled everything. This garden is a form given to dream; it is the form of dream and imagination; this garden is a face given to dream, it is the face of dream and fancy, and the hut sits right at the top, on the mane of the hill and the wind rushes to it from two sides and the stalks and tips of the branches of the trees—lines that can be guessed to be the stalks or tips of the branches of vegetation— bend toward this shelter planted at the top of the elevation, and from the bottom of the painting the ground pulls itself up. The painting has an unusual background and depth, at several different levels, one higher than the next. The sky is invading the earth with a black wrath—what a horrifying dream! It has left no room for the house and trees, it has come down all the way to earth and the earth, frightened and gaunt, hides like a thick strip at the bottom of the painting. The hut sits in the background, the tips of the branches of the trees are bending from both sides toward the hut, the tips of the branches cannot be distinguished from one another: an entangled, dark mass, behind which a darker mountain is stretched out. The sky is low and no light shines from anywhere, yet a grey, cold light has engulfed the haunting garden, like a fog in the fields or a sadness in the soul. The sky is threatening, dark, rainy and the earth is black, and in another the earth is a narrow strip. Twilight at sunset, the sky wide, vast and aggressive, between these two thin transparent lines, the horizon can be seen far away, with the figures of a few lone trees. The garden is on the horizon: distant, at the dividing line of the sky and the earth. When you are on the earth, the garden is in the sky and when you are in the sky, on earth; but neither in this nor on that does it fluctuate on the slippery border of both. I saw a garden that was all sky, and the skyline wavy, more or less level, at the bottom. The mountain, mild and modest, had kindly given as much room to the sky as it could. The tips of the branches of a few trees blown by the wind and bent were moving upward toward the calm and colorless sky. The reflection of the earth could be seen in the dusty air. The air had become the same color and of the same material as the earth. The garden has no gates or walls; it is as open and wide as the plain, and wherever a path is shown, the garden is there, it has no path. Only the wind is the guide. It shows the direction and leads the eye to that side. In

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some of the paintings, the mass of trees fills the back of the hut; the hut, which more and more assumes a square shape, stands alone in the middle and is at odds with the surrounding space. The colors are black, lead grey, lemon, dull brick and dirty red. Black and lead grey dominate and then earth tone.The sky is earth tone, something between earth tone and turbid pink, the color of early evening air, before snowfall. There is little light; the crescent moon can only be seen in one place, which is reflected in a small pond, and a faint light is sprinkled around. Garden at night, moonlight, and hidden growth in the darkness. The light in most of the paintings is on the line of the horizon and the garden is mostly there. The sky, trees, the earth, all are burnt brown, and in the middle a large white square appears in place of the hut; the hut has become a large white square. Most of these gardens have mountains; they are mountain gardens. The earth is a mixture of dead and stifled brown and orange with vague wind-stricken waves and a white square in the middle. The garden is empty of humans, no one! There is no human in the garden, the garden is in man. A picture in the mind that can be seen with the internal eye. The background is lime green and a thick entangled row of trees. From the top of the mountain, a dark light peeks through and the mountain is black and the blackness is thick and full. The mountain seems quite depressed. Here the hut is no longer a hut and it has transformed into a dark mirror or an increasing square that sits in the middle of the painting on the mountains and hills and plants and trees, a pure abstract form that has imposed itself on nature, a form fabricated, artificial. It seems that craftsmanship and technique are making it too cramped for nature and pushing it out of the scene; nature intends to be uncompromising, stern clouds crumble, pregnant infertile clouds that do not rain but head downward with bellies protruding; they want to cover up and annihilate the square that has risen up ostentatiously and belligerently in the midst of the battlefield. The garden has become a scene of conflict between nature and form and form is red; it has caught fire or is fire itself that wants to set everything ablaze.

U When I finished viewing, I said, ‘‘Uncle Farhad! Your garden is not happy.’’ F. Yes, I hadn’t thought about that. S. It has no color either.

U 

Translating the Garden

F. It is not as colorful as flowers and vegetation, but it is not colorless either. S. Of course, but it is more in different spectra of earth tones, even your sky is the color of earth. F. Perhaps, but I don’t think about color when I am working, it comes by itself. S. But what about when it is finished? F. It isn’t finished yet. S. You have not, in fact, come out of your garden these last few years. F: More than a few years.To tell you the truth, it began in childhood, from the garden of Alizadeh in Lahijan; the garden was stretched out on a mild slope with its back to the hill and its front facing the road; several rows of thin, tall white poplar trees, not too close to one another, had reached out to the sky and their small, thin silvery leaves trembled in a constant breeze from the sea. The whisper of the sea has the sharp and acrid smell of iodine and the taste of salt, as fresh as water and as vast as the sky. The moist scent of the sea passed through the garden; in flapping its wings it turned over the light and shadows of the leaves and settled in the lap of the hill. When the wind blows, light waves on the leaves and has a silvery shimmer, a mixture of green and white, which at times appears to the eye to resemble shattered glass sprinkled with water. The ground in the garden was covered with short, thick tea plants, with dark, green, meaty leaves full of blood, and it was solid green, so green that it looked black, like when from the shore you watch the dark blue of distant waters. S: I have seen tea gardens; vibrant plants, which are so full and overflowing as if they are about to spill over; they have more life in them than they have leaves and flowers. F: The ground of the garden was covered with these plants. From the entrance gate, a gravel-covered avenue began with rows of poplars. In the middle there was a round pool, which the avenue encircled—from both directions—and went straight to the landlord’s house. Flowers were planted only around the pool and it was filled with fiery geraniums. When you looked from a distance, greenery surrounded fire and fire surrounded water. S: You remember the garden from that time with all these details? F: No, I have constructed it in my memory with these details. I am de-

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scribing it to you so that you can also construct it the way you want to. The two-story landlord’s house with the vast veranda in the front was a couple of steps above the ground. At the edge of the veranda, on both sides of the entrance, two round pillars supported the upper floor balcony. S: If I had made the garden, I would also have planted a cypress or a weeping willow tree between the pool and the building. F: Provided you would not have placed a stream and a jug of wine next to it. S: And a disheveled old man with his head bent, his hand stretched out and his pleading look at a girl or a boy standing at the side with a body curved and a jug in hand, meaning the poet and the cupbearer. F: My vision of those years is not drawn from cliché miniature paintings. The building is also simple, like the garden itself; every floor has four windows that are rarely opened. The lace window coverings are never drawn aside. S: No one lived there? F: Yes, Alizadeh’s lonely wife. Her man is dead. S: So it resembled more a ghost house. F: No, but it seems a little eerie at night when moonlight pours on the ground of the garden from the terra-cotta-tiled roof or through the claws of the rain and the light in one of the rooms is flickering. The house sits under the sky and among the trees facing the sea and the sea is hidden on the other side of the horizon. On dark nights when there is no moonlight, distant stars watch the sleep of the garden, which is green in the darkness and listens to the whisper of the waves and speaks to the wind; it is afraid of autumn and despondent because of the silence of winter and sometimes in hot weather awakens perturbed by the terror of thirst, its body burning in its branches and leaves. No one knows what the sleepy garden sees and what it has on its mind. S: Your childhood garden has lonely nights. F: It is lonely night and day, because in my past—in one of the stops on the road—it was left behind and has been at a distance as much as several years. S: From this perspective, the garden is always distant from us; even though it is in us, it is not within our grasp. The garden blooms in spring; by the time one reaches autumn, it is already over for the garden.

U 

Translating the Garden

F: The problem is that always when the season has passed, one remembers spring. S: Because in youth, the garden is in a state of becoming and blossoming. The garden is in the body and the body is not a place of awareness. It sprouts in the soul when the body is disintegrating. Awareness comes when the garden is gone. Only awareness of the garden, the memory of it, remains in the mind. F: So, this awareness must be coupled with the regret of passing and loss. S: And the impossible longing to refind what is lost and is present in us. Hands are empty of it and eyes are filled by it. That is why the longing for it will not let go. F: Especially for us drought-stricken people. S: Essentially, the existence of the garden is more meaningful in contrast to the desert.Where nature is generous with flowers, plants, colors, and water, one is less concerned about the garden. A garden is manufactured and crafted nature, a picture that we create of ideal nature somewhere, in some corner on a piece of earth. F: What relevance does all this have to youth, which . . . S: It has relevance to spring. A garden is for growing greenery and flowers, for birds and color, for scents and freshness; all these have a season. One cannot plant flowering bushes for autumn. F: Do you want to say that spring is the youth of nature? S: I want to say that youth is spring but does not return once it has passed. The seasons of our lives are not cyclical, and once we understand spring will not return, we want to keep it in our memory and—more importantly—reconstruct it in our imagination. F: And drop anchor in our imagination, settle in contentedly in our youth, which of course we know is not a place we can stay, but we carry the memory along, like a shadow that follows us. S: A shadow that does not follow us, it is in us and is brilliant. Why do you think we believe that the last home of the good is a garden, the Garden of Paradise, not something else? F: Like what? S: I don’t know, any other conception is possible, natural pleasures or any other sense, or absolute tranquility, felicity, and salvation of the soul, unity with the whole, and so on. But instead of all this, involuntarily the image of the garden appears in our mind.

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F: Do you mean our Paradise is to take refuge in water and spring greenery from the dearth in nature, from the dry and burning desert? S: And returning from old age and decay to the freshness of youth, there is neither any passage of time, nor death: invulnerable, eternal youth! F: Like the garden that Jamshid had built. S: Why should we go so far back; like the garden of your own colleagues. F: Miniature painters? S: Most of the scenes are based on a garden sketch. F: A mental sketch or image; a conception of the garden that existed. S: That is right; of imagining the garden, the garden of imagination. Even the battle scenes. Rostam and Sohrab are wrestling to force each other’s back to the ground, but several rows of pine and cypress trees surround them in a circle, and the horses too are father and son, wearing armor and belligerent, and have risen on their hind legs confronting one another. F: In another picture, the field for the same event is the slope of a mountain covered with cypress trees in which the horses gaze in bewilderment at the father’s filicide—but what does all this have to do with the garden? S: The battle occurs in the lap of nature, but it is not a naked and savage nature; the mountain ridge is greenish and the ground grayish violet. Under a bright dark blue sky, a few cypress trees have grown on the mountain slope and one tree standing on the peak has turquoise, fivepetal flowers—starlike—and here and there clusters of flowers, each in a different color and shape, rise out of the ground. The battlefield is in nature, but in the garden of nature. F: Where a young champion is killed unjustly, the presence of the cypress may be a subconscious allusion to the continuity of life and a negation of death. S: The negation of death in the other world, after death. Dying here and living there, but in what kind of place? In a garden, and especially—in the case of Sohrab—of course, in the Garden of Paradise. F: Do you want to say that the predecessors drew the Garden of Paradise even for battle scenes? S: No, I want to say that the idea of the garden, which was embedded in their subconscious, influenced everything that they drew, in the same way that the idea of the hereafter exists in the soul of every religious believer and influences his behavior, whether or not he thinks about it.

U 

Translating the Garden

Even the houses and rooms that we see in miniature paintings, despite the straight geometrical, square, rectangular, and diamond shapes, or sky-blue tilework, vases with entwined curved lines, upper-floor latticed windows, alizarin-dyed curtains, images of colorful birds on azure parapets and the arabesque designs of a carpet, the white candle in a candlestick next to a long, slender rosewater sprinkler, the round fruit bowl with apples, oranges, citrons, or pears, the revelry with a brown instrument, the kamancheh, the golden jug, the red handkerchief, and the dancer in blue and a few branches of pomegranate blossoms, which, scattered, sprouting from the floor of the room, are all in fact an internal garden. F: Our miniatures are mainly a decorative art form, which was mostly at the service of literature and the illustration of stories, like music that served poetry and still does today and has not found its place without the need for and independent of poetry. In any case, the painter thought only about beauty and took the model of beauty from nature, but not from ‘‘natural’’ nature. Since miniature painting was the art form of the royal court and the elite, the painter who himself was in their company and shared their tastes took inspiration from the nature of the same elite, from the garden which was their adorned and ideal nature which they knew and in which they lived. Otherwise, the miniature artist was concerned about neither theology nor realism, he had nothing to do with either Paradise or nature, nor would he even see a garden in the actual world. Based on his understanding and perception of beauty, he imagined whatever he saw—and more than anything else the garden—more delightful and enchanting than it actually was, and he would draw what he had imagined on paper. The result of this is the dominance of gardens and orchards in miniature painting. The painter not only took the garden from the outside to the inside, but he also would display the pleasure-ground of the outside field as much as he could; for example, the plain can be seen from an open upstairs window, a cypress tree can be seen next to a stream, two deer, one drinking water and the other watching the first one, the house only occupies part of the painting and the rest is free to be filled with the pictures of willow trees and tall pines, the courtyard grounds are covered with flowers and plants in pleasing colors, a brown stream with round orange stones finds its way through everything, mingling the water, trees and the courtyard, the house has

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enveloped the garden and the garden has gone inside the house, as if they are embracing each other. The place for other events, too, as much as possible, is in the garden: the dialogue between the prince and the scholar, the meeting of the father and the son, the coronation of the king, who sits on a throne in the open space in the garden. Even inside the bathhouse with unrealistic, happy, pleasant and vibrant colors is not unlike the freshness of the garden. I want to conclude that there is another reason for attention to the garden. The painter draws war, hunting, school and other scenes, or he paints a scene of feasting, wine, music and song in the garden; but he has nothing to do with the Garden of Paradise, he is free of such thought. S: Of course, I agree that the painter does not draw Paradise; not only does he not illustrate the garden of nature or a natural garden, but knowingly he avoids it. He paints the ideal of the garden or the ideal garden— the garden of the soul—and the ideal garden is the Garden of Paradise, which is the garden of gardens and the source of that understanding and perception of beauty that you speak of, or even if it is not, it is its ideal example and perfected model: the garden of imagination! F: For the most part, neither is the artist religious nor is his subject matter. S: But the supernatural ideal exists and distances the painter from the garden of nature. On the one hand, it drives him away from wrathful, unkind nature toward a desired nature, so that, in contrast to existing nature, he builds and adorns his garden as his heart desires and mind approves, and on the other, the desire of his heart and approval of his mind take him beyond the boundaries of nature and draw him to the supernatural, to the free world of imagination, to an ideal notion of the garden that he has created in his imagination: the Garden of Paradise in the creative imagination! F: A supernatural ideal might have left its imprint on the painter’s nature from before, but he is not a captive of the supernatural and may have nothing to do with it. Visualize the atmosphere of miniature painting in your mind; the world is an ideal garden that the painter has nurtured in his soul and brought to the canvas. S: If we make an excursion into this garden of the soul, the mountain is blue, the sky is golden and the legendary bird, Simorgh, with its open green wings, cinnabar tail and red mouth, is in flight. The cypress trees sit on the violet mountain and the pink bushes on the lead grey earth.

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Translating the Garden

An emerald earth, a white tree and leaves the color of cherry blossoms, and a pheasant on the top of the cypress, and a patch of fiery clouds like a flame in a corner of the sky; and a turquoise horse—unruly and solitary—stands in the middle of the garden. Blossoms pink, like six-pointed stars but on the tree, and the tree on the mountain and the mountain in the heart of the green sky, as green as spring; a garden in the sky and a bloom of azure clouds on it, like a water lily on the water. And in this one the crescent moon among spring blossoms scattered across the purple sky and a clear, azure stream that comes from the sky behind the mountain and runs down from the ridge to the ground of the garden, at the feet of a pair of lovers who sit under an arbor free of this world and the next.Two simple-minded lovers unconcerned and tranquil due to the extent of their simple-mindedness. The red ceiling of the arbor with arabesque twists and turns is like an ornate carpet with a crimson background in front of which a tree with burntumber autumn leaves has grown; the purple flowers of the tree embrace the lovers under the arbor. A bird resembling a francolin or partridge sits on the tree, watching the lovers. In back is a mountain, above which the azure sky can be seen. The ground of the garden is shiny black, it sparkles from blackness; white flowers in the background of the garden set light on darkness and, in a corner of this darkness, a fire burns like a rosebush. And above, the sky is calm and entirely turquoise. In front, two cypress trees emerge out of the picture even beyond the sky; between them a tree with open branches embraces both, the tree has round red flowers and covers the vivid emerald color of the cypresses with agate-hued petals; and a tall, slender pine as tall as the cypresses with green and yellow leaves embodies both spring and autumn. The garden is at times the color of spring and autumn and at other times is not, but it is always the color of the seasons imagined, like a smoky or lead grey earth but more translucent than the freshness of spring. The entire garden full of bushes as tall as a human. The petals, green, blue, maroon, and black. The bushes are seemingly wild but have been trimmed and pruned so well that despite their pleasing appearance they seem wild and have not lost their wilderness freedom. In the upper section of the garden, there is a stream with fresh grass on its banks and small flowers as shiny as silver glass beads. Several trees stand by the water, all covered in white blossoms and purple buds. A

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faint green-blue wave as transparent as clear water can be seen on the moss at the bottom of the stream. At one end of the picture, at the edge of the garden, instead of a wall, there is a folding screen the color of ocher bricks with arabesque curves, triangles and raised curved lines reflecting an apple tree with its white blossoms. From above the screen, in a corner of the garden, the blue of the starry sky is visible with the crescent moon dropped at the bottom of a pond like a golden glass. In the middle of the garden, Homay and Homayun in long floral gowns stand like stems of two flowers; Homayun has a goblet in his hand and Homay a crown on her head; their long gowns have designs of flowers, plants and birds; they are both dressed in spring. F: It is only from the story that we know that Homay and Homayun are lovers; in the painting, they are standing side by side like two strangers and their demeanor does not reveal anything. The woman is looking at the ground, and the man at something else, and their inexpressive faces are set in silence. The kind of love that bursts one’s skin from restlessness and sets the veins on fire, the kind of love that explodes in the heart with the inevitable force of death, can be seen in all the lines of a person’s face and the expression of a person’s body. But they do not look at each other at all, as if they would be embarrassed if their eyes should meet; they are so cold and inattentive, as if they are standing in their sleep. S: You are right; they are really asleep. I should say that they are in a metaphorical world.Their reality is another realm.Wherever they have come from, even if their life is here, the root of their soul is nurtured and blooms there. F: You are trying to justify the ineptitude of the painter. In my opinion, the human figure is the weakest subject matter in our miniature paintings. Compare it with trees, birds, or horses that are usually unruly, well formed, and magnificent. But the riders on such horses come out disproportionate, mostly identical, with distorted eyes and Mongolian Oriental faces. It is as if the painter had not looked around himself, had known humans only from the model that he had once been given, and always repeated the same figure. Miniature characters lack individuality; they are unsuccessful examples of mankind. For this reason, each human figure is not a distinct individual, independent of others, with its own characteristics. It is a predetermined prototype.

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Translating the Garden

S: Like the portraits of saints. Not only are the characteristics of their faces and bodies not a matter of concern, but also either they all look alike or even their faces are covered with masks, because saints are equal due to their holiness. Before eternityand the divine perfection of spirit, the particulars of the mortal body become insignificant and are disregarded. Of course, figures in miniatures are usually not those of saints and their resemblance to one another has a different reason. Essentially, attention to individual characteristics and then drawing an individual portrait is for when the concept and issue of the social individual appears, in other words, for a person with his own intellectual environment, personality and rights separate from those of others while being with others. Simultaneously being apart from and with others, being with oneself and being in the society. Then every face automatically becomes important. Prior to the appearance of such a concept, even Christ does not have individuality in Western culture. The crucified Christ of Byzantine portraits is the symbol of the suffering of the Divine incarnate, or mankind in general (the Son). F: Yes, in a portrait, man does not lose his magnificence and grandeur. But in our miniatures, even Rostam and Sohrab resemble beaten midgets more than champions of legends. The inability of the painter to draw humans must have another source, which I do not know. I do not think you know it either, but you justify it by saying that the painter is not concerned with here; you resort to the root of the soul, the celestial world and the like. In other words, are Homay and Homayun— two lovers who have just come together—instead of other things, concerned about the salvation of the soul and the next world? For instance, about Paradise? S: Like you, I too am not fond of the Mongolian midgets in miniatures. But regarding the painter’s conception of ideal, perfect beauty, I think that idea does its job and leaves its seal on reality. As a result, he sketches a garden that signifies another garden; it leads to a place further beyond. Let me not repeat what I have said, in this miniature painting reality is not the model, and in this sense nothing is real. F: Is the same true of love? S: The same is true of love; it is not only the lover and the beloved who are asleep. Most of the scenes are of spring, as it were, bathed and asleep in light, and because of sleep, without motion and change: an eternal

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spring. Despite the lines, specific shapes, sharp colors and bright light, everything is as in a dream. Because neither the shapes nor colors, none of them, are what we see in nature. The ideal is what exists in the imagination of the painter, even the black ground at night seems translucent, like a light from behind a thin folding screen, and the night is as bright as day; objects, the sky, the earth and vegetation take on the color of one another. F: When the night is as bright as day, difference in time is eliminated. If objects become the same color, forms do not have characterand specificity. On the other hand, because the painter is not familiar with perspective, there is no sign of distance and closeness, all objects are placed more or less at the same distance, and hence place also loses its specificity. S: The same undifferentiated times and places mean all times are one and the same and all places one place. That oneness in the mirror of the painter’s eye is manifested in various forms. In the garden, too, the principle is that oneness that exudes from the dreamy—or, as you say, sleepstricken—mood of these images, like the secret scent of light perfume in the breeze! Where the characteristic of time and place is eliminated and time and place become the same, the place is eternity; it is a place where old age and death do not exist. Now, what garden is it that the painter imagines—at least in his own mind? Also, let’s not forget that the distinct characteristic of all these pictures is light. Even when they draw the Water of Life in the Region of Darkness, the Region of Darkness itself is light and the pebbles under the water can be seen (leaving aside that water is light and in this case, too, it is light in darkness). In the same way that angels do not have shadows, in miniature painting, there is no play of light and shadow; everything is light, in all the colors and in various forms: colorful malleable light. F: In this dialogue, you reach a garden of eternal spring, eternal light, timeless, without old age and death . . . S: In the world of the imagination! The image of that ideal model has been infused like a light into these pictures and has made us accustomed to the mood and atmosphere of another garden, abstract and to some extent alien to the garden that we see. The garden, and essentially the reality of miniature painting, is an abstract and idealistic reality, without shadows, and as a result unencumbered by the heaviness and bulk of daily reality.

U 

Translating the Garden

F: Salaman and Absal in the Celestial Island may have been illustrated more or less with the same idea you are describing. S: The water that surrounds the island and most of the painting is a sharp translucent emerald color under which the fish and plants are visible. Higher up are the colorful rings of passing clouds that are driven in one direction by an invisible but discernible wind. In the air, a white bird with open wings is flying toward the sky—a crane, a heron or a wild goose, a high-flying far-flying bird of this sort! Salaman stands holding a bow and watching a pheasant on a tree in bloom. The tree has white and purple blossoms—it is spring—and the pheasant has a long tail, extended red neck and blue back. Behind all this, between the lovers there is a cypress tree on the solid green color on which the images of the bird and blossoms are reflected. Absal sits, leaning against another tree in bloom.The beloved, the cypress, and a tree in bloom with agatecolored buds and small emerald-colored leaves protrude from one side of the picture and spread over the gilded border that is covered with faint illustrations of foliage. But further, there is a tree that has split the top of the painting, extending even beyond the sky. The green and yellow branches and leaves of this ‘‘spring-autumn’’ tree seem to have opened their wings to go even higher. Everything—colorful and light—faces upward toward a dreamy space . . . F: The dream of courtiers and prominent people who could afford to hire painters to decorate the doors and walls of their palaces or to illustrate their books. For this reason, this kind of painting is captive to literature; it either narrates the stories of The Book of Kings and The Quintet of Nezami or the royal hunting, battle and banquet scenes, joyful feasts and drinking parties, and portraits of the young and princes. And if there is any idealistic imagination, it is the ideal of these same tranquil clients who want vivid and lively colors, and happy, bright and pleasant sketches.The illustrations are saturated with worldly, physical pleasures. S: The Garden of Paradise too not only is not alien to such pleasures but is a place in which ultimate physical and spiritual pleasures are among its eternal blessings. For the painter, every scene is a means by which to transfer his sense and perception of ideal beauty to the canvas. The perfect happiness of the body and soul is in another world and, con-

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sciously or subconsciously, he wants to achieve some sense of it in form and color; for this reason, in painting ‘‘here’’ he has his eye on ‘‘there.’’ He is not concerned with the reality of here because he is preoccupied by the truth of there, and this preoccupation is to such an extent that sometimes only the image of there . . . F: Every image that he may have of there he still has taken through human senses, and from here. Even fantasizing has a source and an origin. S: Of course, but what he takes he has re-created in the mirror of imagination and brings back to this world and he sees here in that open mirror. The result: This is a perfect ‘‘place’’ with optional designs, times and places, and with freedom in color and design and with the blessing of light, he creates his ideal garden, the garden of his soul. F: Such a painter whose soul lives in a garden greener than the garden of the body and whose world of imagination is a happier place than the actual world is a wishful thinker who knows well how to deceive himself. But the garden of my imagination is right here, in the garden of the body, not the garden of the soul. Have you seen the Qasroddasht gardens? In Shiraz at the edge of that city, behind high walls, there is a sanctuary . . . S: There was a sanctuary. F: There was a sanctuary . . . sheltered from the chaos outside. When you open the door, you step into a vestibule or under a false arch with stairs on both sides and possibly with a hexagonal reflecting pool and the shimmering of water on the scales of a few red goldfish that continuously slide along the turquoise-colored tile at the bottom. There is shade, water, and the tranquility of the fish. In the damp cool shade, you rest to take a breath of fresh air and are sheltered from the thirst of the sun and the fever and frenzy outside. Then, the graveled avenue begins with pine trees standing on both sides awaiting the newcomers, with a patient and calm whisper in the breeze. The avenue leads to an open space with a mound overflowing with violets, begonias, petunias, wallflowers, dahlias, and a few corn poppies and other annual flowers, each lasting a few days. The borders of the mound and around the flowers are covered with short decorative boxwood. The continuation of the avenue on the other side of the open space, a little further, the landlord’s

U 

Translating the Garden

building with a vast veranda, halls on both sides, sash windows with colored glass and an open and cheery appearance. S: Which garden and what time period are you talking about? F: About the timeless garden, about Alizadeh’s garden, about two slender, tall cypress trees and a few purple and amber jasmine plants, and about the reflecting pool in front of the house, the length of the veranda, with a short rim, shallow, a wide stone fountain in the middle and the sky in the mirror of the water, about Judas trees, mimosa trees and acacia trees and avenues that stretch from the open space to the four corners of the garden and divide it into several sections, each part with free designs and willful lack of restraint being broken into other plots and flower beds covered with plants and saplings. One cornerof the garden is taken over by fouror five aged plane trees; the trees are planted in a circle so that in the middle, under the canopy of their branches and leaves, a cool shady area oblivious to the flame of the sun stretches out on the ground; this is the cozy corner, a place to lay back and rest from the fire and chaos outside. The high veranda overlooks the garden and from there one can view the flower garden in the middle and the reflective pool—the heart and the mirror of the garden—and sense its scattered shell and its color and smell. But in the cozy corner, one can take refuge. Against the raw and rough nature outside, the cozy corner is a place of refuge in the shelter of the garden. S: This is a cozy, secluded corner, a safe place to meet a friend, a confidant, a kindred spirit. F: Like the old goldfish-pool rooms: an azure pool with a stone overflow gutter and a fountain in the middle that continuously drives the water into the overflow gutter, and course plinth tilework with the faces of kings and princes, Jamshid of the Pishdadi Dynasty and Keykhosrow of the Kiani Dynasty, Anushirvan of the Sassanian Dynasty, and Homay Chehrazad.The arched-brick ceiling and the freshness of the water and seclusion of the house sheltered from the shameless sun of long summers. In the Mahalleh Now District of Isfahan, there is a Safavid house with a hexagonal stone pool with four triangular flower beds that . . . S: There is no longer any trace left of either of those gardens or those houses, except in memory, in history.

Dialogue in the Garden

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F: If there were, we would not long for them. I am speaking of the ideal, of what does not exist. Does the garden of your miniature artists exist? S: No, but it did. As long as their garden existed, they did, too, and as long as they existed, their garden did, too. F: Yes, but in the world of their imagination. S: Creative imagination, orderly and more luminous than light and more real than existing reality. But the garden of your imagination . . . F: Has burned, but with its green longing . . . S: The vague longing of a seed that continues to struggle to pull itself out of the ground, but they in their own luminous garden . . . . Have you ever noticed that the sun usually is not shown in miniature paintings? The painter does not paint the sun, but there is always sunlight. F: There is no sun, but there is sunlight? What are you trying to say? S: I am trying to say, it’s like when there is no moon but the atmosphere overflows with the exuding fluid moonlight. F: When there is no moon, of course there is no moonlight either. S: But there is in the imagination of the painter. The world of his imagination is luminous. The abode of light is in his imagination, not in the sky. That is why the paintings are sunlit even without the sun, even at night and in darkness. F: Perhaps, but luminous darkness is not real. S: Perhaps it does not exist in actuality, but it is real, because his darkness is the source of the Water of Life and the Water of Life is the substance of the illumination of the soul and belongs to the clear-sighted Elias, not Alexander, even if he is the king of the whole world. F: These are not gardens anymore, they are spiritual states, or, I don’t know . . . salvation of the soul and such things. S: It is the garden of the soul. The world of the painter’s imagination is free from the bright sun and the moon. And this drives him toward a sort of absolute beauty, free from factuality. His perception of beauty materializes in the garden that is the figurative form of flowers, plants, water, and trees in an abstract space. In some miniature paintings, this abstraction is conscious; the painter wants to paint the Paradise of the celestial world and for this reason he uses the eye of his head as long as it serves the eye of the heart. F: Are you talking about the miniature Ascension?

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Translating the Garden

S: Why Ascension? F: Because in it, angels with open golden and orange, green and blue, white and violet, and saffron and purple wings on the background of the night’s azure, star-studded sky have surrounded the Prophet, who is riding Boraq, ascending to the upper heavens. In the night sky, with intertwined patches of clouds, the halo of a full moon has a liquid brightness.The Prophet, who has passed the horizon of the moon, is wearing a green cloak, and Boraq, with a feminine face and a crown on its head, traverses the galaxies lightlyand easily. A flaming golden light surrounds the Prophet and Gabriel, and candelabras of the same kind are hanging from the roofless sky; the miniature painting is in fact a flower garden of light on a clear, bright night. S: Perhaps, but this is not what I wanted to say. There are other paintings that portray a glorious celestial earth, mountain after mountain, the entire high Alborz Mountains and the sacred peaks, the nest of Simorgh and Zal, and the prison of Zahhak, with snakes growing out of his shoulders, a land in the sky, the place of the god of water and the source of waters and rivers, and a tree in the heart of the wide sea, the cure of all pains and the embodiment of the seeds of all plants, including the paradisiacal cypress of Zoroaster, the ever-green, ever-young tree, eternal spring, safe from the ravages of time, and clusters of grapes which ‘‘God created out of happiness.’’ F: The two miniature paintings in the Shiraz anthology of the early ninth century A.H.? S: And those colors and depictions that can only exist in the world of imagination, in imagining Paradise. F: In Ascension, the artist has painted his own vision, but in those, the vision of the Prophet has been painted. S: The faithful’s dream of beauty. Zoroaster’s garden of the soul is even more exalted and abstract. His garden is in the thought and the mind, in awareness and visitation. And he wants God to understand God, and asks the Creator: Who is the creator of the earth and the sky, the moon, the stars, water, light and plants? Oh Creator, make me aware of Thy words and Thy language and showThyself. He prays at the threshold of Goodness and Truth, which are manifestations of God, to be bestowed the gift of visitation. Oh better than all! Come to me and bestow a glance upon me. Oh

Dialogue in the Garden

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Mazda! Oh Truth and Goodness! Reveal Thyself to me that I may see the soul of my soul. I want to know and see. Thou bestowed a glance upon me and I knew with the power of thought and saw with the eye of the heart. My Paradise is mutually a perception and a visitation. And if I perceive and see Thee, it is because my thought and my vision are one with Good Thoughts and Truth (both of which are manifestations of Thee). In me there is something of Thee that I perceive, and I see Thee by Thy blessing. Because Thou art thought and light, and I perceive Thee by thought and see Thee by light. And now, he who sought to see the Land of Good Thoughts, Words and Deeds with eyes rests in the luminous House of God and becomes immortal in endless eternity, joy and happiness. Oh, Ahura Mazda! Once I knew Thee, I saw Thee engaged in the first creation and found from the beginning of time to eternity within myself. F: This is no longer a garden, because a garden, besides all else, is the abode of beauty. In it, man reconstructs nature with his perception of beauty—not this one, which is alien to design, form, color and smell, to the freshness of water and the freshness of spring! S: That is why I speak about the Paradise of Him Who is the soul of the garden, not its body, and about the garden of the soul, not the garden of the body. In His Paradise, the principle is awareness and visitation; beauty is secondary to knowledge. But since seeing beauty is possible through rays of light, in His Paradise the source of beauty also flows. F: Your Prophet wants to see the Land of Good Thoughts, Words and Deeds.Through eyes of wisdom he sees awareness, knowledge or other concepts of this sort. His garden of the soul is too far; it is an unattainable utopia. S: But Zoroaster, contrary to Sohravardi, does not live with regret and yearning for utopia from which he is separated. This vast earth with its fecund pastures and plantations is a generous angel and one of the physical manifestations of Ahura. His Paradise, despite its remoteness, is under our feet. F: I don’t know, but I am a painter and my awareness and knowledge come from my eyes and hands; I become intoxicated with the garden of the body, not what you call the garden of the soul or the abode of the soul and other things—a garden that can be seen and touched and with which one can become a friend and companion, observe its morning, greens

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Translating the Garden

and running water and go into ecstasy. My ideal garden is the Paradise of a prophet who is in love and a poet king who was himself lovesick and whose beloved was the most beautiful garden in the world. Has it ever happened to you too that you see a woman one day and suddenly feel as if you have been waiting for her your whole life? Wishing to meet someone who would be like the garden with the color and scent of night, the simple health of plants and the beauty and fluidity of water, with hair like the entwined branches of a myrtle tree, luxuriant. And eyes, a spring in the distant solitary nights of the mountains. A familiar but exotic beauty, embraced by the mystery of darkness, with warmth of bodyand scent of love and a mixed aroma of cherryand apple blossoms, pungent acacia and the bitter, moist scent of boxwoods, and the expectant look of autumn for the flower of the beloved’s face, and the extinguished sun close to dusk, fled from the heat of the sunlight and arrived at the shimmering breath of water and grass, and wet leaves and full veins, and the green shell of a garden that seems black in the dusk, a breath sheltered and free from the fever and frenzy of the times, resting for a moment in one’s own time and reposing in one’s own place, as if on the pleasant meadow of the world, you are King Solomon: Tall and splendid with entwined locks, black as a raven, and a countenance like a garden of balsam and a mound of herbs and hands like gold rings, illuminated with chrysolites, and a bosom like transparent ivory, bejeweled with topaz, and legs like marble pillars standing on pedestals of pure gold, a face like Lebanon and cedars in the green garden of the Poet of Damghan (red rose and locks of boxwood, birds in love with the nightingale in the garden, and the dove in the field, and the partridge in the mountain, and the fleeing rain cloud in the field). Solomon, son of David, who knew the language of the birds and in the blink of an eye traversed time and place, the king of demons and fairies and fire and wind and water . . . but lovesick! Strengthen him with raisins and refresh him with fresh fruit because he is lovesick and smitten by the beloved. Now you are beautiful, oh my garden, oh my beloved! You are beautiful; your very figure is like unto a palm tree, and your breasts like unto clusters of grapes. I said, I will climb the palm tree, I will take hold of its branches.

Dialogue in the Garden

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How very delightful is your love, how much better is your love than wine, and your fragrances than all other fragrances. Oh my flower garden! Honey and milk are under your tongue, and the fragrance of your garments is the fragrance of Lebanon. My beloved is a fountain sealed and an enclosed garden (a garden of emerald and rubyand the spring garment of cypress next to the stream with jasmine, lilies, and eglantine, and the song of the nightingale in love). Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits, camphor and nard, nard and saffron and trees of frankincense, myrrh, and aloe and all the finest spices, a fountain of gardens and a well of living water and flowing streams. Arise, oh North Wind, and come South Wind, and blow upon my garden that its perfumes may spread abroad. Oh my beloved, and oh my flower field! Arise and come, because now winter has passed and rain has done and gone. Flowers have appeared on the ground and the time of melodies has come and the song of the dove is heard and the vines have bloomed and the wine of the poet has a pleasant aroma (the daughters of the vine, the clusters of grapes, the fertile breasts of pregnant virgin maidens, and the blade of the gardener and the cutting of the bodies of the prisoners of the vat with a cover on top like a lock on a door). Oh my beloved, oh my fair one! Oh dove with your nest in the crevice of rocks and under the cover of granite, show your face to me and make me hear your song, because your song is pleasing and your face is beautiful. Who is this that comes forth with the dawn and is as beautiful as the moon and as resplendent as the sun, as awe-inspiring as an army with banners? A poet king and prophet is the captive of her locks, and she is an enclosed garden and invisible fountain. I have come to my garden, oh my beloved, oh my bride: I gathered my myrrh and my spices, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, and I drank my wine. In my garden, the mandrakes give forth fragrance; all manner of pleasant fruits, oh my beloved, I have kept in store for you. Eat, drink, yea drink abundantly, oh lovers.

S: What does not exist in the images of your garden is joy, drinking and merriment. Sometimes the trees are uprooted, the house is lost in the

U 

Translating the Garden

invasion of the wind and rain, floods pour from the sky, and it is stormy. What astonishing distance between what you wish and what your brush draws! Your imagination and your hand are quite distant from one another. F: Not so far apart. In fact, no farther than one season. My gardens are born in autumn but always nurtured with the futile thought of spring in mind. S: Perhaps for this reason they embody the seed of a paradoxical yearning: a spring that has gone, a spring that has not come. As if the wind, in almost all the paintings, drives forth the moonlight, color, tree, sky, and finally time and distances them from us. Everything is fluid except for light that is present, albeit coy and faint. If you have noticed, everything is translucent, like nocturnal blue, the vastness of a field or the other side of a glass. Among all fluid things, light is suspended in space, like rain. F: My gardens are being emptied, involuntarily, of nature, of the struggle of soil and the hidden fire of growth. S: And instead, they are being filled with the memory of time, of the diehard past that does not let go and is present in the present, a present that cannot be captured and is annihilated in light. The flight of light and time—the nostalgia for time—are the two distinct characteristics of these works. F: But I want light for the mass of greenery and the restless growth of plants, not for showing the passage of time. My ideal garden has body, weight and thirst; it breathes, blossoms, withers, and is afraid of drought, of the sun furnace above and the burning soil below and awaits a fertile river that springs from the side of the mountain. It travels through distant twisting and turning roads; it passes, at the bottom of the valley, among the forests and melon patches; run down and tired, below the slope of a solitary mountain, it steps into the edge of the desert, but before it is dissipated and sinks into the swamp, it brings along the cool breath of the mountains; on the way, with the veins that separate from the joints of its body, forests and farms are satiated until it reaches the orchards and the courtyard gardens of a green city. Green land, blue sky and a little further, the desert—empty, dry and dusty as far as the eye can see, and scattered diehard thornbushes, and the enchanting garden at the upper part of the river, at the edge of the city. At

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dusk, you arrive after a distant journey, having left behind the heat of the desert sun, at the garden with geraniums, verbena, jasmine and soaking wet leaves and two long rows of pine trees with round crests on the two sides of a lawn spread in front of the veranda; it is as if you have reached someone you love, the shelter of whose safe embrace is your abode.The raw scent of youth exudes from her body, the freshness of water drips from her wet hair, she looks at you, she has opened her arms and wants you; you embrace her with a painful and pleasing thirst and drown in a pleasant tranquility, your worries go to sleep, you gain peace of mind, like when you reach a place of pilgrimage with absolute devotion. S: But this is not what your hand paints. Wittingly or unwittingly, the garden of the soul that exudes from your fingers is burnt. A sort of destruction of the garden, departure and obliteration. The garden is the abode of your childhood, which is gone and only its memory remains. You are a painter of the memory of the past. The wind that blows in almost all of your paintings and drives everything, even the earth, in one direction in a way suggests their transiency; and along with transient things, the essence of transiency, time past, has also automatically come with the passage of time. F: It is possible, but what I intend is to externalize an image that I have within me, to give it a face with colors and form to actualize something with potential that is gone! S: In your work, things become actualized when they are seen, and seeing is possible in light. Time leaves everything behind except for itself. For this reason, even though it is always passing, it always is; it is a staying wayfarer. Your light too is the same—even though far—in the faint line of the horizon, and even further, but it is a visible concealment. In your work, things from the past come with a light from the past and, despite having passed, are still there. Both are somehow mingled; the light has been lodged in time and time has assumed existence in light. The apprehensive, alienated atmosphere of your gardens is created by a sort of marriage of light and time. F: In you there is an inclination for abstraction and, on the other hand, for creating unity . . . the ancient and original pantheism. I also sensed this in the discussion with you about the Paradise of Zoroaster. Precisely contrary to me, as I am alien to abstract light and beauty, to time without a design and color.

U 

Translating the Garden

S: Not pantheism, but a tendency toward the unity of the garden of the soul and the garden of the body. Zoroaster yearns for a sort of oneness with existence; man who was first with God and came to the world to help Him yearns to return to the abode of his soul, the garden of his soul. F: Which the prophet Solomon found in his beloved and his beloved found in him: the oneness of two gardens, two bodies, unity in love. And the Song of Songs. S: In speaking about the unity of the gardens of the soul and the body, another poet comes spontaneously to mind whose soul itself is a wondrous garden with the flaming fire of love, the intoxicating, boiling fermentation of wine, and the clamorof the lyre and the striking blows of the musician’s hand, which is the source of all blows, and dancing in ecstasy under this revolving dome, and exile under the rays of the light of Shams, and the brilliance of the face of Joseph the Canaanite, and the good visitation of him to whom all eyes belong, and a love that boils from above and below in the spring of the soul, and the yearning for the endless green garden with flowers and fruits that cannot be contained in the imagination, and a cypress that has the same fragrance as the stature of the beloved in the flower garden of the heart. F: Let go of this discussion, because we will be lost in Shams and love and Rumi. S: And in the Simorgh of Mount Qaf and the Homay of the soul, in my Shams and my God, oh my yearning for you my cure, our breath my companion and your face spring and your breathing the companion of my morning and evening, oh you my lineage, your love has once again given flight to the soul, one breath intoxicated for you, another breath yearning for you, dead life, despondent soul, these two or three days sacrificed for you, every moment blossoms bloom in offering to you, on earth and in the sky all restless for you. Oh cypress in motion, hidden eye, soul of the world! I placed love mingled in the heart and the heart attached to you in your heart who are like life and more pleasing than life in the depth of my essence, like fancy in the heart, like the good vision of Shams, the sun of the two worlds. Oh this life-robbing game of yours! The fish thirsting for life in your water of life; I saw you in a dream and drank you like water, oh moon of the nocturnal way-

Dialogue in the Garden

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farers of the imagination! May you come out from the heart of the sun and dawn in every particle and like imagination pass through scattered me, for being alive without your pleasant face is a death called life. Show me love in the garden of your face that has permeated like spring the body of the flower. F: Are you uttering invocations or incantations? S: I speak in unintelligible mystical blasphemy of the light of the Creator and the Creator of Light, of the Friend, of the garden of the soul in the breast of the gardener. Dawn and wakefulness and the first light that has appeared between existence and nonexistence and combined the two. Of the sea, thirst and the water that has gushed out from every direction in the courtyard of the house, and the bejeweled cloud in the sanctuary of the soul, and words clearer than eloquence, spring in the flower, and blossoming in the flower garden of the beloved’s body and the falcon of love and the king of the green fortune of the prosperous heart, the splitting of stone and spilling of the blood of the anemone and the burning of fiery water and ignited fire and the good wishes of the flame and the shining of life released from the vicissitudes of time, and sitting like a smile on the breath of time, strewn with the flowers of the moon and stars, and a face more beautiful than a hundred fantasies, with secret words to the ear of the soul, telling silence, the mystery of God, and the twin spirit of death in the fountain of life, and joy in the joyful abode of the soul, and a heart with the sorrow of love, visible in the eyes of every particle like the visible sun. ‘‘None in the world is alienated from the self as love’’ for the world is the prey of the lover and the lover the prey of love, the lady of his soul is the singing companion of the stars in the firmament, the seed of the firmament in concealment of the depths and crevice in the breast of the earth, unfolding oneself like a bud, acquiring the disposition of the garden and becoming scented by its scent, with the flower of the face of Joseph the Canaanite in the well of a heart encamped by the sea, flowing like water in the stream of the Friend, drinking from His refreshing bitterness and residing like the cluster of the Pleiades in His sky! ‘‘I cannot be contained in the world because of joy and happiness,’’ for once again love collapsed on that drunken songster, on the cup and the wine and a mirror filled with the face of the Friend. Oh joy of the soul, soul of the world . . .

U 

Translating the Garden

F: Enough of the incantations of the lunatics and madmen and words scattered like smoke . . . S: ‘‘Do not mind if I spoke erratically, illogically, and incoherently.’’ F: Riding the unruly horse of Rumi’s words, out of control you gallop in all directions. S: After all, not even he could tame this wild horse. F: Let alone you, or anyone else. S: It became entangled and disheveled because it is so massive, it is the forest of the master. I wanted to give some indication of the garden of his soul. F: To the detriment of the garden of the body, to the detriment of the forgotten garden of the nature which is in it, the reality that surrounds him, the nature of his own existence, the veins and sinews and painful pleasure of his body. S: No, in both poets the garden of the soul and the garden of the body have reached unity. In Solomon, love for the beloved is so selfless and exalted that it has even gone beyond the boundaries of the soul, and physical love has gained spiritual truth. In him, reality is overflowing with dream, but in Rumi, man and the world are immersed in the garden of the soul, his creative imagination encompasses nature and the supernatural and combines them. All is the garden of the soul. F: In other words, as for Solomon, his soul is in the garden of the body, and for Rumi, his body is in the garden of the soul. S: In them, reality and yearning and the desert and the garden, nature and imagination, old age and youth, the freedom of dreams and the borders of necessity have mingled and they have become one. Sometimes even death and life in them . . . F: Precisely contrary to us, who are different human beings in a different world, as if we have been halved down the middle. S: Our desire and action, dream and reality have fallen so far apart that they do not recognize one another. We have fallen far from the garden of the soul. F: And we have been uprooted from the garden of the body. S: The garden itself, too, where it is the abode of our body—whether nature or society—is torn apart itself and is in ruins. F: And even then we have fallen into the torn-apart ruins of others. My garden of the body is like paintings of metamorphosed, deformed, and

Dialogue in the Garden

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dismembered human bodies in harsh, dirty and repulsive colors. They can be found in abundance in the paintings of this century. They have no trace of classical beauty that is pleasing to the eye, but they are true. S: It is Guernica, bombs fall from above and fleeing people are torn to pieces in the dark. It looks scattered and each portion plays its own tune, but . . . F: Like our conversation, we jump from one subject to another and each time we end up somewhere else. S: No, in my opinion, this conversation is more like . . . . Once a few years ago I went to an exhibit, as I entered the hall, in the distance a large painting caught my attention and I could not take my eyes off it. It was merely three or four large spots of color, each at random and apparently independent of the others somewhere on the canvas, so that they appeared not to have any relationship to one another. But when you looked carefully, the empty white space between them had created a form that tightly embraced the spots of color, gave them visual meaning and created a unique kind of beauty. The painting was by Matisse and this was the first time that I had sensed and understood abstract painting. At any rate, I have digressed from our conversation. I was saying that bombs from above . . . F: So, it is natural for the green garden of my memory to come to the canvas stricken by autumn, especially in exile, where I have even lost that burnt garden as well. S: I know. Essentially, man today is threatened from the earth and from the sky, from within and without, and has nothing to lean on anywhere. Everyone is alone in himself. No one is even with himself, let alone with others. See what we are doing to ourselves: first, we have pulled down our garden from the world above and now we want to taste all the pleasures of Paradise at once, while there is still time, before we turn into the potter’s clay. We are in such a hurry that we tear ourselves apart and constantly sink into the hole that we have dug under our own feet, we make everyone sink, the garden of the body and nature. F: Why are you explaining the obvious? Plenty of such statements have been made by others in criticizing their own civilizations. What is the need for further . . . S: No, in fact, I was thinking of ourselves during the Safavid period: First they came promising Paradise and the near advent of the Infallible

U 

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Twelfth Imam; once their foothold was firm—especially from the time of Shah Abbas on—they left the advent of the Twelfth Imam up to God but could not give up Paradise.Theyconstructed gardens and buildings from the Naqsh-e Jahan Square to the Zayandehrud to the foot of Mount Sofeh: Hasht Behesht, Namakdan, Sofreh-Khaneh, Haftdast, Chahar Bagh, and so on. They filled the inside of the buildings and pavilions with images of floral designs, birds, musicians, cupbearers and wine, on the walls, the colorful carpets, the stuccowork, and paintings on the ceilings; they created gardens within gardens and drowned themselves among the harem women in wine, hemp juice, hashish, opium, hallucinogenic concoctions, and any other sort of pleasure they could think of, until finally Mahmud Afghan pulled them out of this immense pleasure house, and the Paradise into which they had sunk as in a swamp turned into their Hell. F: Whenever you use Paradise to excess, it will turn into Hell.The gardens of the soul and the body are both extremely vulnerable. Let us return to our earlier conversation. In such a world, we, who have been cast out of our hearth and home, are more gardenless in the land of others. This nostalgia for home and soil seizes you and, when it does, it does not let go any more. I knew a sixty-odd-year-old woman who was ill and bedridden. She had an incurable disease that was hopeless, but she did not want to stay in the hospital. She said, ‘‘Take me home; I want to die there.’’ She insisted so much that they finally took her back to where she wanted to go, among the entwined tall trees of a fruit orchard covered with weeds in a village with a few indigent households near the sea and next to the forest, the aimless prowling of a few hens and chicks around the well in the middle of the courtyard, the smoke of firewood, the taste of fresh milk and the warm smell of the cows’ teats, wet rice stalks, the falling and decaying of leaves and the bareness of trees, long moonless winter nights, the blowing of drowsy wind through the clay tile roof, the painful rebellion of veins and the splitting of muscles, the hard body of the man, restless desire of the woman, and the budding in the thirsty soil of the body, lightning and refreshing rain, and then pleasant languor in the deep sleep of the earth, and love that had united the two like the miserliness of the sky and indigence of the earth and the years of fear and anticipation. For this very reason, she wanted to die where her man had died. Just as she understood, dying requires its proper place.

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S: The death of the body in the garden of the soul. F: Can one separate the gardens of the soul and the body at such times too? S: No, you are right. Dying in the place where we were born and lived— that alone, the place of birth and death—does not connect us together; rather, an eternal place and creating the illusion that some place always belongs to us is what ties us together. Perhaps we want to return to the moment when the two shores of time—coming and going—tie us together, to all times, to that eternal moment. F: That may be, but this desire has nothing to do with exile, even though it is stronger in us. Not long ago, a note to this effect in a newspaper preoccupied me: ‘‘We are a husband and wife seventy-some years old. We wish to spend the final days of our lives in our own home, which we built with a great deal of hard work, and to die there; but there is no room in the cage for a sick bird. Eventually, there comes a time when one cannot remedy the pain of old age and disability alone. We have no family or friends who can help us. We are very lonely. On the other hand, we neither agree to nor can endure incarceration of the old in rest homes or nursing homes for the elderly and such places. But what is to be done, not everyone is fortunate to die in his own home. Alas . . .’’ S: The time before death has ruined the lives of this poor couple and has driven them out of their place; but we have been cast out of our place in the prime of life and gallop ahead with four horses in our bewilderment. Last year one night I was a guest of Vazgen, the former Iranian boxing champion. He ended up in the United States ten or twelve years ago and now lives near Washington, D.C. The way he talks is as if he just left his gang of street-smart roughnecks in the Darvazeh Dowlat area or Amjadiyyeh Square yesterday, with a thick Tehran accent. After several years of working as a laborer and errand boy, he finally became a boxing coach for the police and worked for a couple of years somewhere else until one day they told him, thank you, we are out of funds, you are laid off, in addition to giving him a commendation and proposal for a part-time job: a children’s boxing coach, just one or two hours a week. ‘‘Think of it, man, I was a champion for ten years. I won two golds and four silvers for Iran. I’m talking about world, forget national. Rome Olympics, the Asian Games. Now, beginners’ class, and for kids at that! Thanks a lot, give it to somebody else who wants it. Do you know Billy?

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Billy Andrew? Here, this is his picture, with his fiancée. He’s a coach, too. He lives close by on the other side of the river. He’s got a big mansion; he’s a millionaire.’’ I asked what he did for a living. Surprised, he said: ‘‘What does he do? Hey, he was a champion boxer!’’ ‘‘U.S. champion?’’ ‘‘No, man, world! He’s my buddy. I was his coach once. He gave me the picture himself. Now I’m supposed to be a nanny for a bunch of kids. I said, no way, you can have your job.’’ ‘‘So, what do you do now?’’ ‘‘I work in a supermarket warehouse forty miles away, I go forty and come back forty every day. After two years it’s getting tiring. Especially coming back. In those days, I didn’t know the meaning of tired. I swear to you, the more I stayed in the ring, the better I felt. My left would never miss; whoever got it would be down on the ground. I’ve had forty-two knockouts, all with the left.’’ He stood up, assumed a boxing posture, jumped up and down on his toes a bit, gave a left hook in the air, and said, ‘‘Like this! Akbar the Lunatic in Darvazeh Dowlat . . .’’ He left it unfinished. He turned to one of the guests: ‘‘Jalil! Remember the Elephant? Over six-six, chest this wide, arms like a bull’s thighs. Why, forget about him, man. Abdollah the Butcher once said, ‘Vazgen, forget about boxing. If you’re man enough, let’s wrestle.’ I said, ‘Abdollah, come on, count me out . . .’ When they threw us out of Russia, they had told my father, either become a citizen or get lost. He said that he would get lost. They put him in jail and kicked my mother and me and my sister out. I was four, my sister was nine. When Mama got to Iran, she didn’t know the language and didn’t have a cent. The relatives were around Reza’iyyeh. My mama raised the two of us on a shoestring by working. I don’t want to say how. My sister came before me. She had had it and didn’t want to stay. She said, ‘I’m a woman and an Armenian, and work in the Embassy too.’ No matter what we said, didn’t do no good. She’d lost her mind. She only said she had to leave. I left later, too, because Mama couldn’t stand either of us being away from her. Otherwise, I was doing fine. I had a lathe shop with six or seven working for me. Who wants a lathe shop here? Every-

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thing is mass-produced. When I was settled, I sent for my mama and brought her here, but she didn’t last more than a year, because she had been through so much. She’s buried right here. There’s a great cemetery here, very nice, clean, everything just right, with trees . . . it’s for everybody, no difference, Christians, Moslems, Jews. I wanted to show it to you before we got home, but I thought you might be tired. I took Mahin. I said, ‘Mama, this is Mahin that you loved so much. She just got here, wanted to see you. I knew you missed her; I brought her for you to see her. She’s gotten married, and this is her daughter.’ We stood by her grave for a while. Then I said, ‘Mama, I haven’t taken Mahin home yet, she just got here, we’re going. Bye!’ ’’ I said: ‘‘Those days, I used to go once every two or three weeks to visit my own mother’s grave and talk with her.’’ ‘‘When you were in Tehran?’’ ‘‘Yeah, we had buried her in the Zargandeh Cemetery. I had planted two Judas trees by her feet and her head. When the trees bloomed, two pretty-colored live umbrellas would open in the air. It seemed to me that my mother breathed with the trees and wouldn’t be lonely any more. She loved flowers and plants a lot; when she was alive, she was always piddling in the courtyard flowerbed.’’ ‘‘When you went to her grave, what would you say to her?’’ ‘‘What would I say to her? Nothing. I just went for a visit. I stood by her feet and tried to look at her in my heart.’’ ‘‘For me, it’s like my mama is still alive and is hanging around here. The first time I became a champion and went home with the medal, she burst into tears, from joy. My medals were all left behind in Tehran. They’re gone. By the way, have you seen my son’s medals? He’s a football champion. Come on, let me show you. He’s in the basement.’’ On the stairs, he said loudly, ‘‘Jeff, we’re coming down, I want to show your medals to my bosses.’’ When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Jeff and his girlfriend were sitting in front of the television with their arms around each other. We looked at the medals and went back up. Jalil did not come down with us; he had seen the medals. When we returned to the patio, he said, ‘‘This Jalil was also a champion.’’ I asked, ‘‘Champion of what?’’ ‘‘Bodybuilding.’’

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‘‘No, really?’’ Jalil was a man of sixty-odd years with watery eyes, the corners of which he occasionally wiped with a handkerchief. ‘‘We’ve been friends for years. He was Ilush’s rival, the male star of Iranian cinema.’’ Jalil had been quiet up to then and was sipping his booze. I asked: ‘‘Did you also come with Vazgen?’’ ‘‘No sir, I came two years ago. Because of the kids, first my wife came and then me. And something happened too . . .’’ He did not say anything else. I asked: ‘‘Now what do you do here?’’ ‘‘I go to night school. What is this? Door. What is that? Hand. At my age! What is this? What is that? No matter how much I say I’m a user, I’m an addict, no sir, it does no good.’’ ‘‘What are you addicted to?’’ With a smirk and a hint, he said: ‘‘Grape juice! Haj Agha Mahmud Jalilvand has now become Jim! In the class, the teacher asked, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Haj Agha Mahmud Jalilvand.’ She asked, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Haj Agha Mahmu . . .’ She said, ‘This is too long, we will call you Jim.’ And I became Jim. They have given me a name. Now, she says, ‘Jim, give me a word starting with ‘‘V.’’ ’ I say, ‘Vodka.’ ‘One with ‘‘W.’’ ’ I say, ‘Whiskey.’ She says, ‘One with ‘‘B.’’ ’ I say, ‘Black and White.’ She says, ‘One with ‘‘J.’’ ’ I say, ‘Johnny Walker.’ She says, ‘You won’t learn English like this. You always say the names of liquors.’ I wanted to tell her, I won’t learn it any other way either.’’ ‘‘You didn’t say it?’’ ‘‘No.’’ ‘‘Why?’’ ‘‘I didn’t know how.’’ ‘‘Then what did you say?’’ ‘‘I said yes. She is a good woman. She teaches free of charge, for the Immigration Office. Once I bought her a Coke. My wife said, ‘Jalil, don’t take it, it’s not proper. She might think you’re in love with her.’ I said, ‘In love with her! Whenever I see her, I can’t touch you for a week; it’s enough to make you give up women altogether.What are you talking about?’ Poor thing is a good woman. But looking at her as a brother,

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man, she really looks like the Mother of Frankenstein. My love is my grandchild, my only love.’’ ‘‘Girl or boy?’’ ‘‘A girl; she’s very cute. Today is her birthday; I talked to her.’’ ‘‘Isn’t she here?’’ ‘‘No, she’s in Germany.’’ ‘‘So you are away from your love?’’ ‘‘I couldn’t get a German visa; they wouldn’t give it to me. My biggest expense is the cost of my telephone calls to Germany.’’ ‘‘Do you work here, too?’’ ‘‘I help my son-in-law. He lays tiles, installs sinks, and I clean up, grout, things like that. My son-in-law is a mechanical engineer. I had a pretty good business myself, too.’’ ‘‘What did you do?’’ ‘‘I had two or three semis. After a while, I didn’t do the driving myself; my wife was against it. She said, ‘Jalil, you’ve gotten old.’ But for thirty years I traveled all over this country.’’ ‘‘Which country?’’ ‘‘Our own, all its mountains and valleys, the cold and the heat, every inch of it. I’m a man of the desert, sir, Desert Jalilvand!’’ Vazgen said, ‘‘Jalil even dreams about the desert at night; he’s in a world of his own.’’ ‘‘What world, man, what dream, what desert!’’ He was talking with resentment. Vazgen saw my questioning look. He said: ‘‘He’s always quarreling with Morteza: ‘Morteza, you got enough air in the tires, did you check the oil, did you warm up the engine? Where is your head, Morteza? Sonofabitch, didn’t I tell you not to go under the truck without being careful?’ ’’ I asked, ‘‘Who is Morteza?’’ Vazgen said, ‘‘He was his helper.’’ ‘‘He was like my son, because he was so loyal; he was a gentleman.’’ There was silence. No one said a word. Then he continued: ‘‘He was run over by the truck. Past Khorramabad, near Baba Morad Hill, a heavy snow had fallen. A kind of cold that could kill a cow. Your hand would freeze to the screwdriver. Uphill at the turn, the truck

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couldn’t pull up in the snow, it would slide; it was about to fall off into the valley. Morteza jumped out to put the fifth gear under the wheel. I don’t know if the truck slipped or he did because he was so nervous. Anyway, he fell under the wheel. The wheel was spinning in place . . . on him. It was my fault. He wanted to go to Kermanshah for a few days. He was a spirited kind of guy from Kermanshah. I told him to go after a trip to Ahvaz and back. I didn’t trust the driver.’’ ‘‘After this happened, Jalil turned to vodka in a serious way.’’ ‘‘Not really, I drank before too.’’ ‘‘Yeah, but not as much.’’ ‘‘You see, I’ve got problems sleeping. This makes you sleep deeper. Gotta go, time to sleep.’’ Jalil said goodbye, and we got up too. The evening was coming to an end. F: This champion in your story has really been catapulted. S: Love, revolution, death, and perhaps many other things have tossed this desert man out of his garden to the other side of the world and to grouting and construction work. Days in nostalgia for the mountains and deserts, and nights in fear of the nightmare of the same daily nostalgia, vodka, and fear of sleep have replaced the refuge of the soul and body. F: And the other one, in his old age in a strange land, punches the air with his left hook and knocks past imaginary challengers to the ground. S: When you lose your abode, you do not know what you are standing on and where. I do not mean a geographical place; it is man’s place in contrast to things, the world around him, other people with beliefs and attitudes and the manner of their existence. Man is a sapling out of season and untimely. He is not in his own time. He is autumn in the middle of spring or vice versa. In your eyes, you who have learned to see in a different light and have tested what you see, if it is not different and strange, it is at least alien and does not stem from the same source as the depth of your mind. Then you invent another reality for yourself and live with it, an artificial environment or space, though compatible with your own disposition and spirit. But because it is fabricated and artificial, it crumbles with every wind and your spirit is disturbed and scattered like smoke.

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F: As Jalil has been tossed somewhere with a different language that he cannot learn, his relationship with the surrounding world changes. S: The problem is not learning the language, because even if you learn it, you think in your own language and express it in another language. Your language and your thoughts do not coincide. You are like someone walking on stilts, not on your own legs. This way, even if you are in charge of your own narrative and solve ‘‘this pedestrian concern for daily bread,’’ the narrative of your soul is out of your control and is controlled by the place in which you are. This ‘‘place’’ is a land, sky and nature, a mass of people connected to one another by their own history, beliefs and culture; it is a living sphere. F: Are there not many people who are more alien than any alien in their own homeland? S: Many are alien in their own being, but that is a more serious story that goes beyond our ability to discuss and we will not be able to do it justice. We had better give it up. F: Do you want to say that we are not competent? S: The issue is ability, not competence.We are talking about human beings who have had to end up in the gardens of others. F: Well, in that case, I cannot understand why one should not come out of his closed garden, tear its walls down and visit the garden of others as well. What if it is greener and more springlike? Why should you remain confined in a corner of your own cage? Is it not true that ‘‘land and sea are vast and people are in abundance’’? S: Of course, a human being usually cannot avoid peeking into the garden of others. It is beyond his control because of the necessities of life, curiosity, the existence of culture that leads to the four-season garden of the world. But the question is whether or not you can become a native plant in someone else’s soil. F: This is a new identity and is different from visiting the garden of others. It is like wanting to change your name or your family, to be born of another mother and speak in another language. It is the negation of the self that few people would want. S: And even if they wanted to, they might not be able to do it. Because a seed that has grown and been nurtured in one climate—I do not mean only geographical climate, but also historical climate and cultural envi-

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ronment—may become compatible with another environment; it might even become domesticated, but it will not become native. And as long as he has not become native, he is an uprooted person who carries as baggage the multiple anxieties of both places. F: I admit this. When you are not in your own place, your fears and worries are sometimes split, horrifying and confusing, and this subjugates a person’s being more clearly in sleep than in wakefulness. S: One night recently in a dream I was passing by somewhere like Ferdowsi Street, near Sepah Square, further up than the former Tudeh Party Club. But it seems like I am in front of the University and there are demonstrations and I am watching. Two or three policemen in civilian clothes are standing in a familiar and casual manner and one of them is an acquaintance. They come forward and ask, ‘‘What are you doing here?’’ I say, ‘‘Watching.’’ The acquaintance says, ‘‘Don’t you know it is forbidden?’’ I say, ‘‘No, and I am about to leave.’’ They ask, ‘‘Do you have an ID?’’ I show it to them. A long orange card folded several times. They do not say anything, as if they are asking, ‘‘This is only for one year, what about after that?’’ I do not understand what they mean; I have another residence permit, this one is for ten years. I show them that too, and stand with peace of mind, because all the documents are in order and are legal.The acquaintance playfully takes that one too and looks at me. Instinctively I figure it out; I search in my pockets for the translation of my birth certificate. I cannot find it. I am nervous; I hand over my old crumpled photograph. He looks at the stamp on the back and puts everything in his pocket. Others come and go, but they are not finished with me and I do not want to show that I am afraid. Why should I be? We chat and I pretend to be unconcerned, but it is of no use. Finally, I begin to protest, why don’t they return my cards? No matter what I say, they respond with pleasantries and small talk. I plead and continue to do so. I get smiles in reply and small talk. I am gradually becoming worried; it is clear that they do not want to give them back, and I feel that if I am unable to get my cards back, they will torture me: In a large cellar, like an engine room or steam boiler room, they are torturing two or three people who have round cylindrical bodies that resemble a steam boiler or a huge insect. Their legs and heads cannot be seen. They have been stretched out on stands; their bodies are metal, the color of hot iron, red and inflamed, with violet, lead grey and rust colors here and

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there. Some of the joints and muscles that are ripped have been riveted together, and other places have been welded. The torturers cannot be seen; only the flames of the welding torches and the fire can be seen. Except for metal harshness and violence, no other emotion—not even anger and hatred—exists.They are not suffering pain any more because they have lost all senses under torture and have fainted. It is as if they have died and invisible, unknown executioners are patching up their torn, broken bodies for no reason. The metal shells of the corpses of the victims whose senses and souls have disappeared lie on the ground. A driver of a large backhoe splits the line of masked spectators and advances forward, the jaws of the shovel open, it bites one of the metal corpses and takes it to the street near the bazaar and places it on the ground. I look and see it is my own paternal uncle, who gets up with difficulty. I am surprised, because he has been dead for years. He grabs my hand and gets up. The acquaintance who has taken my cards, it is him; I see my cards in his pocket. But he does not give them back. No matter how much I plead, how can you torment me like this? I am soand-so. He gestures for me to be silent and not say anything. He seems strangely tired. I look at the dull whiteness of his hands and he says in a creeping, drawn-out voice, ‘‘Not so loud, they’ll hear.’’ There is no one to hear. Further away, two French policemen are chatting. No matter how much I say that there is nobody there, it is of no use. He motions with his left hand faintly, frightened and involuntarily in a way as if he wants to muffle the sound so it stays right by his mouth. I ask, ‘‘Why are you afraid, anyway? You used to be an athlete, you were fearless, you weren’t afraid of anything. In fact, what can they do to a dead person?’’ He is calm and even perhaps kind, but like a stranger. He explains that he will not bother me. He can, but he says it as though he does not intend to. I ask, ‘‘Then why did you confiscate my cards?’’ He answers, ‘‘Don’t worry.’’ Two scarecrows with their heads wrapped in long scarves and wearing wide old-fashioned dark blue frocks down to their feet are strolling in the street. It is clear that they have come from the farms around the city for some fresh air.Two crows, as black as the first night in the grave, are sitting on the right and left shoulders of each. They are writing like speed writers, hastily and perfunctorily. It is clear that for them writing is the performance of a duty and not worship. Then, a taxi comes. My uncle wants to get in, he can’t. I ask, ‘‘Where are

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you going?’’ He does not answer; he only looks at the crows. It seems as if all of his limbs have been misinstalled; the joints don’t work and they have no fasteners and clamps. Finally, he gets in with difficulty. Apparently he wants to go to Grandfather’s house, where we used to always go together. Three or four other people are also in the taxi. Beside the car, I am holding his hand and saying repeatedly, ‘‘How can you? After all, to me! I am so-and-so. Don’t you see?’’ Finally, he is flustered and says, ‘‘On my father’s soul, I will give them back; don’t insist so much.’’ The taxi starts to go, but it has no roof. I see inside the car; the greens and vegetables that the passengers have bought are on their laps. People have gathered around me. My cards are thrown out of the taxi. I am sitting on the pavement of the street. My shoulders are shaking from sobbing and I tell the people, ‘‘You know, we have known each other since childhood, we were always together, we are each other’s paternal cousin.’’ F: I guess something strange has happened in you; there has been an earthquake and it has opened a horrible gap between you and your past, an impassible gap with your past, a past that has been annihilated, so that when I ask you, what is the distance between Tehran and Qazvin, without thinking about it you say, it was  kilometers. Do you remember? It is as if because you have been tossed from your place, time and place have also been mixed up; or, no, I should say that a hand has crumpled and torn up the geographical map of your mind. But at the same time, this annihilated past is so strongly present in you that it has demolished your present tense. At times it is reminiscent of a shadow that only prowls about in the graveyard of the past, watching nightmares. S: Not always, on the contrary, sometimes I stroll and explore my dreams and with open eyes dream of union and not nightmare. For instance, in the afternoon of a holiday, in a remote, uncrowded street, when at the side of bare trees, under the grey, grim sky, I want to find my way in solitude on the geographical map of my own heart, I end up in the back streets of Darrus. Early at dawn, it is still dark, but the light is coming softly and frightened; darkness sheds its skin and the nucleus of light—like the petals of a large flower as vast as the sky—opens shade by shade and descends to the foot of the wall and the bed of the stream, spreading everywhere. In the courtyard of the house, someone waits, someone dreams of me, and

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I am gazing at the green of his soil and hear his voice. Like that summer day when my father and I had gone to Golabdarreh. How many years has it been, I wonder? We are walking alongside the garden alleyways at the edge of a restless stream that hits itself against the rocks and pebbles and flees. Suddenly my father stops. I look at him. He says, ‘‘Don’t you hear?’’ I listen and say, ‘‘Yes.’’ We follow the sound to the back of the clay wall of a garden in the upper part of the valley. My father says, ‘‘It is Ruhangiz.’’ She was singing of the weeping of the cloud, the rose-colored wine, and the sprouting and withering of grass. We stop for a while. It is a consumed, melancholic voice that comes from the vast silence of the desert and the suffering of a thousand years. You can’t let go, but my father says, ‘‘Let’s go, your mother is waiting, she will be worried.’’ Recently, I asked a traveler, ‘‘How is Mount Alborz doing?’’ He said, ‘‘Fine.’’ I asked, ‘‘How about the sun?’’ He said, ‘‘As always, spreading over the mountain and the mountain striving to reach it; the translucent weightlessness of the light and the hardness of the stone, an eagerness to mingle with both and become one with the height of flight, before the eyes of the distant horizon to the other end of the field and under foot the shoulder of the valley and the down flow of the stream, covered with aromatic, lusty, brittle grasses and protruding leaves filled with green blood, tall pine trees and a breeze that slides down from the bosom of the mountain, the unruly love of climbing and the painful desire for sleeping with nature.’’ What ascent and descent and heaviness and lightness! One can touch its light because it is so bright and its mountain is so rocky, and is more awesome, more magnificent and more of a mountain than mountains. Like the white crown of Alborz in the endless blue. When I stand with my back to the vast dark blue waters of the sea that on the edge becomes one with the sky, before me the green forest of Mazandaran sleeps on the bosom of the mountain and higher and further, Damavand Peak stands, which can be seen even in the desert. From all that distance! In the level desert on an open bright day, distances disappear, and whenever I want I can go wherever I want and build my garden any way I want. At night I put it to sleep and wake it up in the morning with the breeze. I grow the flowers I like in its flowerbeds and place strange migrant birds on the branches of its ancient, massive plane trees. I stroll in the shade of its trees, I tear down its walls and stretch the garden to the base of the mountain, to the slope, and climb

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it. At times I ask myself, where am I? On the skyline of the Bakhtiari Mountains where, as far as the eye can see, to the other side of the sky, there are mountains upon mountains: Sefidkuh, Siyahkuh, the Kuhrang Heights, and the source of the river, the Zayandehrud . . . or in the back room of a shop next to the well in a dark, private courtyard with high walls? What do you say I should do with myself, to which land should I make my spirit escape? F: I do not know about the spirit, but grab onto this pleasant, deceptive thought or, according to Hafez, ‘‘your happy magical deception.’’ S: Do you think I am deceiving myself, that I am happy with deception? F: I do not know; but has it never occurred that you have become helplessly grounded in the nostalgia of the garden of your past? When your time passes here, but your life somewhere else, that you are horrified by the thought of there, fearing to lose your balance and fall so badly that you are unable to get up? That you try to bury the past in the recesses of your mind but are unable to do so, because many of those you loved died there, those dead ones are awake in you and that bothersome past does not allow you to see one day farther, and you strive to rescue your today and tomorrow from the invasion of the worn out yesterday and be the commander of your own present? S: Yes, it often happens that a person becomes part of two places and loses both places, as you said: driven and left behind from here and from there. When you lose the meaning of place, you have also lost the sense of time. In the same way that our existence is contingent on time and place, understanding and perceiving these two in the depths of our mind also are each other’s twins and interdependent. Every meaningful and living time has passed in a place, even if we have forgotten that place. Also, when we remember a place in which we have somehow ‘‘lived,’’ where we have experienced death, love, happiness and despair, such specific places also have their specific times that may not be recalled easily, but their remnants in the recesses of the mind do their work. F: In other words, time and place actualize each other’s potential existence. S: More than that, each is the essence and the reality of the other; if you lose one, you become also bewildered and misguided in the other. I know someone from Shiraz whose misfortune landed him in a city in America, alone, unemployed, and in love with the Divan of Shams, divi-

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nation by the poetry of Hafez, watermelons and pomegranates on the eve of thewinter solstice, the setar music of Ebadi and thevoice of the famous singer Banan. As for the children—who are no longer children— they have become so American, they can hardly speak Persian, let alone understand Rumi and Shams. And the wife is busy from dawn to dusk working in a beauty salon. I asked the man, ‘‘What do you do since you have nothing to do?’’ He said, ‘‘I listen to the news.’’ I asked, ‘‘What then?’’ He said, ‘‘Then, again, I listen to the news. There is a radio station here that has news all the time and my job is to listen to it.’’ I asked, ‘‘But how many times do you listen to each news report?’’ He said, ‘‘That depends on the kindness of the newscaster.’’ As this man says himself, his life was split into two parts, before the revolution and after the revolution. In the early days, he was worried about the fate of the homeland and waited for the news, hoping to go back to join the two parts of this torn-apart life and regain his wholeness in time and place. For this reason, he was afflicted with the illness of news and awaited every pleasant and unpleasant wind that blew. Later on, when the times did not turn as he wished and despair became long and dark, the affliction of news remained, but the desire to return died and was buried. Now he listens to the news of all lands, peoples and countries equallyand, in reality, does not hear the news of anywhere. He is standing in neither his own time nor his own place, he is distraught and bewildered in both. It no longer makes any difference to him where he is, because wherever he is, it is not where he should be; he is not in his garden; his garden has been buried under the rubble of time and his soul is as old as a ghost town. It reminds me of the Bam Fortress. F: Or of these gardens that I have painted, the leafless garden of Alizadeh —in these paintings—its spring has turned to smoke and mostly a rectangle, a mere hollow form, remains of it, like an inscription or a tombstone. S: What has died in you that has this tombstone on it? F: These sketches and this bare and empty and perhaps grim space are new even to me. A few years ago, my gardens smelled of spring; I am talking about my work in the previous period. S: I know. Where did this destruction and these burnt scenes suddenly come from? F: From death. I guess everyone has a garden at the bottom of his heart

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that is his place of refuge. No one knows about it, only the owner has the key. There, one can have any forbidden thought one wishes. Impossible loves, any impossible desire and any happy dream or fantasy, every impossible thing is possible there, a Paradise—or perhaps Hell— familiar and cozy that everyone has for himself. This internal garden is often hidden even from its gardener. But he will discover it one day, somehow. S: Or the garden will open in him. Like water gushing out in a spring, or the appearance of an image in a mirror. F: Sometimes a sensual motivation or experience opens its doors: traveling, death, pain or pleasure, a tree and the flight of a bird . . . S: Or enmity and friendship, Rumi and meeting Shams, restless eagerness to see the crystal ball, light and the brightness of the heart’s eye in Zoroaster. F: And death in me! The death of the one that you know tossed me to childhood and youth, the garden of time. When she died, the constant thought of death graduallyopened the doors of my internal garden and I saw how green and silent it is, a solitude in ruins! I do not know whether or not you have also had such an experience. S: I have, too. The first time that I fell in love! I had turned twenty-two or -three, I thought that it had gotten to be too late, that I might never fall in love, that my heart might have died. I would read the poetry of Baba Taher to become sentimental. I was afraid, I was so worried and anticipating that desperately . . . it happened and I fell in love, the proverbial thunderbolt of love. And suddenly I saw an overflowing feeling arise in me, so that the remoteness of the horizon, the sleep of the sun and watching the night, and the thought of ‘‘being’’ would make me cry; this strange incident that happens in the world, the revolving of the earth and time, and being present like a transient—but conscious—existence among permanent—but unconscious—things. A bolt of lightning; a meteor in infinite darkness. A melancholy joy had conquered my being. I had become friends with flowers and plants, felt their pain of blooming and the sorrow of their withering in my body, and the sound of their growing was in my ear. The enthusiasm for seeing and perceiving them exceeded my capacity. I wished to grow with them and die with them. The shell of my soul had cracked and I had been fused with the fate of nature, a sort of atheistic unity of existence! The defenselessness of

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the plants, their drying out and dying, were in me, and autumn withered in my veins. I had metamorphosed and was finding a newly arrived unknown in myself when . . . death—uninvited and panting—arrived. F: The same eternal cliché of popular stories and novels, love and death! The story will be complete if you add birth to it as well. S: Apparently, the constant repetition of a cliché itself indicates the existence of a truth that becomes ordinary, commonplace, and in short cliché because it is repeated so often. In any case, my story, too, is the repetition of the same cliché; love opened my eyes to nature and death, my fearand astonishment (or more preciselyawe) at nonexistence, complaining to time that flows in our essence and has nonexistence in its particles. Forgive me for being unable to say it more simply and clearly. In any case, I discovered the love of nature and the magnificence of death that separates, which were hidden in the depth of my being, at that time. It was as if a seed germinated, grew, and became large; in fact, I saw the two faces of, as Rumi says, ‘‘the secret of the soul of the soul.’’ F: Still the same garden and the same . . . S: The same seed but uprooted from its own homeland, that is, its own nature. F: Like a fish out of water. S: With the difference being that a human being tries both to keep his homeland—or place of the past—in memory and also to build a new homeland for himself. F: Living in an artificial homeland is like walking on quicksand; under the feet it is unsteady and slippery, the earth moves with you. You must always search for the road, and for that matter, not on shifting sand that assumes a new landscape every time and misguides you, but in darkness, by distant stars. S: In any case, if you want to survive, you must take care of your garden, prune its branches and leaves and water its roots—even though they cannot be seen; it is like a bird, like a human being, it has old age and illness, it has storms and hail, it has thousands of blights. F: Especially if it is next to the desert. S: In the desert, there is another garden, which not only lacks a shelter and a cozy corner, but drags the observer out from his abode, thirsty and spent, and decomposes him under the rays of the sun. Near the horizon, in the wavy reflection of the sun, so bright that the long branches

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of trees next to a fortress or a caravanserai, a few houses and a stream and a pond of clear water can be seen, ghostlike, a visage of apprehension, heat, and thirst, yearning for water, habitation and the shelter of the shade, that the closer you get, the more distant it becomes. F: The garden of the heart of the desert: a mirage! S: Or a garden that grows in the desert of the heart: Paradise. July 

Notes .     . This is the title poem of Forugh Farrokhzad, Tavallodi Digar. There are more than a dozen translations of this poem available in English, the most authentic and perhaps accurate of which remains that of Karim Emami in collaboration with the poet, in Kayhan International (July ). . The article appears in a volume of the proceedings entitled Forugh Farrokhzad, A Quarter Century Later, in Literature East and West  (n.d.): –. See especially notes –. . ‘‘Temporary marriage’’ is an approximate translation of what is referred to in Persian as sigheh (and in Arabic, mot’a). I may owe this metaphor to having been reminded of the practice of temporary marriage—which was for all intents and purposes abandoned in the s and s in Iran—in a statement made by former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who was quoted as saying that the present frustrations and tensions of young Iranians under Islamic rule could be eased by following the Shi’ite practice of temporary marriage, which he regarded as a very modern idea for relations between young people (especially university students). For an informative discussion of this practice, see Shahla Haeri, Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran. . Shahrokh Meskub, Goftogu dar Bagh [Dialogue in the Garden]. The book itself provides the English translation of the title as ‘‘Dialogue in a Garden.’’ But, for reasons that will become clear in the course of my discussions, the word ‘‘Garden’’ in the title does not necessarily refer to one particular garden but to the idea of ‘‘garden’’ in general. For this reason, I use the definite article ‘‘the’’ in my translation. . Shahrokh Meskub is a prominent writer and critic who has written on classical and modern Persian literature, as well as various aspects of Persian culture. His writings appear regularly in scholarly and intellectual journals both in Iran and abroad. His books include Moqadameh’i bar Rostam va Esfandiyar [An Introduction to Rostam and Esfandiyar] (), Suk-e Siyavosh [Mourning for Siyavosh] (), Dar Kuy-e Dust [With the Friend] (), Melliyyat va Zaban [Nationality

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and Language] (), Goftogu dar Bagh [Dialogue in the Garden] (), Chand Goftar dar Farhang-e Iran [Essays on Iranian Culture] (), Khab va Khamushi [Sleep and Silence] (), Darbareh-ye Siyasat va Farhang [On Politics and Culture] (), Dastan-e Adabiyyat va Sargozasht-e Ejtema’ [The Story of Literature and the Tale of Society] (), Tan-e Pahlavan va Ravan-e Kheradmand [The Champion Body and Wise Psyche] (), and Safar dar Khab [Journey in Dream] (). He is also the translator of, among other works,The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (), Antigone by Sophocles (), Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (),Oedipus the King by Sophocles (), andOedipus at Colonus by Sophocles (). . A book by Meskub on the subject of identity, nationality, and language first appeared as Melliyyat va Zaban [Nationality and Language] in  in Paris and then, in  in Tehran, as Hoviyyat-e Irani va Zaban-e Farsi [Iranian Identity and the Persian Language]. This book has been translated into English by Michael C. Hillmann as Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language. . Goftogu dar Bagh, . All page references in the text refer to the original Persian text. . As I will discuss later, even though I have tried to retain Meskub’s punctuation, for the most part I have had to make changes, including those in the paragraph just cited, to adhere to the conventions of English punctuation. . A case in point is a translation of a book by Abolhasan Bani-Sadr, after the Islamic revolution and prior to his dismissal and subsequent exile. The book was called The Fundamental Principles and Precepts of Islamic Government, and I merely wanted to become familiar with the ideas of the man who was about to be elected as the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Because I failed to comprehend his rather cumbersome Persian, which had been tainted with his, I was told, rather inadequate knowledge of French, I ended up translating the work for myself and it later ended up being published, though reluctantly on my part. . This version of the translation of this sentence is myoriginal one, even though I had used the verb ‘‘change’’ instead of ‘‘alter’’ and ‘‘the sky was high’’ for ‘‘high sky’’ in theversion I presented in the ALTA and MESA conferences. Upon rereading the translations, I have come to the conclusion that I preferred my initial rendition of the sentence. I have found that often initial renditions are superior to those that undergo extensive editing and revision. . As it becomes clear later, I was at this point misunderstanding the text. There is actually no contradiction in the descriptions by Meskub. Each sentence essentially describes a different painting. However, errors such as this are also a part of the process of translating, and can be caught and corrected. . A case in point is my experience with the translation of a rather long Persian poem by the prominent Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlu, called ‘‘Parya’’ [The Fairies]. The poem is a narrative of sorts, in which Shamlu uses lines from Persian nursery rhymes and children’s games to create a very popular political poem. When Shamlu recited this poem in the  International Poetry Festival at the University of Texas

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at Austin, there was no translation of the poem available, and it was the consensus that the poem was untranslatable. As many translators would, I took up the gauntlet, with the help of a cotranslator, Diane L. Wilcox, and our first strategy was to find more or less equivalent English-language nursery rhymes to help us render Shamlu’s poem into English. Halfway through, we realized that we were merely using Shamlu’s technique to create a similar poem in English, and for that reason we went back to a more literal rendition of the poem. The poem appears in a volume of Literature East and West entitled Major Voices in Contemporary Persian Literature (no.  []: –). For a detailed discussion of the poem, see M. R. Ghanoonparvar, Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran, particularly Chapter , ‘‘Didacticism or Escapism,’’ –. . This version is by Franklin D. Lewis, professor of Persian Language and Literature at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He has cotranslated two volumes of Persian short stories and is now working on translations of the poetry of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez. . This translation is by Faridoun Farrokh, professor of English at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. He has translated several short stories from Persian into English and is now working on a translation of a novel by the Iranian writer Goli Taraqqi. . This translation is the work of Ali Anooshahr, who teaches humanities in the Houston School District. His forthcoming translation is The Horse’s Head by Ja’far Modarres-Sadeqi. He is currently translating a collection of the poetry of the Persian poet Rumi. . This translation was presented by James Clark. Clark is a historian who teaches at the University of Nebraska and is a specialist on Iran, the Middle East, and Central Asia. His translation of Siyahatnameh-ye Ebrabim Beyg [The Travel Memoirs of Ebrahim Beyg] is forthcoming. . This segment was translated by Zjaleh Hajibashi. She is a translator, short story writer, poet, and literary critic, and has written extensively on postrevolutionary Persian fiction. She teaches at the University of Virginia. . This version was translated by Dick Davis, a professor of Persian at Ohio State University. His many translations from both classical and modern Persian literature include Borrowed Ware: Medieval Persian Epigrams and My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad. .     . Examples of published translations in which students participated include M. R. Ghanoonparvar and John Green, ed., Iranian Drama: An Anthology, and M. R. Ghanoonparvar, ed., Satan’s Stones by Moniru Ravanipur. . During the Soviet era in Russia, many translations were the product of group efforts. The examples that I have seen are often uninspired. . I am borrowing this phrase from the translator Paul Sprachman, in ‘‘Lost in

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Translation,’’ his introductory essay to M. A. Jamalzada: Once upon a Time, trans. Heshmat Moayyad and Paul Sprachman, . . William James, ‘‘The Stream of Thought,’’ in The Principles of Psychology, th ed., ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins, –. .     . Shahrokh Meskub, ‘‘Goftogu dar bagh [Dialogue in the Garden],’’ Iran Nameh , no.  (autumn ): . . A particular case in point is a translation I did of Sadeq Chubak’s novel The Patient Stone. In that novel, Chubak presents a number of characters of various social strata and ages who have distinctive speech patterns and dialects. My dilemma at the point of translating that novel was whether to employ various American dialects, for instance, or to fabricate speech patterns for each in English. For various reasons at that time, I chose the latter option. . Lahijan, a city near the Caspian Sea, immediately presents to me a particular kind of landscape, in an area which is one of the most verdant parts of Iran, with thick forests and green pastures. Therefore, the image of the garden that comes to mind, especially in regard to the paintings described by S earlier, is not necessarily the image of a ‘‘typical’’ Persian garden, as will be discussed later. . This novel was translated from the Italian by Isabel Quigly (New York: Atheneum, ). . I am aware that many historians would frown on my use of ‘‘feudal’’ here, but I do so out of necessity. . Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl, trans. D. P. Costello. Costello’s translation of this novel has become the accepted standard of this work in English. Among recent studies of this novel, see Michael Beard, Hedayat’s ‘‘Blind Owl’’ as a Western Novel. . Many years ago, when my wife and I were teaching English in Iran, a student came up after class and asked, ‘‘What is an English synonym for ‘buckle’?’’ . Moniru Ravanipur, introduction to Satan’s Stones, x. . John L. Papanek, ed., Persians: Masters of Empire, . . Ibid. . Victoria Sackville-West, ‘‘Persian Gardens,’’ in The Legacy of Persia, ed. Arthur J. Arberry, –. . Ibid., . . Mohammad Ebrahim Bastani-Parizi, introduction to Pazhuheshi dar Shenakht-e Baghha-ye Iran va Baghha-ye Tarikhi-ye Shiraz, by Ali Reza Aryanpur, . . Ibid., –. . These characters are from the Persian mythological-historical stories that were rendered into verse in the famous Persian national epic poem Shahnameh [The Book of Kings] by Ferdowsi in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Several translations

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of the entire book or parts of the book appear in English, including The Shahnama of Firdausi, by A. G. Warner and E. Warner, and The Epic of Kings, trans. Reuben Levy. For a prose summary of the Shahnameh, see The Lion and the Throne: Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, vol. , trans. Dick Davis. . I am aware that it is more idiomatic to say ‘‘the Garden of Eden’’ in English; however, since Meskub could have used the equivalent of ‘‘Eden’’ in Persian but instead chose ‘‘Paradise,’’ I am assuming that he wants to stay away from the religious connotations of ‘‘the Garden of Eden,’’ and I therefore use the rather unidiomatic and perhaps redundant ‘‘Garden of Paradise.’’ . After much debate with myself, I am using the term ‘‘revelry’’ for majles-e bazm, for which I cannot find an equivalent in English, although a combination of words such as ‘‘feast,’’ ‘‘celebration,’’ ‘‘banquet,’’ ‘‘musical recital,’’ and ‘‘wine drinking’’ may convey the intended meaning. . Literally, ‘‘Thirty Birds,’’ Simorgh is the name of a legendary bird from ancient Persian tales, which also appears in the Shahnameh as well as the works of other Persian poets. In Faridoddin Attar’s Manteqotteyr, it appears as the object of the quest of a group of birds in their mystical journey. For a translation of this work, see Farid al-Din Attar, The Conference of Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. Other translations of this work are also available in English. . Lovers in Homay va Homayun, a mystical romance in verse by the Persian Sufi mystic poet Khaju-Kermani (–). . See Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran. . I have made this argument in Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran; see in particular Chapter , ‘‘A Literary Revolution.’’ . Shahrokh Meskub, Chand goftar dar farhang-e Iran, . .   . Shahrokh Meskub, ‘‘Goftogu dar bagh,’’ Iran Nameh , no.  (autumn ): . . See note  of the previous chapter. . Zolemat [the Region of Darkness] is a part of the earth in the north that ancients believed to be always night and where ab-e zendegani [the fountain of life/ youth] is located. Alexander of Macedonia and Khezr [Elias] are believed to have traveled there. Elias was believed to have drunk from the fountain and gained eternal life. . In some versions, Absal is drowned in the sea; in others, Salaman and Absal are brothers and one falls in love with the other’s wife. The prominent Iranian scholar Ali Akbar Dehkhoda observes in his encyclopedic dictionary Loghatnamehye Dehkhoda that this may originally have been a Hebrew tale, given the similarity between Salaman and Solomon, on the one hand, and Absal and Absalom, on the other. Jami’s poem was translated by Edward FitzGerald as well as by the British

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scholar A. J. Arberry. See A. J. Arberry, ed., FitzGerald’s ‘Salaman and Absal.’ For a brief discussion of the poem, see J. C. Burgel, ‘‘The Romance,’’ in Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, particularly pp. –. . This interpretation belongs to Avicenna, quoted in Dehkhoda, Loghatnamehye Dehkhoda, under ‘‘salaman va absal.’’ . A pentalogy of poems totaling some thirty thousand rhymed couplets, written by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami. He is regarded as the first great dramatic poet of Persian literature.The pentalogy consists of Makhzanolasrar [The Treasury of Mysteries], Khosrow-o Shirin [Khosrow and Shirin], Leyli-o Majnun [Leyli and Majnun], Haft Peykar [Seven Beauties], and Eskandarnameh [The Book of Alexander]. Most of these works are available in English translation. For an insightful essay on Nezami, see Peter Chelkowski, ‘‘Nezami: Master Dramatist,’’ in Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, –. . Ahmad Kasravi (–), Iranian reformist, historian, and social critic, who was at one time the minister of justice. He regarded much of classical Persian literature, particularly the works of mystics, as a source of the social and cultural ills in Iran. Kasravi expressed similar views in regard to modern novels and established for his followers a ‘‘feast of book burning,’’ to which they were asked to contribute their private collections of novels and other ‘‘corrupting’’ works. For an informative essay on Kasravi, see M. A. Jazayery, ‘‘Kasravi, Iconoclastic Thinker of TwentiethCentury Iran,’’ in Ahmad Kasravi, On Islam and Shi’ism, trans. M. R. Ghanoonparvar, –. . Several months later, in one of my meetings with the author, I asked about this sentence. While in the printed version in ja [this place] is placed in quotation marks, the author said that this was a misprint and that only ja [place] should have been placed in quotation marks. . See note  to Chapter . . Later, when I checked with the author, he actually confirmed that bonehgah is a ‘‘cozy corner’’ of a garden. . Traditional Persian tile work used in secular places, such as this fishpond room and in bathhouses, often depicts historical and fictional figures, particularly from the Book of Kings by Ferdowsi. . In colloquial Persian, del is also used for ‘‘belly,’’ ‘‘stomach,’’ and ‘‘abdomen,’’ but it is never confused with such terms when used figuratively. On the other hand, the term that is used for the anatomical heart is the Arabic loan word qalb. Nevertheless, poetically or figuratively, no one would use cheshm-e qalb. . The ascension of the Prophet Mohammad, during which he was taken bodily or spiritually to the heavens, is believed by Moslems to have been a unique experience among the prophets. . A fast horse; also the name of the Prophet Mohammad’s horse. Specifically in this story, Boraq is a mythical winged mount on which Mohammad ascended to the heavens. . Sohravardi [also spelled ‘‘Suhrawardi,’’ in English] is the prolific twelfth-

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century Persian philosopher and mystic theologian, who is also known as Sheykh-e Eshraq, the leader of the illumination school of Islamic philosophy. Influenced by Aristotelian philosophy and Zoroastrian doctrines, he attempted to create a synthesis between philosophy and mysticism, which resulted in his persecution and death in Aleppo, where he lived at the time. .      . In his endnote, Meskub merely makes reference to the Bible as follows: ‘‘The specified portions [which appear in bold in Persian in Meskub’s text, and which I have also thus identified in my translation] on pages – [of Meskub’s Persian text] are taken from the Holy Book. See the Old Testament, ‘Solomon’s Song of Songs.’ ’’ Obviously, this reference did not send me to any specific text, and therefore I have relied on English translations. The main problem is that the verses quoted by Meskub do not follow the order in which they appear in standard editions of the Bible in English. To the best of my ability, I have been able to locate the verses in Persian that could be identified in the following order: :–, :, :–, :, :, and :. In addition to the parenthetical segments of Meskub’s version, which I gather are supposed to be the uncle’s own additions, there are also several other verses that I was unable to identify in the English versions of the Song of Songs. In this segment, ‘‘the poet of Damghan,’’ which is followed by parentheses, may be a reference to the eleventh-century Qaznavid poet Manuchehri-Damghani. Similarly, ‘‘the prisoners of thevat,’’ which appears in the phrases enclosed in parentheses, may be a reference to a poem by the Persian poet Rudaki called ‘‘Madar-e Mey’’ [Mother of Wine]. Hence, it appears that F’s recitation of the Song of Songs is embellished with his own additional parenthetical remarks. For these last two references, I am particularly indebted to Franklin Lewis. . The translation of this poem is by Dick Davis, and it appears in Mehdi Khansari, M. Reza Moghtader, and Minouch Yavari,The Persian Garden: Echoes of Paradise, . . Although it is a consensus among Persian language and literature scholars that Shahrokh Meskub is one of the most talented living Persian prose writers, and I must add, a very careful writer, in one of the panels which I described earlier in this book, an elderly Iranian gentleman in the audience, whom I knew slightly and knew was not a language and literature expert, commented that the translators on the panel had difficulty translating Meskub’s text because Meskub did not know how to write Persian. Since Meskub himself was sitting in the audience in the back of the room, I pointed out to the gentleman in question that he could settle the matter about Meskub’s talents as a writer with the author in person. The truth of the matter is that, although bad writing is difficult to translate, often good writing is even more difficult to replicate in another language. . R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi: A Compendium of Zoroastrian Beliefs.

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. According to Meskub, this line is an allusion to a quatrain, possibly by Omar Khayyam. . Recent translations of Rumi include Coleman Barks, trans., The Essential Rumi. For more scholarly translations of Rumi, see Reynold A. Nicholson, trans., The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi, and Arthur J. Arberry, trans., Mystical Poems of Rumi. For an enlightening study of Rumi and his relationship to Shams of Tabriz, see Franklin Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West. . Among other things, I have translated Sadeq Chubak’s stream of consciousness novel, The Patient Stone. . This is obviously a reference to Omar Khayyam’s series of quatrains in which he uses the images of the potter and potter’s clay, etc., to express the transience of life. . A dynasty that ruled Iran from  to  and established Shi’ism as the state religion. While the country prospered under the Safavid dynasty, especially under Shah Abbas I (d. ), during the rule of the last leader of the dynasty, Safavid power deteriorated as a result of the king’s incompetence to the extent that even the capital city fell to a group of Afghan rebels. . On Safavid buildings in Isfahan, see R. N. Bakhtiar, Isfahan: The Living Museum. . These questions have been addressed in various forms in an increasing number of books, among them Asghar Fathi, ed., Iranian Refugees and Exiles Since Khomeini; Persis M. Karim and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, eds., A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans; and Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures. . In his introduction to Iranian Refugees and Exiles Since Khomeini, Asghar Fathi writes: ‘‘Never before the  revolution were such a large numberof Iranians, including a disproportionate number of the well-educated and intellectuals, forced to leave their country or prevented from returning,’’ –. . These poets and intellectuals were welcomed by the Moghul court of Akbar Shah and established the so-called Indian (or Khorasan) School of Persian poetry. .     . For a discussion of such characters in films, see Hamid Naficy, ‘‘Iranian Writers, the Iranian Cinema, and the Case of Dash Akol,’’ Iranian Studies , nos. – (spring–autumn ): –. For general background information, see William F. Floor, ‘‘The Political Role of the Lutis,’’ in Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Change and Continuity, ed. Michael Bonine and Nikki Keddie, . . A famous female Iranian singer of the mid-twentieth century. . The Divan of Hafez, the fourteenth-century Iranian lyric poet, is found in most Persian homes and is used for divination, especially in regard to difficult decisions. The eve of the winter solstice is celebrated in Iran by eating fruits, especially watermelon, that have been set aside during the end of the season particularly for

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this purpose. Ebadi was perhaps the best-known player of the setar, a Persian string instrument. Similarly, Banan was a well-known vocalist of Persian traditional music. . BabaTaher, known as BabaTaher Oriyan, eleventh-century Persian poet, who lived in Hamadan, Iran. His mystical poetry, which is written in a dialect, has appealed to Iranians throughout the centuries and is still recited and sung byall classes.  . Robert Wechsler, Performing without a Stage: The Art of LiteraryTranslation. . Ibid., . . Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of th-Century Literature. . Wechsler, Performing without a Stage, ; Wechsler quotes Richard Sieburth referring to a statement by another noted translator: ‘‘Someone once asked Richard Howard, ‘How would you translate this word?’ And he came back saying, ‘I do not translate words.’ ’’

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Bibliography Adams, R. Proteus, His Truth: Discussions on Literary Translation. New York: W. H. Norton, . Arberry, Arthur J., ed. FitzGerald’s ‘Salaman and Absal.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . , ed. The Legacy of Persia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, () . , trans. Mystical Poems of Rumi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Arrowsmith, William, and Roger Shattuck, eds. The Craft and Context of Translation: A Critical Symposium. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, . Aryanpur, Ali Reza. Pazhuheshi dar Shenakht-e Baghha-ye Iran va Baghha-ye Tarikhi-ye Shiraz. Tehran: Farhangsara, . Attar, Farid al-Din. The Conference of Birds. Translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. New York: Penguin Books, . Bakhtiar, R. N. Isfahan: The Living Museum. [Tehran]: Forugh Danesh Press, . Bani-Sadr, Abolhasan.The Fundamental Principles and Precepts of Islamic Government. Translated by M. R. Ghanoonparvar. Lexington, Ken.: Mazda Publishers, . Banuazizi, Ali. Darbareh-ye Siyasat va Farhang: Ali Banuazizi dar Goftogu ba Sharokh Meskub. Paris: Khavaran,  []. Barks, Coleman, trans. The Essential Rumi. San Francisco: Harper, . Bassani, Giorgio. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Translated by Isabel Quigly. New York: Atheneum, . Beard, Michael. Hedayat’s ‘‘Blind Owl’’ as a Western Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Biguenet, John, and Rainer Schulte. The Craft of Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . . Theories of Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Bly, R. The Eight Stages of Translation. Boston: Rowan Tree Press, . Bonine, Michael, and Nikki Keddie, eds. Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Change and Continuity. Albany: State University of New York Press, .

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Calkins, Carroll C., ed. Great Gardens of America. New York: Coward-McCann, . Chubak, Sadeq. The Patient Stone. Translated by M. R. Ghanoonparvar. Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, . Coffin, David R.The English Garden: Meditation and Memorial. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Dar, Saifur Rahman. Historical Gardens of Lahore. Lahore, Pakistan: Aziz Publishers, . Farrokhzad, Forugh. Tavallodi Digar. Tehran: Morvarid Publishers, () . Fathi, Asghar, ed. Iranian Refugees and Exiles Since Khomeini. Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, . Ferdowsi. The Epic of Kings. Translated by Reuben Levy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . . The Lion and the Throne: Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. Vol. . Translated by Dick Davis. Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, . .The Shahnama of Firdausi.  vols.Translated by A. G.Warner and E.Warner. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, –. Fish, Stanley. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of th-Century Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, . Frawley, William. Translation: Literary, Linguistic, and Philosophical Perspectives. Newark: University of Delaware Press, . Gentzler, Edwin. Contemporary Translation Theories. London: Routledge, . Ghanoonparvar, M. R. Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, . Ghanoonparvar, M. R., and John Green, eds. Iranian Drama: An Anthology. Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, . Graham, Joseph F. Difference inTranslation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, . Haeri, Shahla. Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, . Hedayat, Sadegh. The Blind Owl. Translated by D. P. Costello. New York: Grove Press, () . Holmes, J. The Nature of Translation: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation. The Hague: Mouton, . James, William. ‘‘The Stream of Thought.’’ In The Principles of Psychology, th ed., edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Great Books of the Western World, . Kapos, Martha. The Impressionists: A Retrospective. New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, . Karim, Persis M., and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, eds. A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. New York: George Braziller, .

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Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, . Kasravi, Ahmad.On Islam and Shi’ism. Translated by M. R. Ghanoonparvar. Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, . Kelder, Diane. The Great Book of French Impressionism. New York: Artabras Publishers, . Kelly, Louis G. The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, . Khansari, Mehdi, M. Reza Moghtader, and Minouch Yavari. The Persian Garden: Echoes of Paradise. Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, . Kirk, R. Translation Determined. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . Lefevere, André.Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context. New York: MLA, . . Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, . . Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge, . . Translation, Rewriting, Manipulation, Textures of Power, and the Power of Texts. London: Pinter, . , ed. Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, . Lewis, Franklin. Rumi: Past and Present, East and West. Oxford: Oneworld, . Major Voices in Contemporary Persian Literature. In Literature East and West , nos. – (). May, Rachel. The Translator in the Text. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, . Meskub, Shahrokh.Chand goftardar farhang-e Iran. Tehran: Entesharat-e Cheshm va Cheraq, . . ‘‘Darbareh-ye Tarikh-e Naqqashi-ye Qajar.’’ Iran Nameh , no.  (summer ): –. . ‘‘Goftogu dar bagh.’’ Iran Nameh , no.  (autumn ): . . Goftogu dar Bagh [Dialogue in the Garden]. Tehran: Bagh-e Ayeneh Publisher, . . Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language. Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, . . ‘‘Yaddashtha’i Darbareh-ye Miniyatur.’’ Iran Nameh , no.  (summer ): –. Miller, Mara. The Garden as an Art. Albany: State University of New York Press, . Mir’ala’i, Ahmad. Isfahan. Tehran: Nashre-Nasheran, . Moayyad, Heshmat, and Paul Sprachman, trans. M. A. Jamalzada: Once Upon a Time. New York: Bibliotheca Persica, . Moore, Charles, and William Turnbill. The Poetics of Gardens. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, .

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Murphy, Richard W., and the Editors of Time-Life Books. The World of Cézanne, –. New York: Time-Life Books, . Naficy, Hamid. ‘‘Iranian Writers, the Iranian Cinema, and the Case of Dash Akol.’’ Iranian Studies , nos. – (spring-autumn ): –. . The Making of Exile Cultures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . Newmark, P. Approaches to Translation. London: Pergamon, . . A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice-Hall, . Nicholson, Reynold A., trans. The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi. E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series. Leiden/London: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, –. Olmstead, A. T. History of the Persian Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, () . Papanek, John L., ed. Persians: Masters of Empire. Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, . Pope, Arthur Upham. Introducing Persian Architecture. Tehran: Soroush Press, Asia Institute Books, . Ravanipur, Moniru. Satan’s Stones. Edited by M. R. Ghanoonparvar. Austin: University of Texas Press, . Sorvali, I. Papers in Translation Studies. Helsinki: University of Helsinki Press, . Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. d ed. NewYork: Oxford University Press, . Sultanzade, Husayn. Urban Spaces in the Historical Context of Iran. Tehran: Cultural Research Bureau and Municipality of Tehran, . Venuti, Lawrence, ed. Rethinking Translation. London: Routledge, . Warren, Rosanna. The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field. Boston: Northeastern University Press, . Wechsler, Robert. Performing without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation. North Haven, Conn.: Catbird Press, . Will, Frederic.Translation Theory and Practice: Reassembling the Tower. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, . Yarshater, Ehsan, ed. Persian Literature. New York: Bibliotheca Persica, . Zaehner, R. C. The Teachings of the Magi: A Compendium of Zoroastrian Beliefs. . Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, .

Index ab-e hayat. See ab-e zendegani ab-e zendegani, ,  Absal, , –n. Absalom, n. Achaemenid dynasty,  Ahriman, ,  Ahura Mazda, , ,  Akbar Shah, n. Alexander, –, n. Anooshahr, Ali, ix, –, n. ‘‘Another Birth,’’  Arberry, Arthur J., n., –n., n. Aryanpur, Ali Reza, n. Ascension,  Attar, Farid al-Din. See Attar, Faridoddin Attar, Faridoddin, n. autobiography, , , ,  Avicenna, n. Baba Taher, n. Bakhtiar, R. N., n. Banan, , –n. Bani-Sadr, Abolhasan, n. Barks, Coleman, n. Bassani, Giorgio,  Bastani-Parizi, Mohammad Ebrahim, –, n. Beard, Michael, n.

Bible, , , n. ‘‘Black Dome, The,’’  Blind Owl, The, , n. Bonine, Michael, n. Book of Kings, , , , –n., n. Burgel, J. C., –n. Caspian Sea, , n. Chand goftar dar farhang-e Iran [Discussions on Iranian Culture], , , n. Chelkowski, Peter, n. Christ,  Chubak, Sadeq, n., n. Clark, James, ix, , n. Coleridge,  collective identity,  Conference of Birds, The, n. Constitutional Revolution,  Costello, D. P., n. culture, ,  Cyrus the Great, ,  Cyrus the Younger,  Darbandi, Afkham, n. Darius II,  Davis, Dick, ix, –, n., n., n. Dekhoda, Ali Akbar, n., n.

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Dialogue in the Garden, ,  Dialogues of Plato, The,  Dickinson, Emily,  Ebadi, , –n. Eden, Garden of, n. Elias, –, n. Emami, Karim, n. Eskandarnameh, n. exile, –, , , – Farrokh, Faridoun, ix, –, n. Farrokhzad, Forugh, , n. Fathi, Asghar, n. Ferdowsi, , , –n., n. Fish, Stanley, , n. FitzGerald, Edward, –n. Floor, William F., n. Fountain of Youth,  Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The,  genre,  Ghanoonparvar, M. R., –n., n., n. Goftogu dar Bagh, , , n. Golshiri, Hushang, – Green, John, n. Guernica,  habitual translator, , ,  Haeri, Shahla, n. Hafez, , n., n. Haft Peykar, n. Hajibashi, Zjaleh, ix, –, n. Hallaj,  Hedayat, Sadeq, , n. Homay, –, ,  Homayun, –, ,  Homay va Homayun, n. Howard, Richard, n. Hutchins, Robert Maynard, n.

immigrants, –, ,  interpreters,  ‘‘Intimations of Immortality,’’  Iranian Identity and the Persian Language,  Isfahan, n. Islam,  Islamic Revolution, , , –, n. Jamalzadeh, M. A., n. James, William, , n. Jami, , –n. Jamshid,  ‘‘Japanese Footbridge,’’  Jazayery, Ali, ix, n. kamancheh,  Karim, Persis M., n. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad, , n. Kasravi, Ahmad, , n. Keddie, Nikki, n. Khaju-Kermani, , n. Khamseh of Nezami, , n. Khatami, Mohammad,  Khayyam, Omar, n., Khorrami, Mohammad Mehdi, n. Khosrow-o Shirin, n. King James Bible,  Lahijan, , n. Levy, Reuben, –n. Lewis, Franklin, ix, –, n., n., n. Leyli-o Majnun, n. literary criticism,  Loghatnameh-ye Dehkhoda,  Lysander,  Makhzanolasrar, n. Manteqotteyr, n. Manuchehri-Damghani, n. Masnavi, n.

Index Mathnawi. See Masnavi Matisse, – Me’raj. See Ascension Meskub, Shahrokh, ix, , , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , –, –nn.,,, n., n.,, n.,, n. miniature painting, , , , , , , , , , , ,  Moayyad, Heshmat, n. Modarres-Sadeqi, Ja’far, n. Mohammad, Prophet, –, n. Monet, Claude,  monism,  Naficy, Hamid, n. ‘‘Narrow Fellow in the Grass, A,’’  Nezami, , , n. Nicholson, Reynold A., n. Old Testament, , n. Ormazd, . See Ahura Mazda pantheism,  Papanek, John L., n. Paradise, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , n. parks,  ‘‘Parya’’ [The Fairies], n. Pasargadae, ,  Patient Stone, The, n., n. Persian carpet, ,  Persian garden, –, , , ,  Persian psyche, –, , , ,  Pezeshkzad, Iraj, n. Plato,  Play Misty for Me,  Quigly, Isabel, n. Ravanipur, Moniru, , n., n. Rostam,  Rudaki, n.

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Ruhangiz, , n. Rumi, , , , , , , , , n. Sackville-West, Victoria, n. Safavid Dynasty, , , n. Salaman, , –n. Salaman and Absal, –n. Sassanian Dynasty,  Satan’s Stones, n. Shah Abbas, n. Shahnameh, , , –n., n. Shamlu, Ahmad, n. Shams [of Tabriz], , , , n. Shi’ism/Shi’ite, , , n. Shiraz,  Sieburth, Richard, n. Simorgh, , , n. Sohrab,  Sohravardi, Shehabeddin [also Suhrawardi], , n. Solomon, , , n., n. Song of Songs, –, , , , n. spiritus mundi, – Sprachman, Paul, n. stream of consciousness, ,  Sufi literature, , , ,  Sufism, , , , –,  Taraqqi, Goli, n. ‘‘Tavallodi Digar,’’ , n. temporary marriage, , n. translation adding information,  ambiguity, , ,  audience,  avoidance behavior,  back translation,  bilingual dictionaries, use of,  capitalization,  close reading, translating as,  concepts, 

U 

Translating the Garden

conjunctions,  conveying meaning, – creativity, – cultural considerations, , –, , –n. decision making,  definite article,  deviating from original,  dialects,  direct, indirect speech,  editing, , , , , – equivalent meaning, –, ,  existing translations, use of,  failure, , , ,  faithful,  footnotes, use of, –,  format,  gender-specific pronouns,  gender-specific terms,  generic use of singular,  genre concerns, – group, , –, –, –,  idiosyncratic language,  immersion in the text, –, – improper usage of words in original, –, – indefinite article,  individual creativity,  lexical items, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , –, , , n., n., nn., literal translation, , , ,  logical progression of text, , ,  losses, , –, –, , n. multiple lexical equivalents, ,  narrative voice, ,  paraphrasing, 

pronouns, – publishing and publishers, ,  punctuation, , –, , , , , ,  redundancy,  simultaneous translation,  speech patterns, , , , , n. style, ,  synonyms, , , , ,  syntax, , , ,  tense shifts, ,  theory, – therapeutic device,  translator’s block,  translator’s license,  trial and error, – unclear meaning, ,  verb tenses, , , – word order,  workshops, ,  Warner, A. G., –n. Warner, E., –n. water of life. See ab-e zendegani Wechsler, Robert, nn., Wilcox, Diane L., –n. wine,  Wordsworth, William, , – Xenophon,  Yarshater, Ehsan, n. Zaehner, R. C., n. Zolemat [Region of Darkness], , n. Zoroaster, , , ,  Zoroastrianism, , , , , n.