I’m picking fitfully away at Evernostian February. There will be seven sections, one for each of the cardinal and theological virtues (don’t worry, or do, depending on your feelings about this: they will be challenging and irreverent takes). The current plan is that each will contain: a messed-up and/or failed romance, some reference to first graders’ Barbie game that eerily mirrors it, and a stretch of questionably real memories of 7-year-old Jennie home alone on Valentine’s Day. And some other stuff! Like poetry excerpts that resonate (ideally sometimes ironically, sometimes naively) with the content.
This got me looking at public-domain English translations of Rumi (13th century Sufi mystical poet) I could include. This site has a lot of info about Rumi translations and various translations of “The Song of the Reed,” which falls at the beginning of Rumi’s long Sufi-stories-in-verse masterpiece, the Masnavi. Parts of “The Song of the Reed” have been in my favorite quotations for years, so I decided to have a go at “translating” (by which I mean adapting existing translations; I do not know Persian). I liked the mostly metrical result well enough I thought I’d share it. The largest liberty I took was translating “the Beloved” as “Love” (as in, “yes, my Love”). This is surely incorrect, as Love is a character of its own, separate from the Beloved, but it helped with the meter and was beautiful and I have no intention of putting this forward as a particularly accurate translation, so here goes…
Listen to the reed
moan its tale of parting:
“Since they took me from the soil,
they wail with my keening.
I want a chest torn with loss,
one to share love’s longing.
Everyone far from the source
longs for a reunion.
I wail in every crowd,
mourning or rejoicing.
They think I feel what they feel;
no one seeks my secret.
My secret is within in my sound;
no ear or eye can find it.
Nothing veils soul from body,
but soul — who has seen it?
The reed’s call is not wind — it’s fire —
better not to be at all
— than to be without it.
Love is the fire in the reed,
Love is the fervor in the wine.
Reed song pierces hearts, befriends
every friend who’s parted
What poison like the reed? What cure?
What confidante, what longing lover?
The reed tells of the Way of blood,
tells us Majnun’s passion.
For the tongue, there’s just the ear,
This sense is for the senseless.
Our days have passed before their time:
they walk with burning sorrows.
Have they passed? Then let them pass!
Remain, peerlessly holy!
Day lingers without daily bread,
though all but fish
can have their fill of water.
The raw misunderstand the ripe:
I will be brief. Farewell!
Break your chains, my son, be free!
Why bonds of gold and silver?
Pour the sea into a jar —
it holds just one day’s water.
The jar, the greedy eye's unsated:
No pearl in bitter nacre.
Only one with love-rent clothes
grows free of greed and flawless.
Rejoice, rejoice, sweet-minded Love —
you heal all that ails us
The cure for vanity and pride,
our Plato and our Galen!
Through Love earth-bodies soar above:
the mountain dances, nimble.
Lover, Love made Sinai drunk,
and Moses fell down fainting.
If I joined a kindred lip,
like the reed, I’d tell all;
But far from those who speak our tongue,
a hundred voices
are as good as none.
If rose is gone and garden faded,
gone’s the nightingale’s story.
Lovers only veil their Love;
They are dead, Love living
Without Love’s care, the lover is
a bird without a feather.
How to know what is ahead, behind
when Love’s light is neither?
Love insists this Word be said —
why nothing in the mirror?
Why is nothing in the mirror?
It is rusted over.
Fun fact: WordPress’s AI is…not coming for me as a writer or editor just yet — to put it mildly.
Just for kicks, I asked it for feedback on this post. It points out my long sentences. This is fair; I like long sentences but not everyone does! It just so happens that am willing to maybe very slightly alienate a subset of readers by writing long sentences!
Same goes for “Unconfident words” (though if it’s going to use the word unconfident it really ought to add that word or “word” to its spelling dictionary too)! Honestly, it was surprising I only used a single “unconfident word” in this post; I usually throw them all over the place!
However, I wish it had the sense to ignore something explicitly formatted as verse/poetry, and even if it insists on looking at poetry, well… Is “Without Love’s care, the lover is a bird without a feather” really a long sentence? Or is the AI merely confused by line breaks? Worse, though, it thinks Rumi should be “rum,” “rums”, or “rump” (…but it does know Hafiz?). Nor do I believe first graders’ is a misspelling (plural possessives! they exist!), or peerlessly, for that matter. And if forward, accurate, and remain are really “Complex words,” we are in a sorry place as readers.
Finally, I think the AI is teasing me: its final piece of feedback on the “content structure” is “Think about addressing the concerns regarding AI feedback subtly to maintain focus on your creative voice rather than getting sidetracked.”
Of Elsewhere 