I completed Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi's fine translation of Farid Ud-Din Attar's The Conference Of The Birds last night. I suppose it's somewhat presumptuous to assume the translation is a good one when I haven't the foggiest what the original Persian sounds like, but the rhyming couplets read so well in English that they are a pleasure in themselves. I felt myself grasping something of the thought-world of the Sufis, certainly feeling a measure of their intensity. The Way outlined by Attar is distinctly intimidating.
As I was reading I couldn't help but think of a production I saw many years ago here in Singapore, based on Peter Brook's version of The Conference Of The Birds. It was directed by William Teo, who sadly has passed away since then. He also did Part 1 of The Mahabharata, again based on the Brook's version and a very powerful piece Year Zero: The Historical Tragedy of Cambodia in the mid-nineties. All three were lovingly mounted and startlingly memorable. I can recall whole scenes and their impact just sitting here. Of the three it was The Conference Of The Birds that seemed the most magical. Partly this was to do with the location of the staging. It was mounted in what was then a deserted warehouse by the river, I think on the spot where the Singapore Repertory Theatre's home now stands. The magic was also a result of the intensity the cast, all amateurs, brought to the experience. They really meant it. Though what exactly it was, was enigmatic, to some degree. In fact, more enigmatic, I think, than Attar's original poem which does have its puzzles, but strives as far as it can to say exactly what it means.
One simple thing that's impossible to miss in Attar is his contempt for the fruits of this world and the sense that what's real bears no relation to how we see the world. This echo of Qur'anic truth (though I'm not sure that contempt for the world is what we get in the scripture) has been on my mind for the last few days as the holy month has made me take stock of my own vision/version of how things are. I'm adjusting the goggles.
I'm also moving on from Approaching The Qur'an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells, though I've yet to give my full attention to the readings from The Holy Qur'an on the CD accompanying the text. Sells's readings of the Suras he covers are sympathetic and illuminating, and helped clean my goggles.
So now it's a question of what to turn to over the last lap of Ramadhan. The idea of sticking to Islamic-themed material (though not quite exclusively) has worked well for me so I'm sticking to that idea. A collection of Rumi's poems, The Essential Rumi, in translation by Coleman Barks, came to hand this morning and looks to be a worthy successor to the Attar. (Though I must say, I was sorely tempted to have a look at The Parlement of Foules, my favourite early Chaucer, which kept springing to mind throughout my reading.) And I'm also considering Fazlur Rahman's Revival and Reform in Islam, which is pretty heavy and demanding as a specialist text, but will fill, I hope, quite a few spaces behind the goggles.
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