HAFEZ IN LOVE, so smoothly translated I forgot it wasn't English from the get-go

HAFEZ IN LOVE
IRAJ PEZESHKZAD (tr. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi & Patricia J. Higgins)
Syracuse University Press
$24.95 all editions, available now

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Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez is in love. He is in love with a girl, with a city, and with Persian poetry. Despite his enmity with the new and dangerous city leader, the jealousy of his fellow court poets, and the competition for his beloved, Iran's favorite poet remains unbothered. When his wit and charm are not enough to keep him safe in Shiraz, his friends conspire to keep him out of trouble. But their schemes are unsuccessful. Nothing will chase Hafez from this city of wine and roses.

In Pezeshkzad's fictional account, Hafez's life in fourteenth-century Shiraz is a mix of peril and humor. Set in a city that is at once beautiful and cutthroat, the novel includes a cast of historical figures to illuminate this elusive poet of the Persian literary tradition. Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins's translation brings the beloved poetry of Hafez alive for an English audience and reacquaints readers with the comic wit and original storytelling of Pezeshkzad.

Iraj Pezeshkzad was born in Tehran in 1928 and educated in Iran and then France, where he received his law degree. He was a retired diplomat, journalist, and writer. He was the author of several plays, short stories, and novels, including My Uncle Napoleon. He died on 12 January 2022 in Los Angeles.

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is senior lecturer of Persian language and linguistics at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University.

Patricia J. Higgins is a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emerita at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.

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My Review: First, read this:

He agrees with everyone's opinion, from black to white. With his constant refrain, "We are all children of this land," he recognizes both sides: he who believes it is night, and he who believes it is day.
–and–
"O light of my eyes, don't forget that until a few months ago you and I were among the court favorites of the then-shah. If some of these 'many' {whom Hafez claims will hide him from pursuit} enjoyed our poetry, it was because the poetry pleased the shah. The power and honor of the shah was behind our poetry. Now our poetry is just poetry. And perhaps in the eyes of these 'many,' it is not even poetry. Perhaps some of the men who praised the poems of Shams al-Din Hafez without hearing them will come to agree with His Honor, the police chief, and consider them dirty."

This seems to me to represent the tone and tenor of the book's translation...I think it also gives a flavor of the world in which we're spending a few hours. The court of an insecure, unworthy ruler, whose jobs are done for him not by workers or even lackeys, but by henchmen, is a fertile place to set a love story. Especially when the lovers are unable to come together because the obstacle to them getting their love consummated is one of the aforementioned henchmen.

Our narrator, Mohammad Golandam, is Hafez's brother-in-law and long-time best friend. He's a sensible sort; we can not say the same for Shams al-Din...he who will become, in the fullness of time, Hafez; the two men are only twenty-three at the time of this story. It's easy to see why Golandam, as Hafez (let's use his famous, and short, handle from here on) addresses him, is anxious and on needles and pins. Hafez has made many a sarcastic, cutting remark in his poetry about the new power-wielder Mobarez al-Din Mohammad Mozaffar. This self-installed prince is a "...blood-shedding creature of God {who} understands neither literature nor poetry. He is one of those dull-hearted people who, in the words of Shams Qeis Razi, don't 'distinguish between the sound of music and the braying of an ass.' His source of pleasure and happiness is cutting off heads," entirely enough to strike poor Golandam with near-lethal agita given Hafez's indiscreet, but truthful and honest, characterizations of him:

To get his aversion to him off his chest, {Hafez} had used this phrase extremely carelessly in a lyric poem about repentance after a life of drinking and wenching:
The morality officer became a pious sheikh and forgot his debauchery.
It is my story that remained throughout the bazaar.

It's not too hard to imagine a thin-skinned leader whose response to verbal disrespect shown by those less powerful than he is being, um, disproportionate, is it. The problems are, of course, many in a world run by incompetent and malicious people. The story's not complete without wild schemes and convoluted plots and hilarious misinformation campaigns...there are no better stories, in my never-humble opinion, than the ones about True Love Thwarted!

And True Love it very much is. This poem is what Hafez writes for his morning glory Jahan while he was imprisoned by his oft-insulted rival for her affections, and while she was scheming to get him out by pretending to agree to marry his captor, and while Golandam and Hafez's honorary father schemed to get her out of the unwanted marriage and back into Hafez's arms:

I swear on the life of the belovèd that if I could reach my soul,
That would be the least of the gifts to her by her slave.
If my heart was not bound to a strand of her hair,
How would I have been at peace in this dark vessel made of dust?
Your face is like the sun in the sky, unique in the heavens;
If only your heart were a bit more kind.
You said to me, "What is the worth of the dust under her feet,
If the precious life were eternal?"
I wish you would emerge through my door like a beam of light,
That divine fate would shine on my eyes.
The cypress would acknowledge its lowliness compared to her stature
If it had ten tongues like the wild lily.
You wouldn't fall out of tune with Hafez's melody,
If you weren't the companion of the morning songbirds.

Okay, I don't understand one damn word of that, but I know yearning and longing and sheer miserable wretched being-in-loveness when it smacks me across six or seven centuries. There's plenty of this poetical stuff peppered around the story. There are many readers who will see that as a plus; I want, therefore, to be clear that you will be reading a lot of poetry when you read this novel. (And the clever-clogs blog readers will now be recalling my stance on poetry, and looking at this review's star rating, and drawing some brow-knitting conclusions.)

So why am I praising this book, this poetry-laden book about a poet in love with a woman? Because it's such a delight to read. Because Hafez, every time someone talks sense to him, says "mm hmm" and carries right on being In Love with Jahan and acting as if by sheer force of his will, backed by the spiritual power generated by the huge dynamo of his adoration for Jahan, Things Will Come Out Right.

But I won't tell you if they do or they don't because some things you need to find out for yourownself.

The book concludes with a Dramatis Personae, and a Glossary; both are very handy. The Dramatis Personae include markers for characters based on historical personages, meaning those not marked are invented; though the names and actions of historical people are used, they're probably all best seen as fictional. It's worth noting that, even though Hafez's love object in this story is Jahan, a woman, there's no way in Farsi or in Persian poetry's conventions for that to be certain. It's a feature of the language that pronouns aren't gendered. While Hafez is in love with a woman in twenty-first century Iran, there's absolutely no reason for that to be the case in fourteenth-century Shiraz. I merely note this fact, quite firmly stated by the translators, as a datum of some interest to some readers.

THE SLAVE YARDS, nightmarish Benghazi reality translated from Arabic

THE SLAVE YARDS
NAJWA BIN SHATWAN (tr. Nancy Roberts)
Syracuse University Press
$24.95 trade paper, $14.95 Kindle, available now

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Rating: 4* of five

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The Publisher Says: Set in late nineteenth-century Benghazi, Najwa Bin Shatwan's powerful novel tells the story of Atiqa, the daughter of a slave woman and her white master. We meet Atiqa as a grown woman, happily married with two children and working. When her cousin Ali unexpectedly enters her life, Atiqa learns the true identity of her parents, both long deceased, and slowly builds a friendship with Ali as they share stories of their past.

We learn of Atiqa's childhood, growing up in the "slave yards," a makeshift encampment on the outskirts of Benghazi for Black Africans who were brought to Libya as slaves. Ali narrates the tragic life of Atiqa's mother, Tawida, a black woman enslaved to a wealthy merchant family who finds herself the object of her master's desires. Though such unions were common in slave-holding societies, their relationship intensifies as both come to care deeply for each other and share a bond that endures throughout their lives.

Shortlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Bin Shatwan's unforgettable novel offers a window into a dark chapter of Libyan history and illuminates the lives of women with great pathos and humanity.

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My Review: What a horrible life slaves have always led.

There's an earth-shattering insight for you. I can't believe anyone didn't say it before me, can you? Well, this book's like that. It's not telling you anything that you didn't know before. It's making you feel, see, smell it instead of intellectually knowing. Slavery, at its heart, is about bodies. The thing we take for granted, the autonomy of the corpus delicti of our lives as sinners on this, gawd's private torture grounds, is abrogated; no man controls his labor, no woman her womb, no child its curiosity. A slave exists, doesn't live. A slave possesses nothing, not even a soul, or else no religion would allow the practice. No religion has ever, to the best of my knowledge, forbidden slavery. At best a few wild-eyed bizarro outlier sects like the Quakers, or the Northern Baptists in the US, could even be bothered to protest its wrongness.

Many were the slaves who had forgotten the story of their enslavement and had integrated gladly into the life of those owned by Muslim masters. As for those who married other members of their own race and, in some cases, won emancipation, they were delivered from hunger to hunger, and from poverty to poverty.

That is a sad and eternal truth: Poverty closely resembles slavery, and as poverty is entirely curable, that cannot be an accident. It suits the people at the top to keep the system just unfair and evil enough that they can keep the best for themselves and run the lowest risk of the huge majority figuring out that they can't kill *all* of us and rebelling.

I hope to High Hallack that the US is at such an inflection point right now. But I digress.

At any rate. The Slave Yards tells a story, fairly simple in its outlines, about Atiqa growing herself up in Benghazi's Slave Yards, suffering multiple orphanings, and growing into a woman with a loving family, both made and born. Into that world comes a man with secrets to tell her about her past, secrets she buried during the worst night of her entire existence, and proofs that she was not just a slave girl and never had to be one. Too late, of course, to prevent the slave girl from suffering the degradation of not even owning the lungs she breathed with.

But Atiqa, the self-made therefore self-possessed woman of the story, doesn't come to this knowledge simply or directly. The whole novel is, as the title suggests, the Slave Yards whole and entire, its incredibly rich culture, its appalling degrading poverty, its joys and hates and endings and beginnings. The stories Atiqa remembers, tells herself anew, feels and smells again in her hard-earned, richly merited new life, are the meat of this book. Maybe "meat" isn't the word...the asida in the bazeen of this book. The story is dispensed with for long stretches of tale-spinning, of life-living memories. And that is a good, good thing.

I felt as though I had gone completely away from 2020 Long Island and its existential anxieties, thence to gain perspective:

Without a word {the groom} handed the bride's uncle a blood-spattered white sheet. The uncle...took it out to a group of men gathered in front of the house. This done, he gleefully set about emptying the contents of his shotgun into the air. ... The uncle unfurled it like a victory banner, the battle of innocence now won...they could hold their heads high in the knowledge that their honor was intact.

The present-day abortion-rights battles are the not-distant descendents of this kind of complete and utter idiocy. The entirety of monotheistic religion's thrust (please pardon wordplay) has been to stand on the neck of Womankind's autonomy out of anxiety. What? Anxious manhood? Perish forbid, say the abortion-deniers, and throw a thousand words into the void between their fears and the actual world. (THEIR daughters, white as snow, will always be able to get abortions...multiple women I'm related to had them pre-Roe-v-Wade. We're white. Connect the dots.) The real issue is control. The real issue is covering up for the men's fear of being robbed of their control over women's bodies:

Nobody seemed to notice that there was something wrong with the custom of having the groom use his hand {to break the woman's hymen} on the wedding night to determine whether his bride was a virgin. On the contrary, even the women thought is was perfectly normal. It had never occurred to them that it was just a way of covering up for a man's possible impotence.

Huh. Imagine that, a custom arising (you should forgive) to protect a fragile boy-ego at the expense of a woman. My pearls, my pearls.

So for a moment, I was swept into a world where the power imbalances made no smallest effort to hide themselves. It was a relief, in a way, to be in a place where the crushing and cruelty were open and acknowledged; were simply the way things are. Because to fight the way things are is to crusade, to smash and shatter and slaughter the old, the bad, but the *known* and the *open* awfulnesses. Today it is harder by far to protect gains not evenly spread, to defend boundaries set to deliberately disadvantage some, and then work to spread and reset them. The world of Benghazi in the 1890s, the 1900s was bitter to be Black in, and the wrongness of it was everywhere. To root out racism in the richest country on Earth? The battle never ends, the rebellion is bought and undermined and softened and, in the end, prevented from making changes that discomfit the wealthy.

Better to be somewhere else, then, even for four hours. To be, however temporarily:

...the legacy of those who didn't look at their dead, who closed their eyes so that they wouldn't see death's cruelty, leaving them open just enough to let their tears escape. I'm the plant that was watered by those tears.

Instead I look with horrified eyes at the photos of Emmett Till https://tinyurl.com/y53q9w9s or videos of fucking racist pigs https://tinyurl.com/y272hvz3
and think, "slavery? what the hell's the difference between that and this?"
and I have no answer for myself.

GAIA, QUEEN OF ANTS is a rollicking good, weird, uncomfortable time

GAIA, QUEEN OF ANTS
HAMID ISMAILOV (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega)
Syracuse University Press
$19.95 trade paper, available 13 December 2019

Save 40% off on direct-from-publisher purchases of all literature in translation with discount code 05WIT25 now through September 15, 2025.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov comes a dark new parable of power, corruption, fraud, and deception. Ismailov narrates an intimate clash of civilizations as he follows the lives of three expatriates living in England. Domrul is a young Turk with vague and painful memories of ethnic strife in the Uzbekistan of his childhood. His Irish girlfriend Emer struggles with her own adolescent trauma from growing up in war-torn Bosnia. Domrul is the caretaker for Gaia, the eighty-year-old, powerful wife of a Soviet party boss with a mysterious past.

One of Ismailov’s few novels written in Uzbek, Gaia, Queen of Ants offers a rare portrait of a complex and little-known part of the world. A plot centered on political corruption and ethnic conflict is punctuated with Sufi philosophy and religious gullibility. As Ismailov’s characters grapple with questions of faith, power, sex, and family, Gaia, Queen of Ants presents a moving tale of universal themes set against a Central Asian backdrop in the twenty-first century.

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My Review: Corruption is universal, I suppose we can now agree. Politics and power corrupt innocents and attract the corrupt. Purity fetishists would do well to contemplate what their insistence on viewing all signs of corruption in a person wielding or seeking power costs, as well as being utterly unhelpful, bordering on destructive, in seeking a government. Then there is Gaia Mangitkhanova, the central powerful figure of the novel; she is Kali, the destroyer-to-create-again goddess of Hindu myth; she is also Gaia, Greek goddess of Creation, who parted Chaos to summon all order and logic into being. These divinities use their femaleness, their existence as sexual as opposed to unsexed divinities, to create and to destroy entire races; Gaia (or Goia, as we also learn to think of her) is very explicitly made in their mold.

We meet her in the lift of her geriatric-care home in Eastbourne, a new-by-English-standards resort town on the Sussex coast that's near Brighton. Like many seaside towns, Eastbourne houses a lot of the elderly who are waiting for God to notice them again...to die, that is...and among them was Friedrich Engels. You know, the codifier of Communism, together with that other German fellow...what was his name...well, anyway, here's Gaia:

Bringing with it the smell of mouse, the lift came for her, moving as ponderously as the old folk it carried. Old Lady Gaia pressed the G button and peered into the mirror. Her hair stuck out in clumps, and her eyelids were swollen. But what really broke her heart was that her mustache had thickened.

Her carer, here in the England of today, is Domrul. He is an Uzbeki refugee, whose childhood there was blighted by inexplicable (to him) agonies of threat and loss. His aunt carried him to the safety of England with a few stops in between, Istanbul and Cyprus among them. England accepted the family, and Domrul is now a thirtyish British citizen. Let's meet him:

He knew he was a very patient and tolerant person, but still, as he descended in that malodorous lift ride from the heavens to the earth, from the distant tongue of his childhood a curse came to him. F... yes fuck her, even if she is a begum!
Angels bless both good words and bad, as they say, and this absolute shame indeed came to pass in their second meeting.

Author Ismailov, Uzbeki political refugee and banned writer, is a deeply cruel person. Domrul's young life is about to go totally out of control again, and just when his prospects were looking up. He's floated through life meeting amazing people, about whom he feels as Forrest Gump is presented as feeling: "Oh, there you are, hi and welcome." He has had menial jobs, as an immigrant to England will have had, as well as been the darling of some powerful older peoples' lives. His bosses and his gurus have led him on a meandering path that culminates at the door of Gaia Mangitkhanova. It is here that this Turkic Uzbeki exile to the rainy cold of England will gain the energy to rocket home to Uzbekistan, to find the woman he thinks he loves, Emer the evangelical, and rescue her from imprisonment in the underworld of...

But you know...the story is best left for you to experience, its digressive and discursive style is less suited to a recapitulation or a review than it is to experiencing it directly, engaging with its storytelling and its layered meanings left to you to pick apart. The novel's charm, and it is plentifully endowed with charm, is in its voices. The storyteller, the novel itself, has a voice that breaks the fourth wall to address the reader in a conspiratorial first-person plural "we." I very often inveigh against that usage; here it felt appropriate, almost inevitable. Myths aren't best told at a narratorial remove. They're shared experiences of power and its victims, they're cries of outrage and triumph and unbearable, peak feelings. Domrul's young, virile body servicing Gaia's cronehood in body and in soul is a cruel and horrible perversion of lust's purpose: Connection to the Other is not easily attained but the shortest route is through the sexual acts—and what connection worth the name can be made between spent ending and burgeoning middle?

It will disturb some readers to know that Gaia exerts power over Domrul, her literal servant, in sexual terms. But think of the myths, the root stories of all cultures. Think of the Mother Goddesses who create all things and then, somehow, have husbands...modern squeamishness elides the glaringly obvious fact: Mother beds son. Goddess enfolds creation in her sacred body. Gaia fucks Domrul, and in the process, sets her life into a crystalline clarity of pattern. Remember, when you're reading these squirmy uncomfortable scenes, to contextualize the actions Gaia and Domrul take in mythic not quotidian terms. Goia Mangitkhanova is Gaia Calligeneia, the Maker of Good, the Good Mother of All. In the generative process, she creates Domrul to destroy him. In the process of creation, she carries the meaning of the novel in her vagina: Creation and destruction, joy and shame, sex and birthing, are sides of a coin that we all must use to pay the ferryman at the end.

This is very much a novel about endings, about the end of life, about how to end the agony that is emptiness. I disliked the character Emer most strongly. She is an evangelical christian and she is an utter void of a being. Her trajectory is tragic, but to me it felt more satisfying than pathetic, evoking pathos that is. Her last act in the book isn't credible, at least not to me; Domrul is the focus of it, and that takes away the power of her presence as the young Gaia-Creatrix. It is a sour note from a sour person, and I was expecting better of her story. But that was the last of my woes while reading. (There are far too many w-bombs dropped in this book, as seems to be a developing norm in litrachure. This cartoonish means of expressing...what? what is expressed in a wink that can't and shouldn't be expressed in another way?...must die in fire.) The other stories, of Gaia and Domrul, end in ways much less simple. They feel, therefore, more satisfying, more the thing the reader earned by confronting the uncomfortable use of sex as metaphor for destruction. This is where the story was meant to go. That it reaches the harbor, not a safe one, of the divine destruction wreaked on Gaia and Domrul together, is a satisfying payoff to a complex and unsettling journey.

Translator Fairweather-Vega is to be praised for her fidelity to the structure of a myth. She didn't impose a spurious order on her words, she clearly felt the power of this story and went to the full extent of her powers to render its soul in English prose. She had, I must surmise, more trouble with the baxshis' poetry-cum-songs (a baxshi is more or less a bard, the book tells us), as the inevitable complexity of expressing in poetry what prose is purported to be unable to carry weighs her efforts down:

A drunken nightingale took this road,
a land of flowers it found,
On it went with a flower,
goblets and good cheer did abound.

Finally it spoke the truth; in my ear I heard the sound,
Saying the sorrow was gone now,
but still no peace could be found.

Okay. Well. That's just perfectly corking, isn't it. It's not *bad* per se, but it's not something I'd seek a lot more of. That cavil aside, I encourage y'all to seek out the novel and to explore the end, the ending, and the process of ending a pattern.