Beginning

Fifteen or twenty years ago — maybe more — I found The Diwan of Zeb-un-Nissa in a used bookstore in Bennington, Vermont. Or perhaps the book found me. In bookstores and libraries, guardian angels seem to nudge certain books off the shelf and into my hands in their attempt to guide me.

This particular book presents fifty poems written by a 17th century woman, Zeb-un-Nissa, as rendered from the Persian into English by Magan Lal and Jessie Duncan Westbrook.

The book is five inches wide and seven inches high; it rests easily in the hand. Published in the United States in 1913 by E. P. Dutton and Company, New York, it’s printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. Its 112 pages are thick, felt-like.

Was it printed on a letterpress? If so, a typesetter put each metal letter in place, preparing to stamp lines of type into paper. I can feel the impression each letter makes upon the page.

The text fills seven signatures of sixteen pages. (Seven and sixteen: good numbers.) Were the signatures hand-sewn? If so, who made the four inch-long stitches in the center of each signature that hold the pages together? Who assembled the signatures, discreetly labeled by letter to indicate their order?

John Murray, Albemarle St W., London commissioned the Diwan and published it in the United Kingdom in 1913. Founded in 1768, this company has a reputation for pushing the envelope of intellectual history — for example, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. The Diwan is one of 122 volumes in the publisher’s “Wisdom of the East” series, initiated in 1905, introducing English readers to the philosophy and poetry of India, China, Japan, Persia, Arabia, Palestine, and Egypt.

Written a hundred years ago, the series editors’ note remains timely. Editors L. Cranmer-Byng and S.A. Kapadia declare their intention: to promote “a revival of that true spirit of Charity which neither despises nor fears the nations of another creed and colour.”

I must have paid $2 for this book — that’s the price marked in pencil in the upper-right corner of the flyleaf. That page also bears this inscription in strong, graceful, stylish strokes:

To Maliha
from Razzack
in grateful remembrance
of all your kindness.
October 20 | ‘52

I find that Maliha means “beautiful, graceful, strong.” Razzack likely means “devotée.” They are names from India, Africa, the Middle East.

This Diwan was, and is, a gift. An expression of gratitude.

When this book made its way to me, I’d been reading — imbibing — Robert Bly’s The Kabir Book: Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir. Mystery surrounds the identity of Kabir. It might be true that Kabir was a 15th century Muslim and/or Hindu poet. As his words reveal, he defied religious convention, drilling down to the essentials that make such conventions irrelevant.

Working largely from the Bengali translation of a printed Hindi text, Rabindranath Tagore and Evelyn Underhill translated Kabir’s odes into English. Working from their Songs of Kabir, published in 1915, Robert Bly crafted new versions, updating their Victorian-era English into a modern American idiom.

Now you can access the Tagore-Underhill Songs of Kabir on the internet, but in the late ’80s I was lucky to find a copy of the book at the local library. I found two poems in Songs of Kabir that did not appear as new versions in Bly’s book. Working from the Tagore-Underhill translations, I made new versions of those poems myself. And I loved the process.

Collapsing distinctions of time, distance, ethnicity, language, and culture.

Sinking down through words to the kernel of a knowing that words in any language can barely convey. Then rising up, surfacing, trailing new words that hint at what I’ve seen and felt.

Stretching out threads of empathy, tendrils of inquiry, until I’m buzzing with the initial impulse of the poem. Reeling in those threads and arranging them in a form that resonates with the original.

Perhaps my years of practicing yoga, qigong, meditation, and bodywork plus my general sensitivity to light and sound equip me for this process.

So when the Diwan came into my hands, I thought that someday I’d play with Zeb-un-Nissa’s poems in the same way: making new versions, updating diction and rhythm, making her work accessible to women and men in this day and age.

Fifteen or twenty years later, apparently that someday is now.

Why has it taken me this long? With all respect to Magan Lal and Jessie Duncan Westbrook, the way these Persian poems morphed into Victorian-era English made them difficult to read. The rigid rhyme schemes, monotonous rhythms, and tortured syntax put me off. Within any sentence, the subject seemed miles apart from its verb, separated by a bevy of convoluted prepositional phrases.

But three events got me started.

First, a demonstration:

In June, 2009 I attended poet and critic James Longenbach’s lecture on poetic tone at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC. Longenbach is on the faculty of Warren Wilson’s MFA program in Creative Writing; he’s also a distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

The very first item on his handout put Herbert Giles’s Victorian-era translation of a Chinese poem next to Ezra Pound’s free verse adaptation of that translation. (Longenbach quoted T. S. Eliot’s pronouncement: “Ezra Pound is the
inventor of Chinese poetry in the English language.”) Here’s the juxtaposition:

Herbert Giles’s translation of “Liu Ch’e”

The sound of rustling silk is stilled,
With dust the marble courtyard filled;
No footfalls echo on the floor,
Fallen leaves in heaps block up the door.
For she, my pride, my lovely one, is lost,
And I am left, in hopeless anguish tossed.

Ezra Pound’s adaptation of Giles’s translation:

The rustling of silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the court-yard.
There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

The Giles treatment of the Chinese poem is so similar to the Westbrook treatment of the Persian poems. And Pound’s adaptation is so gorgeous. I was heartened, inspired by this demonstration of possibility.

Second, no alternative:

I like to do crossword puzzles, the Sunday NY Times crosswords in particular. They make me blend logical thinking with intuitive leaping. They exercise memory, guesswork, pattern recognition. I can feel various parts of my brain lighting up and nerve impulses shuttling between brain hemispheres.

I especially like to do a crossword as I’m sitting in my kitchen, keeping my washing machine company, on hand to check the water isn’t overflowing at any point in the cycle.

Not long after the Longenbach lecture, I was in the kitchen with my washer but without a crossword. Bereft of a puzzle, I retrieved the Diwan from a dark corner and began with the first poem.

My first step was simply to untangle the words into straightforward sentences. What were these words trying to say at the simplest level of communication?

Then I felt my way into the poem. I bought my ticket for that state of being in which time and space are fluid, permeable, detached from any fixed coordinates.

Having read the story of Zeb-un-Nissa’s life in Westbrook’s introduction to the Diwan, I already felt a sense of kinship with the poet. Now, as I sat with the first poem, that sense of connection intensified.

I felt an oscillation in time, saw the split-screen image of parallel lives: the imprisoned 17th century woman writing these poems and the 21st century woman sitting in her kitchen with them.

Third, structure and format:

A few weeks ago I saw “Julie & Julia,” the movie. Talk about parallel lives. Here’s Julie Powell whipping up the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days, with a blog to go, intercut with Julia Child writing and rewriting that cookbook and seeing it through to publication.

If I’m going to get something done, I need a due date. A public forum adds to the pleasure.

So here we are with a blog and a timeline: 50 ghazals — the literary term for Zeb-un-Nissa’s poems — in 52 weeks.

Let’s have fun with this….