Emerson in Iran

The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry

Roger Sedarat

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438474878
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Emerson in Iran is the first full-length study of Persian influence in the work of the seminal American poet, philosopher, and translator, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Extending the current trend in transnational studies back to the figural origins of both the United States and Iran, Roger Sedarat's insightful comparative readings of Platonism and Sufi mysticism reveal how Emerson managed to reconcile through verse two countries so seemingly different in religion and philosophy. By tracking various rhetorical strategies through a close interrogation of Emerson's own writings on language and literary appropriation, Sedarat exposes the development of a latent but considerable translation theory in the American literary tradition. He further shows how generative Persian poetry becomes during Emerson's nineteenth century, and how such formative effects continue to influence contemporary American poetry and verse translation.

Chapter 1

From Plato to Persia

Emerson’s Transnational Origins

The unity of Asia and the detail of Europe, the infinitude of the Asiatic soul, and the defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking, opera going Europe—Plato came to join, and, by contact, to enhance the energy of each … In short, a balanced soul was born …

—Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (4:31)

For Emerson, Platonic integration of Persian poetry begins at an almost mythic level. Much like Zeus in the Symposium split the original two-faced, four-legged, and four-armed human, which then sent the respective halves looking to each other for wholeness, East and West for him provoke sustained lyric tension in an attempt to realize ultimate unity. In his essay on the ideal philosopher from which the above epigraph derives, he attributes Plato’s journey beginning in his native Greece, then on to “Egypt” and his “eastern pilgrimages,” as having “imbibed the idea of one Deity” (CW 4:30–31). According to his own criteria, “Every great artist” achieves such a “synthesis” (CW 4:31). While Platonism sanctions Emerson’s accommodation of many transnational influences, localizing its implications to his reading of Persian verse proves especially instructive. Insofar as for Emerson, “Man is only half himself … the other half his expression” (CW 3:4), his romantic embodiment of Hafez and Sa’di in the American Renaissance leads to his figurative rebirth as a “balanced soul” between disparate literary traditions. Taking the East as the site of the beloved, which for the classical Persian poet in the verse form of the ghazal becomes the desired object leading to the divine, offers him a kind of aesthetic, if not spiritual, completion.

Lacking knowledge of the source language, Emerson’s reading of Persian poetry in translation nevertheless identifies significant stylistic and spiritually thematic correspondences. While chapters that follow qualify the limits of such attempted synthesis, a brief comparative outline instructively foregrounds the extent to which his overarching aesthetic allowed him to so easily accommodate the voices of his classical foreign predecessors. Such an approach importantly heeds Lewisohn’s call for a greater investigation of the philosophical underpinnings that inform Emerson’s rhetoric as they relate to the Sufism found in Persian poetry:

Just as the Romantics shared a fascination with Platonic philosophy and Neoplatonic esoteric doctrines, so the Persian poets were steeped in Sufi mystical doctrine and symbolism; for this reason any comparative study of Romantic and Sufi poetry must take such forms of esoteric speculation seriously, not dismissing it to the realm of the fanciful and fantastic. (“Romantics” 41)

Lewisohn’s reading of Emerson’s philosophy as analogous to Sufism importantly emphasizes paralleling tendencies, as opposed to direct connections. Whenever possible, this study tries to foreground such analogous relations, despite the difficult, and at times impossible, task of separating the American’s Platonic conflation with the Persian’s Sufi philosophy. William Chittick’s extended metaphor for the religious basis of Sufi mysticism as the outer shell of a walnut, representative of the “ritual, legal, and social teachings of Islam” becomes especially helpful in understanding how Emerson effectively manages to capture a distinct yet significantly comparable transcendent spirit in the foreign verse while somewhat disregarding such indigenous influences as Islam. In this respect he resembles his twentieth- and twenty-first-century translating inheritors covered in chapters 5 and 6. With an insistence on an all-encompassing unity best exemplified by the Over-Soul, Emerson manages to crack into what Chittick calls the Sufi’s “kernel” of “invisible light” held by the “husk” (424), extracting a spiritual essence that mirrors his own.

Briefly surveying the history of the Persian verse tradition shows how its religious origins risk getting lost in Emerson’s translations. Emerging around the twelfth century with “mystical and esoteric interpretations” accompanying the spread of Islam (Katouzian 74), authentic Sufism began by considering the Qur’an as its foundational religious book and Muhammad, to whom it was revealed by the divine, as its living example (Geoffrey xvii). As the definitive source text underpinning Sufism, it remains as integral to the translation of Persian poetry as the Bible does for English renderings of Saint Augustine. Though poets informed by Sufism lyrically play with lines and concepts from their religious text against more rigid interpretations by mullahs, they nevertheless tend to follow their mystic practice back to the revealed wisdom of the divine as first transcribed by their illiterate prophet. Hafez, arguably the most rhetorically intransigent of the Sufi poets of Iran and one of two classical masters to whom Emerson most devoted his Persian study, earned his pseudonym as “one who has memorized the Qur’an.”

Instead of Emerson’s variance from the Islamic underpinnings of the Persian poets inevitably leading to egregious misreading, his attraction to their spiritual transcendence over religious strictures frequently enables his relatively close correspondence to their divine intentions. Hafez proves such an ideal poet for Emerson in part because like the American’s relation to Christianity he engages his Islamic tradition through poetic and philosophic subversion. In Emersonian fashion, Hafez in his inspired verse plays against the tension of religious constraint and empty, ritualistic performance. “Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows” (CW 8:132), writes Emerson. As if projecting his own rejection of communion in “Bacchus,” an imitation of his Persian counterpart, he calls for, “Water and bread, / Food which needs no transmuting” (CW 9:233). Much like Emerson, Hafez alternatively transforms his Islamic influence into original, transcendent verse that makes a religion out of poetry. Named for committing the words of the Qur’an to memory, he wrote the kind of timeless spiritual lines that well into the twentieth century Persian speakers and readers memorize alongside their holy book (Lewisohn “Prolegomenon” 16). Predisposed to verse that challenges established dogma, Emerson naturally could gravitate to the comparable sensibility of Hafez without excessive concern for his relation to Islam. If he misses the significance of specific allusions to the Qur’an in his English translations and imitations, he often captures the greater overall effect of the original Persian poetry.

While Emerson in a general sense tends to parallel the Sufi mystics’ trajectory toward divine wisdom, he of course differs from their specific origins. With Muhammad as their first living mentor, the Sufis’ ultimate goal from the inception of their practice was to spiritually ascend like the prophet preceding them via a “double ladder” of “spiritual discipleship,” which includes a process of “repentance, denunciation, restitution before God” alongside “spiritual states” such as “love, contemplation,” and “proximity to God” (Geoffrey 10). To a certain extent, this description begins to summarize an archetypal journey of spiritual development within most any religious practice, further revealing how Emerson could so easily accommodate such an influence. However, the Sufi tradition remains contingent upon the unique transmission of wisdom between mentor and student (Burkhardt XV). Such a relationship stretches back to the prophet as first teacher. As important, its divinely inspired pedagogical objective substantially differs from Western conceptions of spiritual instruction more aligned with an individuated experience with the divine, considering that there is nothing like “the same continuity in Islam between God and creation.” Instead, the Sufi seeks the complete obviation of self through “fana” or “extinction in God” (Geoffrey 14).

Nevertheless, following Lewisohn’s example of a critical parallel, Emerson through his ideal Over-Soul approaches a comparable transcendence with his American ladder, journeying alongside the Sufis in their ascension by attempting to reach his own conception of a divine source. Lacking a literal mentor, he analogously positions himself at times as both teacher and student of Hafez and Sa’di. As will be shown in chapter 3 with a comparative reading of fatalism connected to a spiritual reckoning with the veil of language, by both following as well as attempting to precede the lines of the Persian poets, Emerson Platonically positions himself in the realm of the pre-eternal much like Hafez through his divine vision aligned with Islam. To return to Chittick’s metaphor of the walnut, Emerson can partially discard the shell of the foreign religion to share the Sufi’s deeper spiritual essence.

Irrespective of such distinctive features and prior to Emerson’s syncretic connections to the general sensibility that he found in the verse of Persian poets, Sufism’s spiritual basis has long been associated with broader religious and philosophical connections. Its name, referenced by Muhammad, was first derived from the Arabic word for the wool cloak worn by the early Sufi mystics as a symbol of “ascetic piety”1 (Brujin 4), which closely associates with what the Christian monks wore during the tenth century (Geoffrey 5). Thematically following such a sartorial thread, there is reasonable speculation that either the philosophy of Platonus or Philo “indirectly nourished Sufi metaphysics and cosmology” (Geoffrey 34). Winston Waugh specifically places the reach of Neoplatonism in sixth-century Persia, and despite its conception of a much more abstract God, he foregrounds sufficient correspondences with Sufism such as the “supreme good as the source of all things” and the “ascension to the true source of being through contemplation” (16–17). Ultimately the first and fundamental principle of the Islamic faith, “God’s unity” (Chittick 423), resembles the Neoplatonist’s tenet that all of reality derives from a unifying oneness. Insofar as “the idea of the ecstatic union with the One” remained an especially key teaching for Emerson from Neoplatonic philosophy (Richardson 348), it no doubt made him ready to accommodate this core idea found in Sufism.

Though the distinction between Platonism and Neoplatonism certainly warrants extended qualification, this study follows Emerson’s tendency to disregard specific differences in support of the seemingly comprehensive and all-inclusive perspective afforded by his reading of ancient Greek philosophy. As Loloi explains, “Emerson’s study of Platonism, Neoplatonism and Orientalism were concurrent” (108). Ekhtiyar further establishes Emerson’s Eastern and Western ecumenical bibliography, noting that by 1830 he had been “introduced to the philosophy of the various schools of thought in India and ancient Persia.” Around the same time, Emerson was “impressed with the philosophy of Plotinus and by its effect on Oriental thought,” wherein Neoplatonism coincides with his interest in Zoroastrianism (57).

While the Neoplatonists might be thought of as more explicitly subsuming all of reality within individual unity, their ultimate variance from their founder was seen by Emerson as relatively negligible and easy to conflate in his rather all-accommodating perspective. Much like how the Neoplatonists introduced a greater syncretism in the Middle Ages that influenced Islamic, Christian, and Jewish thinking, Emerson in his time interposes the Western philosophic tradition within his reading of Eastern religions, most notably his approach to the Vedic texts of Hinduism. His own early reading reinforced such Platonic integration of foreign ideas. Joseph de Gerando’s Historie comparée des systèmes de philosophie, for example, helped him come

to the realization that ancient Hindu, Chinese, and Persian thought was on a philosophical par with Hebrew, Greek, and Christian and that it was not only entitled to serious attention but was a probable source for fresh insight. (Richardson 104)2

That Sufism from its Islamic basis began moving into poetry as early as the tenth century (Katouzian 74) allowed Emerson an even more accessible Platonic accommodation of its ideas. By the time Sa’di and Hafez emerged in the city of Shiraz, respectively during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (the height of what is considered the Persian literary golden age), their verse invited rather inclusive interpretations. A predominant theme of “Unity of Being” established in such poetry (Bayat and Jamnia 11) continues to broaden and accommodate varied Western, Platonically informed influences, as exemplified by how Sufis considered “great figures of the old and new testaments as masters of the path” (Bayat and Jamnia 12). Poets incorporating such allusions with “varying degrees of seriousness,” from profound sincerity to “little more than fashionable rhetoric” (Davis, Faces xiii), further reveals the ease with which they could engage different traditions. If Hafez, who so closely follows the Qur’an in his work, found the greatest “metaphysical stumbling block of egocentric vision” to be the binary division of personal identities, then its best antidote became immersion in seemingly inclusive unity (Lewisohn, “Puritans of Islam” 173).

Such appeals to the universal with Islamic underpinnings as well as to comparably all-encompassing Platonic influence respectively position Emerson and the Persian poets in a mutual meaning-making site that seemingly anticipates all differences. With exceeding literary playfulness beyond strict intellectual identification, Sufism’s greatest resemblance to Plato coheres around the inclination toward a return to primal origination, the mystic’s “stages of the remembrances of the Friend” akin to “true knowledge,” which for Plato would be considered “recollection” (Brujin 8). In support of such a lyric drive toward the spiritually ineffable in Sufi verse, Leili Anvar remarks how the poetry of Hafez “produces mirror images that reflect what usually cannot be imagined, vocalized, or remembered” (124). As if further referencing Emerson’s figurative rebirth in the union of East and West while conjoining Sufism with Platonism, Anvar claims that the fourteenth-century Persian master’s poetry, “aims at reanimating the memory of the soul’s preeternal life” (128). Such an ideal return considerably relates to the Sufi mystic’s ultimate goal of annihilation that collapses the “false distinction and discrimination of separate personal ‘identities’ (‘you’ vs. ‘me’) …” (Lewisohn, “Puritans of Islam” 173).

The implications of such Platonic correspondence, which become clear in close readings of Emerson’s verse related to Iran, culminate in radically sanctioning the disregard of differences in language, literary tradition, religion, and even time. The Persian poets inheriting from Sufism an “a-temporal relation to our source of being and the intelligible world to which we once belonged” allows Emerson to project onto them a rather similar Platonic obviation of history. As important as source languages remain in any discussion of literary translation, Emerson further follows the Sufi mystics in his conception of an ideal poet who can “speak through the symbolic language of nature” (Loili 112). Important to an application of Emerson’s approach to translation and its early effect on his own verse, such a seemingly translingual symbolic connection helps to build a strong case for his having anticipated Ezra Pound’s appropriation of the East in his influence of the American poetic tradition.

Despite distinctive tenets of Sufi philosophy surfacing in Hafez, Lewisohn further views the spirituality in his verse at times as transcending any “theological conflicts” with “an ecumenical call for the unity of religions” (“Puritans of Islam” 187). Similarly, although Sa’di exemplifies specific Sufi teachings with Islamic resonances in his writing, especially with his instructive stories, he too tends toward an all-encompassing unity. His famous “Bani Adam” or “Children of Adam” poem inscribed on the entrance of the United Nations and once read by President Obama in a videotaped message to the Iranian people during the Persian New Year, heeds a comparable “ecumenical call”:

The sons of Adam are limbs of each other,

Having been created by one essence.

When the calamity of time affects one limb

The other limbs cannot remain at rest.

If you have no sympathy for the calamity of others

You are unworthy to be called by the name of Human. (“Bani Adam”)

Despite the Qur’anic origins of these lines in Islam, referring back to God breathing life into Adam (Sura 15:29), they quite easily extend their reach to encompass broader humanistic themes amenable to the West. Politically bringing Obama’s recitation of the Persian tradition full circle, in a 1998 televised good-will address to the United States, then Iranian President Mohammad Khatami recounted early New England history, respectfully identifying the underpinnings of American Christianity that influenced Emerson. In their respective ways both Eastern and Western citations exemplify how an especially accommodating approach much like Emerson’s Platonism facilitates the close association, if not conflation, of traditions that seemingly overcome very distinct underlying differences...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 From Plato to Persia: Emerson’s Transnational Origins
• Chapter 2 Transparent Eyeball / Persian Mirror: The Renewal of American Vision
• Chapter 3 Imitation as Suicide: Islamic Fatalism and the Paradox of Self-Reliance
• Chapter 4 The Subversion of Equivalence: Emerson’s Translation Theory in Praxis
• Chapter 5 Americanizing Rumi and Hafez: The Return of Emerson’s Verse Translation
• Chapter 6 The Other Side of the Persian Mirror: Emerson’s Gaze as Necessary Corrective
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover