"Attar is one of the greatest poets of the Persian language. Nonetheless, his popularity - both in Iran itself and in the West (Goethe, for example, touched on him only briefly in his West-Eastern Divan) - does not match that of Ferdowsi (d. 1020), Omar Khayyam (d. c.1132), Rumi, Saadi (d. 1292) or Hafiz (d. 1389); occasionally he is even omitted from the line of seven Persian poet-princes in favour of Jami (d. 1492). One possible reason for this is that the composition of his poetry is too artful, too complex to be effective in the town squares and teahouses, while at the same time, many of his stories and figures may seem too coarse, too folk-like and too sarcastic to be at the forefront of the high spiritual literature cultivated at courts in former times and in middle-class households today. Attar’s poetry, on the other hand, is far less stilted than that of most Persian poets but, rather, unadorned, clear and immediate. The pain it expresses is not spiritually filtered as in Rumi, far less metaphysically elevated than in Saadi, and not sublimated into pleasure as in Omar Khayyam - where Hafiz turns the earthly into the mystical, Attar strips mysticism down to its leaden, earthly foundation in order to scream his longing to the heavens."
--Navid Kermani, The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt
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I asked my professor which masnavi (Persian epic poem) he thinks is the greatest ever written. He replied, Rumi's Masnavi (the only masnavi Rumi wrote). Shock. How can there be a masnavi greater than Attar's Conference of the Birds? (There are 4 authentic Attar masnavis; sadly, as far as I know, Conference of the Birds is the only one that has been translated into English.) Reading through Rumi's masnavi I think I am still team Attar. It's Attar's coarseness I love--he is a poet of mad saints and freaks. In Rumi's Masnavi, the absence of a frame story and the pious/didactic tone is somewhat of a barrier for me. The pieces don't quite hang together, whereas Attar's Conference of the Birds is intricately structured--there are stories within stories within stories, each bird with its idiosyncratic psychology--a narrative arc that mirrors the journey of the soul across the seven valleys. But maybe there is a difference between reading a sufi text for its poetry rather than religious instruction, I don't know.
“The home we seek is in eternity;
The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,
Of which your paradise is but a drop.
This ocean can be yours; why should you stop
Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?
The secrets of the sun are yours, but you
Content yourself with motes trapped in its beams.
Turn to what truly lives, reject what seems --
Which matters more, the body or the soul?
Be whole: desire and journey to the Whole.”
― Attar of Nishapur
"Tu marches dans la tempête, l’esprit plein d’illusions, une lampe à la main. Ne crains-tu pas que cette lumière précaire ne s’éteigne subrepticement ? La lampe éteinte, tu tomberas dans le puits. Ecervelé, prends la route avant qu’il ne soit trop tard ! Par un tel vent, la flamme est fragile. Une fois morte, il ne te restera d’elle ni signe, ni trace. Alors tu auras beau chercher, personne au monde ne te fera signe."
Farididdin Attar, Le Livre de l’Epreuve, trad. Isabelle de Gastines, XIIIe siècle.
—Al-Ghazali on perception and dream divination, from The Alchemy of Happiness
Random notes on my Hallaj printout
I’m immensely enjoying my Sufi literature class but it fills me with such grief. There is so much literature that has not been translated from Persian and Arabic into English. Even Ibn ‘Arabi’s magnum opus The Meccan Revelations has not been translated (well, it is like a trillion pages long). I could not even find a full translation of chapter 178 on love!
Attar has an untranslated text called The Book of Affliction. The professor of my class says, “It’s REALLY good.” It pains me that I can’t read it, but I’ve been hunting for snippets in the Anglophone scholarship on Attar. O how my heart burns to read this book!!
Unidentified Goddess - Astarte? Atargatis? Ishtar? Allat? with Tyche
Palmyra, Syria
c. 150 CE?
Source: The Pantheon of Palmyra by Javier Teixidor, 1979
Inscription reads: [ASh]TRA T.BTA, which Teixidor translates as "The Good Goddess". (see p.79 for more discussion)