Attar and the Simurgh: seven valleys and a mirror

The previous article read Suhrawardi's birds in Persian: a translation of Avicenna, a hoopoe that becomes a Simurgh, and a Simurgh with a mirror. This one stays in Iran, in the same era, in Nishapur, with a poet whose name means "apothecary" and whose most famous poem is a journey of birds. I read in Persian, in the text published by Ganjoor, the Manṭiq al-ṭayr, "the language of the birds" (it is known as The Conference of the Birds). I downloaded its 211 sections to count and search them, and I read the ending slowly. What it says is not the summary that gets told. And I searched Rumi for two famous lines about Attar that are not where people say they are. What I did not read, I say at the end.

Who Attar was, with what little is known

According to the English Wikipedia, Farīd al-Dīn Muḥammad Aṭṭār of Nishapur lived around 1145–1221. "Aṭṭār" is his trade: apothecary, herbalist, perfumer or alchemist. Little is known of the life, and it was mythologised over the centuries: only two contemporaries mention Attar, and according to Reinert Attar was not known as a poet in life outside the home town; the greatness was not discovered until the 15th century. Tradition says Attar died at 78 in the Mongol massacre of Nishapur, in April 1221.¹ The Persian Wikipedia gives the Hijri dates 540 and 618, that is, 1146 and 1221.²

Which works are Attar's is not clear either. The English Wikipedia says that sources of the period confirm only the Divan and the Manṭiq; the Persian Wikipedia counts four long poems as authentic: Ilāhī-nāma, Manṭiq al-ṭayr, Muṣībat-nāma and Asrār-nāma.¹²

A title that quotes the Quran

Manṭiq al-ṭayr is a phrase from the Quran. In sura 27, verse 16, Solomon says: "O people, we have been taught the language of the birds, and we have been given everything." Four verses later, "he inspected the birds and said: why do I not see the hoopoe?"³ The hoopoe is the guide of the birds in the poem, and the poem greets it with that allusion in its second couplet: "With Solomon, your language of the birds is good."⁴

"The Conference of the Birds" is a translators' title, not Attar's: FitzGerald's 1889 version was called Bird Parliament; Nott's, of 1954, The Conference of the Birds; Avery's, of 1998, The Speech of the Birds.⁵ According to the English Wikipedia, the poem dates from 1177.⁵

The poem, measured

I counted the couplets in Ganjoor's text: there are 4697, in 211 sections. The story that is always summarised goes like this: the birds of the world gather to choose a king; the hoopoe tells them the Simurgh exists, that it lives very far away, and that to reach it they must cross seven valleys; thousands set out and thirty arrive. But the poem does not spend most of its space on the road.

The seven valleys add up to 898 couplets: 19% of the poem. Before them come 1666 couplets of beginning: praises, the assembly of the birds, the first ten birds with their excuses, the hoopoe's reply and the decision to set out. And there is a block of 1568 couplets, 33%, which Ganjoor titles "The excuses of the birds": 98 sections, of which 61 have a title that begins with "story" (Mahmud and the little fisher boy, Rabia going to the Kaaba, Shibli lost in Baghdad). The title of that block is Ganjoor's; I do not know whether it is Attar's; it reads rather like the stories with which the excuses are answered. What can be said is that the poem gives more space to why not to set out than to setting out: 1568 couplets against 898.⁴

The piece below goes through the seven valleys, in the order in which the hoopoe lists them (quest, love, knowledge, detachment, unity, perplexity, and poverty and annihilation), plus the ending. Each step carries the Persian couplet, my translation and the place it takes up in the poem.

The valleys are listed in section 98 of the excuses block (couplets 9 and 13–16), and right there, in couplet 10, it is said that no one has come back from this road: "No one in the world has come back from this road; no one is informed of its leagues."⁴

The excuses

Ten birds make their excuses first, each with a portrait of what it loves. I read the opening of each, five couplets. The nightingale says the secrets of love ended in it; the parrot, shut in an iron cage, melts with longing for the water of Khidr; the peacock was expelled from paradise because an ugly snake became its companion; the duck washes itself at every moment and prays on the water; the partridge lives in the mine as guardian of jewels; the hawk covers its eyes waiting for the king's hand; the bittern weeps on the seashore; the owl has chosen the ruin, because "in the ruin there is a place for the treasure"; and the little bird ṣaʿwa asks: "how will a little bird ever reach that Simurgh?"⁴ Each excuse is what that bird already has in place of setting out.

The hoopoe answers in 431 couplets. It begins: "Whoever has fallen in love does not think of life."⁴

How it ends, in the text

The usual summary says the birds discover that they are the Simurgh. The Persian does say something like that, but not all at once and not at the end. I read the six sections that Ganjoor titles "The thirty birds before the Simurgh" (324 couplets). The order is this:

Of "hundreds of thousands" of birds, "a world full of birds walked the road" and no more than thirty arrived, without wings or feathers, broken. They see a court that cannot be described, and a herald tells them to go back: "what comes from you but anguish? Back, you handful of insignificant ones!" They are left "like the eternally dead". After the story of the moth and the flame, which prefers to burn, they are seated on the seat of nearness and a scroll is put before them: "Read it to the end." That is what they did. Ganjoor titles the section with the story of the letter that Joseph's brothers gave when they sold him: the birds read everything they had done, and shame leaves them clean.⁴

Only then, couplet 33:

چون نگه کردند آن سی مرغ زود / بی‌شک این سی مرغ آن سیمرغ بود — chūn nigah kardand ān sī morgh zūd / bī-shak īn sī morgh ān Sīmorgh būd

"When those thirty birds looked, at once: without doubt these thirty birds (sī morgh) were that Simurgh (Sīmorgh)." The name Simurgh can be read "thirty birds", and the poem plays with that. But couplet 34 leaves them "again, in another way, perplexed". The poem has them look toward the Simurgh, toward themselves and toward both at once, and ends with both being a single Simurgh, "more or less" (36–38): "this was that and that was this; in all the world no one has heard this" (39). They ask, without a tongue, how that "we" and that "you" are solved, and the answer is a mirror:

چون شما سی مرغ اینجا آمدید / سی درین آیینه پیدا آمدید — chūn shumā sī morgh īnjā āmadīd / sī dar-īn āyina paydā āmadīd

"As you thirty birds came here, thirty appeared in this mirror." The previous couplet says that whoever comes sees himself in it, and the next begins "if you came again, forty or fifty birds", which seems to say that the mirror would show another number; I do not translate the rest of the couplet with confidence. Further on: "what you knew, when you saw it, was not that; what you said and heard, was not that" (50). And the passage closes with this pair:

محو او گشتند آخر بر دوام / سایه در خورشید گم شد والسلام — maḥw-i ū gashtand ākhir bar davām / sāya dar khurshīd gum shud wa-s-salām

"At last they were effaced in Him, forever; the shadow was lost in the sun. And farewell." The shadow and the sun already came from the valley of poverty and annihilation: "a hundred thousand eternal shadows of yours: you will see them lost through a single sun of yours."⁴

And the poem does not end there. In the same part there are 194 more couplets. A lover sits on the ashes of Hallaj and says that everything you said, heard, knew and saw is nothing but a tale, except the beginning: "vanish, for your place is not this ruin." Afterwards "they gave the annihilated birds back, with grace, to themselves, without total annihilation", and they came forward "in subsistence, after annihilation" (baqā, after fanā). There is one last story, of a king and his vizier's son, and the poet says: "now at last I have finished the speech; deeds are needed, how much more shall I say? And farewell."⁴ Still 241 couplets remain, which Ganjoor titles "On his state" (fī waṣf-i ḥālih). Going by the titles of its sections: sayings of the dying, a counsel from Aristotle to Alexander "at the time of his death", Nizam al-Mulk in his agony. Of those sections I read the titles and the opening of the last one.

The Rumi that circulates, again

The next article reads Rumi's reed and warns that a good part of what circulates under his name is not his. The two lines most quoted about Attar are of that kind: "Attar has roamed the seven cities of love; we are still at the bend of one little street" and "Attar was the spirit, and Sanai his two eyes; we have come after Sanai and Attar." The English Wikipedia puts them in Rumi's mouth.¹⁸ The Persian Wikipedia says the attribution of the first is doubtful and that one author attributes it to Jami.²

I searched for them in Ganjoor, which publishes Rumi's Divan of Shams, the Masnavi, Fīhi mā fīhi and Majālis-i sabʿa: they are not in Rumi's work. The same search does find a line of Rumi taken at random (the one about the reed). In the whole Ganjoor corpus, each of the two lines appears once, in the Riyāḍ al-ʿārifīn of Reza-Qoli Khan Hedayat (1800–1871), more than five centuries after Rumi's death. The first is introduced with "as the Mawlawī said" (kamā qāla l-Mawlawī); the second comes after a row of stars, in the entry on Sanai.⁶ That they are not in Ganjoor's editions does not prove whose they are.

What Rumi does say about Attar, in the Masnavi, is in the sixth book. In its 25,637 couplets the word "Attar" appears eight times; seven are apothecaries in its stories (a clay-eater who goes to the apothecary, the bazaar of the perfumers). One is the poet. At the end of a section:

اینچ گفتم از غلطهات ای عزیز / هم برین بشنو دم عطار نیز — īnch guftam az ghalaṭhā-t ay ʿazīz / ham bar īn beshnaw dam-i ʿAṭṭār nīz

"This that I have told you of your mistakes, dear one: on the same subject, listen also to the breath of Attar." And the next section begins, without repeating the name: "The mercy of God be upon him, he has said, has strung in verse, the story of King Mahmud the Ghazi", and sends the reader to "the words of that great one of the religion" for the length and breadth of the tale: that of an Indian boy taken as booty, whom Mahmud seats on his throne, and who weeps because his mother used to frighten him with Mahmud.⁷ That tale is in Attar's Muṣībat-nāma, in twelve couplets: the king asks the boy why he weeps, and the boy answers that his mother used to frighten him in a hundred ways with Mahmud.⁹ Ganjoor separates the two sections, but the closing phrase and the opening one follow each other. It is a connection you can read, with both texts in front of you.

Sanai, by contrast, Rumi calls "the sage of Ghazni" (ḥakīm-i ghaznavī) four times in the Masnavi, and Hedayat quotes one of those lines as Rumi's about Sanai.⁶⁷ And according to the English Wikipedia, a hagiographic account that not all scholars accept says that Rumi, as a young person, met Attar in Nishapur and that Attar gave the Asrār-nāma; and that Ḥusām al-Dīn, when asking for the book that would be the Masnavi, spoke of a book "like Sanai's Ilāhī-nāma or Attar's Manṭiq al-ṭayr".⁸ I cannot check either of those things.

What I could not read

I downloaded the whole poem, but I read only a small part of it properly: the ending (sections 1 to 4 of "The thirty birds before the Simurgh" in full, twelve couplets of the fifth, and the first ten and last fourteen of the sixth), the first four couplets of each valley, the opening of the ten excuses, the first twelve of the hoopoe's answer and a few scattered titles and openings from the rest. The rest I counted and searched, but did not read. I could not identify the edition Ganjoor follows, and its section titles are Ganjoor's. I did not compare my reading with any translation: I did not read FitzGerald, Nott, Avery or Wolpé, nor the study by Shafiʿī Kadkanī that the Persian Wikipedia cites. Of the Masnavi I read only the passages I quote, and of the Muṣībat-nāma, the story of Mahmud. The dates of Attar and Rumi come from Wikipedia. And my Persian is a reader's, not a specialist's: if you read Persian and see a mistake, this Diary needs you to say so.

What we do with this

Out of "hundreds of thousands", thirty arrived; the mirror gave back thirty. Something similar, and much smaller, happens in Anima Mundis: a chamber forms with 3, 5 or 7 people who arrive at the same frequency and the same language in the same ten minutes, and what there is depends on how many arrive together, as told in the article on Durkheim. We are not saying it is the same: here there is a mechanism, not a poem. What the Observatory counts is the voices that arrived and at what UTC hour, and nothing more: like the mirror of couplet 45, it adds no one.