The Subject Tonight Is Love, Daniel Ladinsky (365 Books, Day 36)

[rushthatspeaks]

Man, this was surreal. And an object lesson about what can lurk in the books in one's house without anybody knowing it.

So for various reasons gaudior and weirdquark were getting out all the books of Sufi poetry, and weirdquark handed me her copy of Hafiz, which she's had as long as I've known her and which I've seen floating about, and I sat down with it.

The thing is, there are several methods of approaching a poetry collection. There's the approach where you open it at random, and read around until you've read it all; and the way where you skip all the prologues and introductory essays but otherwise begin at the beginning, go on till you come to the end, and either stop or go back to the front matter; and then there's the method I sometimes follow where you just sit down and read the entire thing, in order, scholarly essays and what not included. Which I did with this. weirdquark had never actually read the front matter.

You may notice that the author I have listed for this book is not Hafiz. That's because this turns out not to be an actual translation of Hafiz. It's a kind of jazz improvisation on somebody else's translations of Hafiz, inspired by the author's experiences worshiping, in an impressively and hilariously devoted way, the Indian guru Meher Baba.

The introduction has more randomly capitalized words than one would really expect. For one thing, Ladinsky refers to Hafiz as the Great Old One, which cracks me up and instantly makes me think of Hafiz as having tentacles. But there are also occasional things capitalized such as 'And' or 'The' in the middle of sentences. The essay is about how Ladinsky feels that all existing translations of Hafiz are insufficiently joyful and also-- he literally says this-- insufficiently crazy. But he wasn't getting anywhere studying Persian-- he says that too-- so he took the extant English versions and did something that sounds like a mashup crossed with a guided meditation crossed with making things totally up. Also with Extremely Unique Capitalization. After finishing the essay, I was both nearly crying with laughter and in a state of total flabbergasted amazement.

You want to know the really amazing thing? The poetry isn't terrible. I mean, some of it is undistinguished, but the couple of poems that weirdquark had quoted to me on previous occasions are genuinely well-crafted and much of it would be fine (in the manner of didactic religious poetry) if you took out the damn capital letters. He has an occasional felicity of phrase, and it reads very similarly to the way people who translate Sufi poetry usually translate it. It feels a lot like versions I've read of Rumi. It spins off into the vocabulary specific to the author's cult, but not very often nor very blatantly. If handed an excerpt out of context, I would not immediately take it as anything other than a reasonable attempt at a literal translation, which is what this book has looked like in our house lo these many years.

This leads to the question, then, what is this poetry? Is it Hafiz? Hafiz worked in the oral tradition, spoke his poems and they weren't collected until about a century after his death. Would Hafiz, an iconoclast in the traditional Sufi manner, have considered the kind of textual fidelity that a scholar finds necessary today to be even remotely appropriate? Is this poetry, then, by Ladinsky? He wouldn't have written it all by himself and says as much, but this isn't Sufi poetry anymore, it's Sufi-plus-this-other-cult. Might one refer to it as 'after the school of'? It's one of the more interestingly remixed pieces of culture I think I've ever seen, in that it is doing in an attempted-Serious-Literature context a thing I've only seen done before in fanfiction, where one author takes another author's story and rewrites it so that it is both recognizable and totally different.

Would I care so much about figuring out what I think is going on in this metatext if Ladinsky weren't so clearly a total loon? Would I care so much if Ladinsky weren't a loon associated with a cult I happen to know some things about and were, instead, an esoteric Buddhist or something? Am I trying to use my criteria of authenticity to continue to distance Hafiz from Ladinsky because I find the looniness off-putting? Hafiz was a loon, too. That is much of the point of Sufi poets, the joyous anarchy that appears and may actually be insanity. Am I trying to discard my usual ways of judging this text for any good reason, or is it just that I'm bending over backwards trying to mentally compensate for my immediate instinctive thought that because Ladinsky is what he is, this can't be good poetry, even though in other contexts I might have thought it reasonable? Should I be trying to compensate for that thought?

Am I overanalyzing the fuck out of this experience?

This is the sort of book that roundly defeats criticism. On the other hand, I am not certain criticism is remotely relevant to it.

I can't recommend it. It's not actually that good, in my (profoundly confused) opinion. But it does achieve what I have always believed to be the primary purpose of Sufi poetry: it is, on a deep existential level, a genuinely hilarious practical joke on the reader, and you can't tell how much that's intentional.

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