Poetry, Orality, and Authorship
Even after all this time,
the sun never says to the earth,
‘you owe me.’
Look what happens with a love like that!
It lights up the whole sky.
I recently shared this verse on social media. It is a verse that has circulated widely before I shared it, attributed to the 14th century Sufi Persian poet Hafez, and this was the attribution I cited. In response, a friend shared an article in Al Jazeera by Omid Safi who pointed out that this verse has no connection to the original work of Hafez (something I did not know at the time I shared it), and is actually penned by American poet Daniel Ladinsky.
Ladinsky has published four collections of poems that he claims are based on the poetry of Hafez. The attributions vary across the books. One says, “Renderings of Hafez by Daniel Ladinsky.” Another says, “Poems by Hafez, the Great Sufi Master, Renderings by Daniel Ladinsky.” Ladinsky claims that Hafez appeared to him in a dream, reciting his poems in English and instructing Ladinsky to share them with the world. While dreams may be a source of inspiration, Safi argues they fall short of qualifying as either translation (Ladinsky speaks no Persian) or direct attribution of authorship.
Safi admits that many of the verses are indeed beautiful, it is just that they are not Hafez, and Ladinsky should have published them solely under his own name rather than exploitatively riding on the back of Hafez’s established fame. Consequently, a substantial portion of often quoted verses attributed to Hafez are false citations, and Safi suggests the resultant corrosion of Hafez’s legacy is tantamount to a “Western appropriation of Muslim spirituality.” This critique resonates with Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism which argues that Western interest in the Orient that emerged in the 19th century is not a long due acknowledgment of the Orient’s accomplishments, but a mask for a hegemonic bias that casts the Orient as an exotic other, yet to enter modernity, and hence in need of an Occidental voice to speak on its behalf.
I fully agree that Ladinsky’s appropriation of Hafez is deeply problematic. But there are other nuances in the situation that warrant attention. Hafez belongs to a pre-Gutenberg era where a significant percentage of poetry relied on an oral tradition. In his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter Ong shows that in oral cultures the rhythmic meter of poetry acts as an aid to memory necessary in the absence of written record, which is why much of its linguistic culture as well as scripture are in verse rather than prose. Much poetic composition was intended as a mode of cultural transmission, usually presented orally or in song, often content with anonymity, and far removed from the possessive and documented claim of personal authorship that we assume today as a matter of fact. This would be specifically so in the case of mystic poets who preached a quest for union with the divine through an embodied awareness beyond what the intellect could grasp, indirectly inferred through metaphor, where the emotive force of oral performance played a strong part in presenting the poetry. Hafez undoubtedly presented a great deal of his work orally, and his best known written compilation, The Divān of Hafez, is believed to be compiled by others after his death.
One finds a similar situation in India in the 15th/16th century in the work of Kabir, one of India’s great mystic poets. Kabir and his followers often referred to his verses of wisdom as bāņis (utterances), and an oral tradition sustained his poetry with written compilations emerging well after his death. There is consequently a great deal of ambiguity, with much scholarly debate, on which verse is authentically from Kabir and which is an anonymous addition made by subsequent oral tradition. One could imagine that if there was a way of posing this question to Kabir, he would be likely to respond that it does not matter. He rejected dogmatic assertions that were meant to be frozen within prescriptive ideology or ritual, calling for the spiritual seeker to be wide awake, free of precondition, keenly aware of a divinity within. How poetry preserves this discerning awareness is what truly matters, and not any privileging of authorship.
In his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard analyses how traditional cultures orally preserve and transmit cultural wisdom. When I listen to my grandmother tell me a myth, I know that she received the authority to tell from listening on an earlier occasion. In listening now, I know that I receive the authority to tell on a later occasion. The myth’s narrative presents challenges of ethics, culture and nature that capture both teller and listener. All participants can occupy all three positions of teller, listener, and story — nobody is granted any privileged position of authority outside the system. There is no need to consciously remember the past for even if the narrative is based in the past, its reality rests in a contemporary act of telling. Knowledge and authority are recycled in a manner where the cyclical rhythm of retelling is as significant as the accent of a specific telling.
One can imagine mystic poetry playing a similar role (and much of traditional myth is recorded in verse). Poetry is particularly powerful for its rich deployment of metaphor lends an acuity to life. Much of life’s significant dimensions (love, wonder, beauty, reverence, joy, humour, and much more) are known as tangible reality when experienced but are unmeasurable and resist definition, made available for cultural transmission only indirectly through metaphor.
Many years ago, I attended a lecture by the late philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi. In the discussion after the talk, I posed a question on poetry and in his response Gandhi made the enigmatic assertion, “Poetry constructs a powerful space in-between speech and silence.” There was no time then for him to expand or clarify this assertion, and I have spent a great deal of time since reflecting on what he might have meant. Poetry deploys language and is inextricably tied to speech. But it evokes a reaction that is beyond speech for it must be appreciated viscerally — the body must feel a reality that the intellect cannot grasp, a reality that can only be hinted at by metaphor, a hint that remains incomplete until the loop is completed by the silent, evocative, and visceral echo within one’s body.
One can complete this visceral loop in reading a poem that is linked to its authorship. But a rhythmic culture of oral performance in which poetry is meant to be a baton of wisdom that is passed on, where there is no privileged position of teller or listener, and unshakeable claims to authorship are not central, takes this visceral resonance to another level. The world has moved on and one can no longer assert that the claim to authorship should surrender to an anonymous rhythm of transmitted wisdom. But we need to confront the challenge of designing the spaces of a polity where poetry can lay the foundations for collectively reconnecting with the mystical resonances of a fully lived life.
