Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry

Abstract

Among the most foundational American poets of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson naturally comes to mind. Emerson’s work, however, is far from being essentially American in both content and form. We know him not only as one of the principal founders of transcendentalism, an essentially international religio-mystical movement, but as the seeker and proponent of an American mysticism that becomes the literary-cultural canvas onto which he writes his oeuvre as poet-philosopher. What is much less known, however, is the extent to which Emerson borrows, or “appropriates” from the classical Persian tradition of poetry, and, in particular, the poetry of two giants of the Islamo-Persian mystical tradition: Sa’di and Hafez. Iranian-American poet and translation scholar Roger Sedarat’s new book, Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry, makes a compelling and well-documented argument for the ways that Emerson’s work as poet and philosopher draws heavily on the idea of being an “appropriative translator” who has left an indelible mark in American poetry. In his critical study, Sedarat argues that Emerson, “more than wishing to write like his Persian predecessors, often longs to write as them” (11).Emerson in Iran builds on previous studies that indeed identify the influence of Persian poets such as Hafez on Emerson’s work, but Sedarat takes it further, arguing that Emerson not only appropriates Persian poetry, but also “performs” a kind of Persian identity that enables him to construct a kind of Persian Sufi mirror that refracts both his philosophical ego-lessness and his desire to become something unique and original in itself. Sedarat’s study identifies the rhetorical strategies Emerson adopts, and that, in turn, results in a kind of “self erasure in the ghazal.” Sedarat’s study underscores Emerson’s need to “look for himself elsewhere, attracted to the foreign” as “half himself,” and at times, dislocating his “‘other half’ in Hafiz and Sa’di’” (63). In essence, Sedarat names how Emerson selectively reads, translates, and appropriates Sa’di and Hafiz to perform his “Persian mirror.” Although Emerson does not know Persian, and comes to his translation and reading of Hafez and Sa’di through the work of German translators, he effectively “nullifies the difference between his original and translated texts from Persian through German sources.” According to Sedarat, Emerson stands as an “amalgamation of writers he reveres much like Hafez and Sa’di embody their precursors.” Sedarat argues that Emerson threads together the old and the new as he “refashions himself as ‘Sa’di’ projecting his own self-reliant ideal onto the thirteenth-century Persian poet.” In a more general way, Sedarat exposes the anxieties of influence inherent in this American poet, and also generates an argument for understanding just how much of the “American version of poetic influence” surfaces in the verse of Persian poets, among other displaced, foreign traditions.What is at stake in holding a poet like Emerson accountable for those early Persian influences and understanding those appropriative tendencies has even more relevance in the case of Rumi’s popularity in twentieth-century American society, as well as in the poetry of Hafez. Sedarat takes to task the appropriative tendencies of translation currently in practice by Coleman Barks (Rumi) and Daniel Ladinsky (Hafez), citing how they break from any linguistic equivalence between the original source and their tendency to remake the poetry of these classic poets as their own selective interpretations of these spiritual masters. Sedarat sees their appropriative practice as a continuation of Emerson’s practice; these contemporary writer-translators fold themselves into the genius of these Persian poets without ever really attending to the original language or context. In essence, the poems and the poets are further divorced from their original linguistic and spiritual origins and are used as a kind of palimpsest for the so-called translator-authors own literary genius:At the heart of Sedarat’s project is as an attempt to understand the transmission of culture and literary influences on poets from other traditions and cultures on American letters, and to rightfully bestow upon their work the meaningful semblance of a powerful and iconic tradition (whether Persian, Islamic, mystical, or Eastern) that too often has been obscured by the commercial success or appropriative impulses that do not recognize where things originate and why they take hold.