Review of The Quickening: Unknown Poetry of Táhirih by John S. Hatcher and Amrollah Hemmat

Abstract

Review of The Quickening: Unknown Poetry of Tahirih, by John S. Hatcher and Amrollah Hemmat. 261 pages. Wilmette, IL: Baha'i Publishing Trust, 2011.We can never be too humble as artists to copy fever and craft of artist in alien tongue but, at best, any rendition of Persian into English is only luminescent and can never trap incandescent glow of original work, just a bright mirror of an ancient glory. The other artist in this case is Jinab-i-Tahirih (Her Excellence, Pure One), a legend and sworn poetess of every dauntless dawnbreaker.1 This first woman suffrage martyr (Shoghi Effendi 75), the beautiful and enthusiastic Kurratu'l-'Ayn (Browne 287-88)2 was a gifted, impetuous founder of a new cadence and embodiment of religious resurgence in mid-nineteenth-century Iran.In her writings and poems, Tahirih may well be faithful representation of a Baha'i Weltanschauung (world view), one of most affecting episodes in history (Lord Curzon, qtd. in Maneck 7) and herself a worthy symbol of the greatest religious movement of century (Browne 424). She was a Persian Joan of Arc,3 a charismatic, undeterred, and unruffled woman leader, almost prophetess (Browne 240) whom none can mention without a certain involuntary awe and admiration, and to whom these tardy words still ring true: Then courage . . . revoltress! / For till all ceases neither must you cease (Whitman 288).By all this is meant that Tahirih's corpus of is no ordinary work to read, let alone for translators to pause and prescribe treatment. It is not enough to plough to discover what verses proclaim through semantics and syntax; through our habitual knowledge of language; through grammars, dictionaries, and all literature that is source of dictionaries; through use of classical tools of time-honored traditions, such as devices esteqbal and tazmin, for example, used liberally by Tahirih and methodically explained by Hatcher and Hemmat in their footnotes to poems-through all that makes a language and a culture.Translating Tahirih's concentrated, imaginative awareness of experience in a distant culture undergoing profound religious upheaval in derived not from past but from future, of texts of a distinct genre in which content exceeds phrase is a truly formidable task. To convey rapture of these poems to an English-speaking audience, translator must not only capture Tahirih's spectacularly autonomous, daring, and creative imagination, but also preserve her poetic energy and guarantee her poetic authenticity in form she wished. For me, that form focuses on helping revolutionary modernity to know itself, to arrive at itself, to make and to manifest itself: ...For you there should be detachment / that you might discern (one) hidden Countenance now dawned in world (Hatcher and Hemmat 54).Doing away with veil of past and ushering in garb of future, Tahirih seeks to produce arrival of a modern revolution through an act of self-foundation and self-creation: we, standing here and now, must act!It is particularly apt that in subtitle chosen by authors, unknown poetry is precisely referring to that part of our poetic faculty yet to be born as a mode of access to this collective consciousness that poet laureate Tahirih typifies but that we have yet to experience on a global scale; namely, to carry into vernacular that an ever-advancing civilization depends on seeking new and discarding old. This process inevitably and forcibly entails willingness to sacrifice (the hallmark of revolutionary rather than reformer) and should be an integral part of any outlook on progress: He should know that my Cause is greater than all causes and / will appear in creation only through great tests and trials (43).Sorrow or lamentation never prevails in Tahirih's work. …