Parable of the Moths, Part 1

Leyla: Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation, Attar’s Parable of the Moths That Wanted to Know More About Their Beloved with Omid Arabian. salām omid jān, thank you so much for joining me today!

Omid: salām leylā khānoom, I'm really happy and honored to be here!

Leyla: Yeah, we've been talking about doing this for so, so long, so I appreciate your patience. It is a really important project. I'm very excited about it, and so, today, what we're going to be talking about is Attar’s ‘Parable of the Moths’, for short. This is for our more experienced Persian language speakers, because, similar to the poetry program that we have, we are going to be going through the entire parable, which is 16 lines that Omid has chosen for us. We're going to be going over it in Persian and in English, and then we will be going over the overall meaning of the parable and the words and phrases in them. But we're not going to go into as much detail as we do in the poetry program, which is for complete beginners. This is more about using the language to understand the meaning of this poem. I'm super excited to do this project, long time coming, and with that, omid jān, can you introduce yourself and tell us so who you are and what you do?

Omid: Sure. Pleasure. I am Omid Arabian. I am the co-founder and director of YOUniversal Center. That's YOUniversal with a Y-O-U, so it is about you in the end, and our mission is basically to help more of our fellow human beings access the message and the ideas of primarily the Iranian mystics, like Rumi, like Hāfez, like Attar, and to just help those ideas kind of continue to spread and be known and help us hopefully live more joyfully and at more peace with each other. 

Leyla: Wonderful! Well, when did you start this, and why did you start it? 

Omid: Yeah, I've been doing this for about 15 years, and it really started just with my own love of these ideas and these great mystics. I had been studying them for a long, long time but primarily in the original language, in Persian. The whole idea for me to start these classes was to just make sure that people who don't necessarily speak Persian or whose Persian is still not so perfect to still be able to access these ideas and hopefully make use of them. The classes are primarily in English, but we do read the texts in the original Farsi, and then I translate everything. Then we get to talk about and discuss everything, mostly in English, so that everyone can participate. 

Leyla: That's perfect. That's exactly in line with what we do, and we'll definitely have links to YOUniversal on the show notes for this program so that if you want to in the future, explore more of these classes that omid jān teaches, that you can go do that, but who are primarily your students? 

Omid: It's funny, there's a really good mix of people from different places, different age groups, different experiences, so it's not really kind of one demographic. We get people locally, I'm in Los Angeles, and we have people from the greater LA area but then all the way out to Europe and Asia. Whoever can make the time slots is welcome to join, and that's really good because we get these different experiences that people bring to the table. Once we start to apply these lessons to our daily lives, we get different perspectives, which gives us a more kind of rich and varied kind of understanding of what these wonderful sages are talking about. 

Leyla: And can you say a little bit about your background? How did you get into this poetry in the first place? Did you grow up speaking Persian and reading poetry? Was it part of your family? 

Omid: Oh, yeah. Well, like a lot of people, I left Iran with my family, when the Revolution happened in ‘79, so I was, at the time, 11 years old, and I was in sixth grade. I would have probably not gotten to these ideas unless I had had some exposure as a kid. In fact, I know I remember when we were growing up in Iran, in the school books, they would have some of these kind of stories just for us to read and get exposed to. Of course, they were kind of a shortened version and simplified versions of them, but some of them would stick in my head because they were so beautiful. Even as a 10-11-year-old, I would remember that they were very meaningful and profound as much as I could understand it at that age. Then coming to America and getting back to these kind of as an adult starting college, I started to really resonate because that seed had been planted in me, because I had that familiarity. As soon as I would read a Rumi poem or a story, I would just suddenly kind of go back to that era and remember how much I loved and enjoyed them, so it just started to grow from that. Then in my 30s, I started to really intensely get into kind of studying Rumi and a little bit of Hafez and so on, and that opened the door into other Persian mysticism and literature that was associated with it. It just grew and grew and grew, and it became really a major passion in my life. I’m so really blessed and honored to now be able to help other people also discover and benefit from these ideas. 

Leyla: And was the language a barrier for you since you grew up mostly here? It has very complex language. How did you really learn that?

Omid: Yeah, that's a great question. Well, on the one hand, it was lucky that I had kept up my kind of exposure to Farsi, even here in America. I would read books in Farsi, I would try to get my hands on newspapers and magazines, if you remember what those are, and just read as much as I could. Then in college, I took some courses in Persian literature, and that helped me kind of get a little bit more exposed to that. Of course, the language of poetry, and especially mystical poetry, is more complex than even regular poetry, especially, of any kind of literature. That always presents a challenge to anybody, I think, of any level of linguistic kind of familiarity. For me, also, it was definitely a challenge, but a lot of persistence and a lot of looking things up and, you know, the more you read of it, the more you get to understand the context clues, so that even if there's a word or phrase that doesn't show up, in your mental kind of capacity or what you're familiar with, you can get a sense of it in the context because of the clues that are usually there. That's something that I think the poets really intentionally did. They put these words in the kind of context that challenged you to kind of decode and understand, “What do they mean in this context?” Sometimes they can be used in a way that has the opposite meaning than what the usual word meaning of the word is, so you just have to kind of be very aware. The more you read of, let's say, Hafez, as you know, the more you get to understand that certain words in Hafez have their own very special meanings because it's Hafez, whereas in regular language, it would have a slightly or very different meaning. 

Leyla: Right. Yeah. We say in our poetry program, it's kind of like these keys that you kind of discover, and it becomes more and more clear to you the more you practice and the more you read. It's very similar to Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the same. The first time you hear it, it might sound very unfamiliar, but then, over time, it becomes more and more clear. 

Omid: That's exactly right.

Leyla: So, now, let's bring it to Attar. So, Attar is not Rumi or Hafez. Actually, this is the first Attar story that we're doing for Chai and Conversation, so I'm super excited! Tell us about Attar and who he was, when he was.

Omid: Sure, sure, sure. Attar’s full name was Abū Ḥamīd bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm. That won't be on the test. Okay. He's much better known by his pen name, which is Farīd-ud-dīn Attār. Sometimes they call him Sheikh Farīd-ud-dīn Attār. Sheikh just means an important man or a wise man. He lived from 1145 to 1221 on the Christian calendar in a city called Nishapur. Nishapur is a major city, or was, in Khorasan in the medieval era and still is in the northeastern part of Iran. He lived during the Seljuk dynasty. So, if you want to put it into context, he was born about 50 plus years before Rumi and about 170-something years before Hafez, so he predates both of those guys. There's not a lot of details about his life. It seems that during his lifetime, he was not so well known, actually, as a poet, except in his own hometown of Nishapur. And his greatness was not really discovered until a few centuries later, around the 15th century, is when people started to talk about it. 

Leyla: Well, how many followers did he have on Instagram? 

Omid: Yeah, exactly, hard to say, hard to say! There's not a whole lot of detail that I can tell you about his own life. There's a lot of interesting…not a lot, but there's a few interesting legends about him. One of my favorite ones is that Attar meets Rumi when Rumi was a child. Rumi and his family are presumably on their way out of Iran, kind of fleeing the expected invasion of the Mongols, and so they pass through Nishapur, apparently. The legend goes that they go up to meet Attar. Attar holds little Rumi in his arms or on his lap and bounces him a little bit and says, “This is gonna be a great person when he grows up,” so he predicts Rumi’s greatness. I mean, nobody knows if it's true, but it's a lovely, lovely story to think about. There's not a lot of detail, but his work is very much deeply woven into Iranian culture, not as much as, again, Hafez or Rumi, but he is considered one of the absolute greats as a mystic, as a poet, as a master of storytelling and narrative. Probably his best-known work is called “mantegh at-tayr.” It's certainly the most translated of his works. And the story that we’re going to talk about today is going to be coming from that work called mantegh at-tayr. 

Leyla: Is that ‘Conference of the Birds’? 

Omid: Yes, that's ‘Conference of the Birds.’ Exactly, yeah. 

Leyla: I think that that definitely is well known among people. It's well translated and well known as the emblem of Sufi storytelling. Is that right? 

Omid: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Both within Iranian culture and the bigger circles of even the Western understanding of Persian mysticism, it's considered one of the absolute greats. 

Leyla: Can you tell us a little bit about what is Persian mysticism? We hear this word “Sufi” all the time. This mysticism, what is it?

Omid: Yeah, I mean, it's a very broad term. It can apply to a whole huge kind of body of works, but the idea is that at some point, people kind of started to rise up from Iranian culture and really kind of talk in depth about ideas that have to do with the bigger questions of life. Who are we? What are we doing here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What's our relationship to the universe? What does it mean to say “God,” for example? To understand these ideas, not from a logical, even philosophical perspective, but through a direct experience, a direct connection with kind of the universe itself, with existence itself, and then to express these ideas in a way that was not, like I always joke in class, it's not like an instruction chart or an IKEA manual of how to do things, right? It's not like that. It's expressed in a language that itself is very complex but also decodable. Once you read the work of these mystics, part of the fun and part of the process is to start to understand what, for example, their symbolism stands for. What is it that each image or each idea is trying to represent? This decoding process can be extremely challenging but also very, very satisfying. Overall, it is basically a perspective and approach to understand and explain the biggest questions of existence. 

Leyla: Okay. Well, wonderful! And then what about this story in particular, can you tell us? The ‘Parable of the Moths that Wanted to Know More About Their Beloved’, can you tell us about that? And then afterwards, we'll talk more specifically about this selection.

Omid: Sure, sure. So the parable that we're going to talk about today comes from mantegh at-tayr, and so I have to explain a little bit about how Mantiq al-Tayr is structured and what is it ultimately about in the bigger picture, if I may? 

Leyla: Of course.

Omid: The title mantegh at-tayr itself comes from the Arabic into Persian. “mantegh” means ‘speech or a verbal expression’, from the root “notgh,” ‘to talk’ or ‘to give a speech’. And then "tayr" means ‘to fly’ or ‘anything that flies’, basically, in this case, ‘birds’, so “mantegh at-tayr” loosely translates into ‘the speech of the birds’ or ‘the discussion of the birds’, but it's usually directly titled ‘Conference of the Birds’. Somebody started that, and it kinda stuck. It is an epic poem, and it's an allegory, roughly 4,500 verses written in Persian when Attar was in his 30s. mantegh at-tayr has an interesting structure: There's a main thread of the story, and that main thread is about how all the birds of the world come together, and they decide that they want to have a ruler; they want to find somebody who becomes their king. One of the birds, who’s called the hoopoe, tells them, “Well, we already have such a king whose name is Simorgh.” All the birds get excited because the descriptions of Simorgh sound so magnificent and so alluring. They say, “Well, let's go and find and meet the Simorgh and designate Simorgh as our official king.” The whole story then becomes about the journey of these birds to go and find Simorgh. The journey is not an easy one. It's a very perilous one. It goes through seven valleys, each of which present the challenge of difficulty or hardship, but then also a reward if one is able to pass through that valley. That's really the main story until at the end. I don't want to spoil anything, but hopefully, they come face to face with their designated king, Simorgh.

The whole thing is really an allegory about the mystical journey of self-realization, and it's told by this magnificent storyteller called Attar. That's kind of really the main structure of mantegh at-tayr, but then, along the way, with each part of the main story, Attar includes one or several parables in Farsi, “hekāyat.” These parables are little short stories that are meant to illustrate and expand on what's going on at that point in the main storyline. They're like little stories within the main story, and they show up all through mantegh at-tayr. The parable we're going to talk about today shows up kind of later in the book, later in the journey of the birds, when they're in the seventh valley, which is called “vādeeyé faghr va fanā,” ‘the Valley of Poverty and Annihilation’. That's where it shows up. That's where it's placed in the story. It's good to kind of remind ourselves, as we're just starting to touch upon, that mystic poetry really invites us to interpret everything in any part of the story. The interpretation has a few different levels. One has to do with just understanding the language as we were saying, the words, the phrases. Of course, we do that with anything we read, but with poetry, and especially this kind of poetry, it can take a little bit more work because as I'm sure all of your subscribers and students know, with poetry, the expressions don't always follow the regular rules of syntax and grammar, all of that. There's a little bit of work to be done already there to understand what is being said even at the linguistic level, and that's especially true, of course, of Persian poetry with love, the wordplay and all of that kind of stuff. That's the first level, and the next level is to just understand the symbolism and start to decode that which we touched upon. That kind of symbolic language is almost always used by the Iranian mystic poets as a tool of expressing these huge ideas. Often, each of the characters, each of the elements in the story, stand for something they represent. They symbolize something, and something that itself is kind of abstract and hard to talk about. They have to kind of personify it as a character, or object, or thing, to help us kind of understand what it is that they're trying to talk about, and so we have to decode that. Then the final level is really getting a sense of the overall idea that is being discussed through these symbols and through this imagery. There's lots and lots of layers, but in this lesson, I think we're going to probably start with just the first level, the linguistic, and focus mainly on that. Then I think we're going to spend some time seeing if we can define some of the deeper meanings hidden behind the surface of the words and the characters and all of that.

Leyla: Yes, definitely. So thank you for that wonderful introduction. I want to say that this is for people that have some familiarity with the Persian language, but even if you're not fluent, like Omid jān says, a lot of people in this class aren't fluent in Persian, they can still understand these poems. We're really trying to get the meanings of the poem, and in the process, we are going to learn a lot of words and phrases as well. We're going to have a PDF guide for this. Omid put together a really nice guide, and we are going to have each of those words and phrases, defined in the PDF guide. As always, we'll have the Persian written and the English transliteration and the English translation as well so that you can really understand this poem on your own terms wherever you're at. It's 16 lines total that Omid has chosen for us. In each of the lessons, we're going to learn four of the lines, and we'll go back and forth and kind of talk about the language in that and the meanings. At the very end, after we've read all 16 lines, we're going to go back and talk about the parable as a whole and what we can learn from it and how we can apply it to our own lives and all of that stuff. I'm super excited to get into this! Is there any other final thoughts before we just read our first four lines? 

Omid: No, let's do it!

Leyla: Okay, wonderful! So Omid’s going to read the Persian; I'm going to read the translation. Is this your own translation? 

Omid: Yes. 

Leyla: Okay, so I'm going to read his translation, and then we're going to read the first four lines, and then we'll go back after we're done and talk about each of the lines individually.

Omid: yek shabee parvānegān jam’ āmadand. dar mazeeghee tālebé sham’ āmadand.

Leyla: One night the moths gathered together in an enclosure. They came seeking the candle.

Omid: jomlé meegoftand meebāyad yekee k’oo khabar ārad zé matloob andakee.

Leyla: They all were saying: we need one of us to go and bring back a little news/information about our beloved/object of desire. 

Omid: shod yekee parvāné tā ghasree zé door, dar fazāyé ghasr deed az sham’ noor. 

Leyla: One of the moths went out to a palace, and from a distance saw candlelight glowing in the space of the palace. 

Omid: bāzgasht ō daftaré khod bāz kard, vasfé oo barghadré fahm āghāz kard. 

Leyla: The moth returned and opened up its notebook and began to describe the candle to the limited extent of its own understanding. 

All right, that's an exciting beginning; a lot is going on! Okay, so now let's go back through, and if you can read that first line again… 

Omid: Sure!

yek shabee parvānegān jam’ āmadand. dar mazeeghee tālebé sham’ āmadand.

Leyla: Okay, so let's begin. The first line is very simple. I think “yek shabee,” ‘one night', “parvānegān jam’ āmadand,” now, this is kind of where I get… “parvāné,” as I usually use it, is ‘butterfly’, but here, we use ‘moth’, so let's start talking about that. 

Omid: Yeah, in modern Farsi, when you say “parvāné,” immediately, it brings up a ‘butterfly’, but the original meaning, and the meaning that, from the context, we can gather here, was being used by Attar, has to do with ‘moth’ because there is this very well-known kind of attraction between moths and the light. Before there were electric lights, it was always a flame of a candle, so this kind of relationship between the moth and the flame becomes something that we find a lot in Persian poetry. The poets would see the way that the moths usually were attracted so strongly to the candle’s flame, and sometimes they would even… the moths would even be burned up by the flame. They use this kind of as an analogy, as a metaphor for the power of true, very, very deep, mystical love. 

Leyla: Okay, so this is our first unlocked key is when we see “parvāné” in these poems, which we often do. Don't think of the pretty butterflies that we have now, which is what it's known as in modern Persian!

Omid: Especially if you see the word “sham’” near, anywhere near the “parvāné,” that's another confirmation that it's most likely the ‘moth’ and not the ‘butterfly’. 

Leyla: Wonderful! Okay, so “parvānegān,” of course, when we add “-gān,” means ‘the moths’, so plural. “jam' āmadand,” ‘they came, gathered’, but then in this case, it just means ‘they gathered’. Is that right? 

Omid: Yeah, ‘came together in a group’.

Leyla: Okay, now this next line, you're going to have to read. It's a lot of words that I actually don't know!

Omid: Sure! dar mazeeghee tālebé sham’ āmadand.

Leyla: So, “mazeeghee”? 

Omid: Yeah, “mazeeghee,” as you know, once you add the “-ee” at the end of a word, often, it just means one of those things, so “mazeeghee” means ‘one’ “mazeegh,” ‘a’ “mazeegh.” Now, what is “mazeegh”? “mazeegh” is not a word that we use at all, really, in regular, conversational, modern Persian, but it's a word that means an ‘enclosed space’. “mazeegh” is an ‘enclosed space’, and “mazeeghee” is ‘an enclosed space’.  

Leyla: Okay, so again, we had “yek shabee,” so ‘one of these nights’, and then now, we have “dar mazeeghee.” 

Omid: Yeah, and I think just to talk a little bit more about that idea, it's important that the moths are in an enclosure, symbolically speaking, where one can imagine that it's kind of dark. It adds power and meaning to the idea that they're seeking the light of the candle. They're in a place that itself is dark, and they are yearning and wanting to go and find the candle which emanates this light. 

Leyla: Which, ‘candle’ is “sham’,” and so what does the word “tāleb” mean?

Omid: Sure, “tāleb,” another wonderful word! We do use that a little bit. 

Leyla: Yes.

Omid: Yeah, “tāleb” means ‘seeker’. It's from the root “talab,” which means ‘to seek’, so “tāleb” becomes somebody who is seeking, somebody who is after something, somebody who is looking for something. “tālebé sham’” means ‘the seeker of the candle’.

Leyla: Hmmm, and a place that that word… like “tāleb kār”? Is that the same root, “tāleb kār”?

Omid: It is, it is, although “tāleb kar” has a slightly different connotation, which has more to do with material stuff, like if you owe me something, I am your tāleb kār. 

Leyla: You're in debt. 

Omid: If I borrow $100 from you, exactly, you are my tāleb kār, but in the context of mystical poetry, tāleb has to do with the life's journey of seeking and usually seeking one's own self, one’s own meaning, one’s own highest existence. The connotation has less to do with being owed something and more to do with seeking something that is really about your own realization, your self-realization. 

Leyla: Got it, and we end with the word “āmadand” again, ‘they came’, but that one's a pretty clear word, so one night, the moths gathered in an enclosed enclosure, “mazeeghee.” They came seeking the candle. Anything else we want to say about that first line? 

Omid: I just think it's a lovely kind of setting of the stage, because it already starts the wondering. I did not know anything about these notions. Just to imagine that picture, this lovely dark enclosure, where all these butterflies gather, and then this kind of idea that they are here not just to hang out, to look for something, to seek for something. And that thing is a light, something that emanates light in contrast to the dark space. 

Leyla: And it's already night, and they're already coming into this enclosure. 

Omid: Exactly, darkness upon darkness, exactly. 

Leyla: All right, so should we do the next line? 

Omid: jomlé meegoftand meebāyad yekee k’oo khabar ārad zé matloob andakee. 

Leyla: I'm seeing it’s kāf-oo-vāv. Is that pronounced “koo”? 

Omid: So kāf-oo-vāv is pronounced “koo” because it's a contraction of two words: “ké oo.” 

Leyla: Ah, okay, okay. ‘That he, she, or it’, right? 

Omid: In poetry, as we have a lot of contractions, this is a very typical contraction in Persian poetry, “ké oo,” but it's pronounced “koo,” so that it sticks. It stays within the meter of the poem. If we said “ké oo,” then it would throw off the meter. 

Leyla: Right, okay, so the translation: ‘They all were saying, we need one of us to go and bring back a little news/ information about our beloved/object of desire, i.e. the candle.’ Omid has some notes in here, so it's not directly translated. A lot of times in these Persian poems, we see, you know, there's four words in Persian. Then you need 20 words in English to say the same thing.

Omid: That's why it makes translating it so difficult and such a challenge!

Leyla: And it's just so… like, that first one where you have this “āmadand,” it's so elegant in Persian, and then all of a sudden, it gets super clunky in English, which is why we always like to learn it in Persian and to learn those words that have several meanings that just encapsulates so much in just a few words. Okay, “jomlé meegoftand meebāyad yekee,” so “jomlé meegoftand”? 

Omid: “jomlé” is a ‘sentence’, normally, yeah. Here, it has to do with a collective; “jomlé” can also mean “hamé,” as we say usually, in modern linguistics and conversational Farsi. It really has that connotation of “hamé,” ‘all of’, basically, so “jomlé meegoftand” means ‘all of them were saying’. 

Leyla: Okay, “meegoftand,” ‘were saying’, which is a very common word. “meebāyad yekee.” “meebāyad” is one of those words that you see in written Persian, but not in spoken Persian, but it just means ‘we must’. 

Omid: Yes, and here, it has a slightly specific connotation of ‘there must be’. “meebāyad,” 'there must be, there has to be, it's necessary for', and “yekee” here: ‘a one’ or ‘someone’ or ‘one of us’. 

Leyla: Okay. I've already jumped the gun on this one, but k’oo gets written kāf-oo-vāv, which is actually two words, “ké oo.” “ké” is ‘that’; “oo” is ‘he or she, they’. How do you translate “oo”? 

Omid: Yeah, it depends on the context. 

Leyla: Okay. 

Omid: Yeah, it's ‘he, she, it, they’, but you’ve got to kind of figure out what fits best in the context.

Leyla: Right. “khabar ārad zé matloob andakee.” Okay, let's go through this. This is also one of those. 

Omid: “khabar ārad,” let's talk about “ārad” for a moment. “ārad” is really “āvarad.” It's kind of like a shorter version of this word, “āvarad,” which means ‘to bring’, so “khabar ārad” is ‘to bring news’. “khabar” literally means news or information, but in the context of mysticism, it also means ‘awareness’. It's a really very important word and concept and really kind of the key to the ultimate thing that the moths are looking for, a kind of awareness, a kind of consciousness. It repeats many times, as we will find in the last few verses of the poem, but here in the early part, “khabar” is really set as kind of the main thing that is necessary, thing that we need. We need “khabar.” We need someone to go and bring this news or information, but more deeply, awareness of the “matloob,” and we can talk about “matloob.” We had “tāleb” before earlier in the previous verse. “matloob” is also from the same root, “tāleb,” but “matloob” means that which is being sought, that which is being kind of looked for. “tāleb” is the object form, which is the ‘seeker’, and “matloob” is that which is being sought, the object of desire. More poetically, that object of desire in Persian mysticism is also referred to often as “ma'shoogh,” the ‘beloved’, the ‘object of my love’. Here, “matloob” means ‘the object of my seeking’, ‘that which I’m ultimately seeking’, which here refers back to the candle. That's what they're all kind of in love with or looking for. 

Leyla: Great, and then what does the “zé” in that “ārad zé matloob”…? 

Omid: Sure, sure, “zé” is another contraction of “az.” “az” means ‘of’ here. Lots and lots of these Persian, small Persian words that show up with many different kinds of meanings in language, as I'm sure you've said before. The prepositions in Persian just can go anywhere and everywhere.

Leyla: Yeah!

Omid: But you know, “zé,” which is “az,” simply means ‘of’ or ‘from’. “khabar ārad zé matloob,” ‘bring news of the object of the desire, of the beloved’. 

Leyla: And then “andakee”? 

Omid: “andak” means ‘little bit’. Then once we add the “yé” again, it's ‘a little bit’, so “andakee” is just ‘a little bit’, just ‘a small amount’, basically. 

Leyla: Great. And we've gone over the song in Chai and Conversation “andak andak"!

Omid: I was just gonna reference that!

Leyla: Of course!

Omid: About this Rumi poem and song that begins with “andak andak,” little by little! 

Leyla: ‘Little by little the people come’. Okay, great! Then I think let's read these first two lines again, just to hear how they feel. And maybe we can understand a little bit more now that we've been going through them. 

Omid: yek shabee parvānegān jam' āmadand.

dar mazeeghee tālebé sham’ āmadand.

jomlé meegoftand meebāyad yekee

k’oo khabar ārad zé matloob andakee.

By the way, if you're going to be a purist and a perfectionist, you would probably pronounce “yekee” as “yakee.” Even though normally we say “yekee,” but you would probably say “yakee” just to rhyme better with “andakee.” Just for the sake of easier understanding, we say “yekee,” just so it doesn’t get too confusing. 

Leyla: I think that a lot of these… it's nice to remember the wordplay that you can do with Persian. You can just really mold it to what you need in terms of rhyme and in terms of the measure. Even the “k’oo” and the “zé” is a good example of that as well. 

Omid: Yeah, exactly, keeping it fluid, as I like to say. 

Leyla: Keep it very fluid, yes, definitely! Yeah, okay, so the third line… 

Omid: shod yekee parvāné tā ghasree zé door. dar fazāyé ghasr deed az sham’ noor. 

Leyla: ‘One of the moths went out’, i.e. flew to a palace, ‘and from a distance saw candlelight glowing in the interior space of the palace’. “shod yekee” or “yakee parvāné”? 

Omid: Here, I would just say it. 

Leyla: Yes. 

Omid: Because we don't have that rhyming issue. 

Leyla: “tā ghasree zé door.” Okay, so we have the word “parvāné” in there. “shod yekee,” ‘became one’, “parvāné,” moth, yes? 

Omid: Right, yes, except “shod” also has more than one meaning, and usually, yes, we have it in conversational Farsi as ‘became’, from “shodan” which is ‘to become’. Actually, in poetry, often, “shod” is used as the verb ‘to go’, so “shod” means ‘went’. 

Leyla: Wow!

Omid: Yeah, yeah, just, again, context clues, but here, it means ‘it went’. ‘One of the moths went’, “shod yekee parvāné.”

Leyla: And then “tā,” like ‘to’. “ghasree,” and “ghasr” is a ‘palace’, and “zé door,” that is ‘very far'. But what does the “zé”…? “door” means ‘far’, right? 

Omid: “door” means ‘far’. 

Leyla: What is the “zé” in there? 

Omid: “zé” here is the same as we had in the previous verse, a contraction of “az,” which means ‘from’. One of the moths goes “tā ghasree,” 'towards', or almost 'to', ‘a palace’. “zé door” means ‘from a distance’, so ‘from a distance’… Now we have to go to the next part of that verse to see what happens from a distance!

Leyla: What happens?

Omid: ‘From a distance,’ yeah. The ‘from a distance’ sets up kind of what happens in the next half of the verse. 

dar fazāyé ghasr deed az sham’ noor.

Leyla: So ‘it looked very far away and' then…

Omid: ‘Looked from far away,’ “zé door,” and “deed” is ‘saw’, but what did it see? “dar fazāyé ghasr.” “fazā” means ‘the space’, kind of… in this case, the interior space of “ghasr,” the ‘palace’. “dar fazāyé ghasr,” ‘in the interior of the palace’, “deed,” ‘it saw’, “az sham’,” again, ‘from', “sham’" is the ‘candle’, ‘from the candle’; “noor,” which is ‘light’. 

Leyla: Well, I wanted to point out that the “parvānegān jam’ āmadand,” and then, in this case, we have just one moth that went out to see this sham’. 

Omid: Exactly, one of the moths, exactly. 

Leyla: So I'm excited to see what that means!

Omid: Yeah, another thing to keep in mind is that with poetry, the order of the words are often kind of inter-… what's the word? Move directions… I don’t need a big word. It's not what you usually expect in conversational Persian. The order of the words is always moved around, so that you have to kind of, if you want to say them conversationally, you have to put them back in order, in a different order. “dar fazāyé ghasr deed az sham’ noor,” if you were to say conversationally, you would say, “dar fazāyé ghasr az sham’ noor deed.” 

Leyla: Right, you would end on the verb. 

Omid: So that reads like ‘from the candle it saw a light’. The words are moved around, but the meaning is the same. Once you understand that, you understand that this moth that goes towards the palace, or a palace, and looks from a distance and sees from that distance within the interior space of the palace that there's a light emanating from the candle… 

Leyla: Okay, and then, should we go over now the fourth line?

Omid: Sure, I just wanted to say one quick word about the notion of ‘palace’ because suddenly, we have this idea of a palace. Where did this palace come from? It just shows up in the poem, and now we understand that the candle is in the palace because that's where, when the moth looks within the palace, is the candlelight. That's a clue itself about what the candle represents symbolically, so it's really asking us to ask ourselves, why is this candle in the palace? What does that say about what the candle might mean or represent in this case? We'll talk about that once we get to the bigger picture. 

Leyla: Okay, so the fourth line. 

Omid: Yeah.

bāzgasht ō daftaré khod bāz kard. vasfé oo barghadré fahm āghāz kard.

Leyla: Okay, “bāzgasht” means you’ve 'returned’, “bāzgasht.” “ō daftaré khod bāz kard,” “daftar,” that's all language that we use now, too. “daftar” is a ‘notebook’, and “khod” means ‘self’, so ‘his own’, ‘his or her own notebook opened’, “bāz kard.” That's all very simple language. 

Omid: So apparently, somehow, the moth has been taking notes in its notebook about the candle and the light on the candle. Good student!

Leyla: Okay, okay, and then, this next line has more complicated language, so I'll let you take the lead on that. 

Omid: Sure, sure!

vasfé oo barghadré fahm āghāz kard.

“vasf” is ‘description’, so “vasfé oo” means ‘the description of he/she or it’. In this case, the “oo” refers to the candle, so the description of the candle. 

Leyla: And is “vasfé” a word that we would use in conversation now? 

Omid: Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit bookish, but not so much. I mean, I think it's… it's a fairly common word. “vasfé” something is just a ‘description of’ something, so “vasfé oo,” ‘the description of that’, which here is the candle. “barghadré fahm,” “barghadré,” “ghadr” is a ‘measure’ of something, right? In Farsi, we say “cheghadr,” or “cheghad” to be really conversational about it, but really, the correct is “chegadr,” ‘how much’ of something. It's a word that refers to the amount of something. “barghadré,” “bar” is one of those prepositions that means a thousand things here. It means ‘to the extension’, ‘to the amount of’, ‘commensurate with the amount of’, ‘as per the amount of’ what? “barghadré fahm,” “fahm” is a wonderful word that means generally ‘understanding’, the kind of awareness, or again, understanding of something. “fahmeedam,” ‘I understood’, so “barghadré fahm” means ‘based on or to the extent of its own understanding’. Yeah, and then “āghāz kard,” ‘began’. “āghāz” means ‘beginning’, so “āghāz kard” means ‘it began’ something. What did it begin? It began the “vasfé,” it began to describe, it began to kind of talk about and describe, “oo,” the candle. The moth begins to describe the candle, but how much of the candle can it describe? “barghadré fahm,” ‘to the extent of its own understanding’.

Leyla: Okay, so now, I think, let's read that third and fourth line together, like we did, just to hear how it feels!

Omid: 

shod yekee parvāné tā ghasree zé door. dar fazāyé ghasr deed az sham’ noor. 

bāzgasht ō daftaré khod bāz kard. vasfé oo barghadré fahm āghāz kard. 

Leyla: Hmm, and that's a good cliffhanger there. What is it going to describe? 

Omid: What is it going to describe? We have to remember that this moth has only experienced the candle from a distance. Remember “zé door”? How much will a moth know of a candle when it has only experienced the candle from a distance? We can kind of… not to spoil anything, but we can kind of expect how much understanding will this moth have.

Leyla: And why is the flame in the castle, in the palace?

Omid: In the palace, also a good question! 

Leyla: Lots of good questions. 

Omid: Dun dun dun! 

Leyla: Yeah, yeah, but it is amazing. Like you said, he's from the 12th century, Attar, and it's, I always say, how amazing it is that we can still read this and understand it at all! And so clearly, you know, someone with even rudimentary understanding of Persian can come to understand these poems, and that's amazing.

Omid: Absolutely, and I think actually, if we're going to do the comparison to Shakespeare, I don't think Shakespeare is as easy to understand even if you are very well versed in modern English, whereas the more you know modern Persian, the more you can still go back and understand. This language is not that different from what we use today. Certain words, of course, are more archaic, but generally, it's the same. 

Leyla: Absolutely, and, I mean, there's a big difference between written and spoken Persian in general. A lot of the differences here are also that, not just because it's a poem, the orders and all that kind of stuff, so that's very interesting.

Okay, well, that's it for our first four lines! We have a lot to think about this week, and then, like I said, we have the PDF guide. I urge everyone to go back and look at all these, get to know each of these words and phrases. On our additional learning resources, we'll have each of these lines individually so you can listen to them over and over again throughout the week and really get to know the language of this before we come back next week to read the next four lines. I think that's a wonderful introduction to the poem, and is there anything else you'd like to add, omid jān, to this lesson? 

Omid: No. I'm excited to explore more together and see what happens to this moth and the rest of the moths as well!

Leyla: Yes, wonderful, and like we said, we'll link to YOUniversal on the show notes for this lesson as well, so you can learn more about Omid and his project. We'll be back next week with more of Attar’s Parable of the Moths That Wanted to Know More About Their Beloved.

Omid: Thank you, Leyla. Thank you so much!