Parable of the Moths, Part 3

Leyla: Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation: Attar’s Parable of the Moths Who Wanted to Know Their Beloved with Omid Arabian.

salām omid jān, thanks again for joining!

Omid: Of course, totally my pleasure!

Leyla: Today, we're going to be going over the third part of this Parable of the Moths That Wanted to Know Their Beloved. It might be a little while before you've listened to the first two episodes. We recorded them a week ago, so I know for me, it would be great to get that fresh on our mind. We're going to read lines one through eight, and hopefully, with the discussions of the first two parts, you will understand it a lot better. As we're reading, feel these words and see what images they evoke for you, and remember all the things that we talked about in the last lessons! With that, omid jān, if you can read the Persian… and I'll read the English after you.

Omid: Absolutely.

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, meaning the candle.

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

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

Omid: nāghedee k’oo dāsht dar majma' mahee goft oo-rā neest az sham’ āgahee.

Leyla: A pundit/sage who had a position of authority/honor among them said: this moth does not have a true understanding/awareness of the candle.

Omid: shod yekee deegar gozasht az noor dar. kheesh-rā bar sham’ zad az door dar.

Leyla: Another one of the moths went and passed through the light of the candle. It flung itself towards the candle from a distance.

Omid: par zanān dar partoyé matloob shod. sham’ ghāleb gasht ō oo maghloob shod.

Leyla: Fluttering its wings, it entered into the beloved's radiance, but the candle won out, and it became overpowered.

Omid: bāzgasht oo neez ō moshtee rāz goft. az vesālé sham’ sharhee bāz goft.

Leyla: This moth also returned and revealed a handful of mysteries. It told an account of its close encounter with the candle.

All right, so that was the first, first two weeks that we had. Omid jān, do you want to give a little synopsis of what’s happened?

Omid: Sure, just briefly! As we see, it’s a group of moths that want to know their candle, their beloved candle. They come together, and they decide that one of them needs to go and bring this information, bring this news, some awareness of the candle back for the others. The first one that goes doesn’t get too close to the candle, just sees the candle from a distance, the light of the candle filling the interior of the palace where the candle is situated, comes back, and reports back. This sage or pundit, this wise kind of moth that’s among them basically says, “Well, this is not really true awareness of the moth. This does not really count as knowing the moths,” so the next moth then goes out and passes through the light and gets a little bit closer. Although it’s still not too close, there’s still a distance between the moth and the candle. The heat of the candle kind of overcomes the moth, so it can’t get very close. It comes back, and it tells the other moths also of its own experience and what it has learned of the candle. That’s kind of, I think, where we left.

Leyla: Perfect, okay, so now we're going to get into our third part. We're going to read the next four lines, and as we always do, Omid’s going to read the Persian. I'll read the English, and then we'll go through it line by line, word by word afterwards.

Omid: nāghedesh goft “een neshān neest, ay azeez!

hamchō ān yek kay neshān dādee tō neez?"

Leyla: The pundit/sage said to it, the second moth, “This is not a true sign/ evidence of the candle, my dear. Just like the other moth, how have you presented any sign?"

Omid: deegaree barkhāst meeshod mast mast.

pāyé koobān bar saré ātash neshast.

Leyla: Another moth lifted off. It traveled drunkenly toward the candle, stomping its feet. Joyfully, it sat, landed upon the fire/flame of the candle.

Omid: dast darkash kard bā ātash bé ham.

kheeshtan gom kard bā oo khash bé ham.

Leyla: It took the fire in its arms, embraced it, and lost itself, joyfully united with the fire.

Omid: chon gereft ātash zé sar tā pāyé oo,

sorkh shod chon ātashee a'zāyé oo.

Leyla: As the fire took (enveloped) it, the moth, from head to toe entirely, every part of the moth turned red like a fire.

Wow, okay, so this moth had a very different approach than the first two moths!

Omid: Certainly!

Leyla: Oh, no! Okay, let's go through it line by line and see what happens. It took a turn!

Omid: Going back to the ninth verse:

nāghedesh goft “een neshān neest, ay azeez!

hamchō ān yek kay neshān dādee tō neez?"

It’s a question that the pundit is now asking, but it’s almost like a rhetorical question, like ‘how have you shown any signs of this candle, just like the other moth?’.

Leyla: Okay, so then, “nāghedesh”… so how come it’s “nāghed”? Is this the same “nāghed” that we’ve seen before?

Omid: Yeah, this is the same pundit/sage/"nāghed" that we’ve seen before that is now, once again, commenting on the experience of the second moth, the one that got a little bit closer but still not very close. This nāghed is now speaking to the second moth and calling the second moth “ay azeez,” ‘oh, my dear’. “nāghedesh,” here, the “-esh” at the end of “nāghed” denotes the object of the pundit’s speech. Who is the nāghed speaking to? “nāghedesh.” We would say “nāghed be oo goft,” but poetically, we contract it, and it becomes “nāghedesh goft.” “nāghed be oo goft.”

Leyla: Gotcha, so it's talking to the moth.

Omid: To the moth, exactly.

Leyla: Okay, so “goft” is a simple word meaning ‘said’. “een neshān,” “neshān” is a sign or an evidence, like “neshān-é.” “neshān neest,” ‘it is not…’, and then “ay azeez,” and that's a nice turn. It's kind of derogatory, because it's saying 'you didn't do it, sweetie!'.

Omid: Yeah, it could be read that way, and it could be read as a genuine sign of affection. One could definitely go either way out. Just like when we speak Persian, you have to tune in and see if they mean it sarcastically or genuinely.

Leyla: I mean, but the nāghed is in a position of power, and it's being like “neest, ay azeez!”

Omid: Yeah. It could be a little bit dismissive.

Leyla: Yeah, maybe this is from my experience, if I would hear that in Texas, like “bless your heart!”

Omid: “Bless your heart.”

Leyla: It's never a good thing! It's never, really, but anyway, okay, so then the next line!

Omid: hamchō ān yek kay neshān dādee tō neez?"

“hamchō” is ‘just like’, hamchō. We don’t say it in this way so much in conversational Farsi. “meslé,” usually, these days, that’s what we say, but hamchō is ‘just like’, right, ‘just as’. “ān yek,” ‘that one’, “ān” being ‘that’, “yek” being ‘one’, so “ān yek,” ‘that one’, and that refers to…

Leyla: That last moth that we saw.

Omid: The previous moth, exactly, so “hamchō ān yek,” ‘just like that previous moth’, "kay neshān dādee tō neez?" “kay” here becomes ‘when’, but with our kind of loose meanings and the many, many layered meanings of these kinds of words, “kay” here could also mean ‘how’ or ‘in what way’. It could have that kind of connotation. “kay neshān dādee?” “neshān,” again, ‘sign’, “dādee” means ‘you gave’, so “kay neshān dādee?” ‘when have you given a sign?’ or ‘how have you given a sign?’ or ‘what sign have you given?’, “tō neez,” ‘you also’, “neez” meaning ‘also’ or ‘as well’.

Leyla: Right. Okay, that's pretty self-explanatory, so I think we can move on to the next…

Omid: Great, so just briefly, one more point, which is that then, basically, what the pundit is doing is pointing out the same idea as the previous moth. The first moth, when it went and came back, the pundit said, ‘no, this is not quite it’. Now, the second moth goes. Even though it gets further, the pundit once again says it’s falling short of the true description of the candle, true understanding. Then, the next verse is:

deegaree barkhāst meeshod mast mast. pāyé koobān bar saré ātash neshast.

Leyla: Okay, so “deegaree,” ‘another’, and then “barkhāst.”

Omid: ‘It rose up’, ‘it lifted off’ in a way, if you’re thinking of something that flies, and “barkhāst” is not necessarily getting to its feet. It’s more like lifting off, flying off.

Leyla: And the “barkhāst meeshod mast mast,” so, again, not a way that we would say it in conversation, but "meeshod" means ‘became.’

Omid: Sure, “meeshod,” yeah. “meeshod,” again, we had “shod” before. It has to do with ‘going’, actually, not ‘becoming’, so “meeshod,” ‘it was going/it was moving/it was traveling’. How was it traveling? “mast mast.”

Leyla: And I like that that’s twice. I'm sure we'll talk about that word a lot, but it basically means ‘drunk’. You translated this as drunkenly, but I like that he's… it's just “barkhāst meeshod mast mast.” It's really nice that it's repeated again, “mast mast.”

Omid: Yeah, and I think the repetition, yes, certainly serves the purpose of emphasizing the idea of being drunk. But also, “mast mast,” when you repeat it, it becomes more like an adverb, so to go somewhere “mast mast” is to go somewhere ‘drunkenly’. To go somewhere “koor koor” would be to go somewhere ‘blindly’, so the repetition also serves the purpose of turning it a little bit into an adverb.

Leyla: Okay, got it, and we'll come back to this concept, but let's move on with the line!

Omid: “pāyé koobān.”

Leyla: What does that mean?

Omid: Literally ‘stomping your feet’, and, of course, “pāyé koobān…”

Leyla: “koobeedan,” “koobeedan,” is ‘to pound’, and “pā” is ‘foot’. Okay.

Omid: So ‘pounding its feet’, but, of course, a moth doesn’t have feet! So this expression is kind of the idea of doing something joyfully. “pāyé koobān” is to do something in a mood of celebration, in a mood of joy, in a mood of happiness. That's kind of what it implies, both here and in general. When you do something, “pāyé koobān” is to do it ‘joyfully’.

Leyla: Got it. “bar saré ātash,” so ‘on the head of the fire’, “neshast,” ‘he sat’.

Omid: Right, and again, so the fire doesn’t literally have a head. It’s kind of like ‘on top of’, right? ‘On top of the fire’, “bar saré ātash,” “neshast,” ‘it sat’, going back, referring back to the… ‘it sat on top of the fire’.

Leyla: Got it. Okay, so now let's go back to this concept of “mast mast!”

Omid: I'm sure you’ve talked about this before in the context of other poems, but just to remind ourselves, in Persian mysticism, being drunk has a very deep, symbolic meaning, but if we were to simplify it, drunkenness would be a state of being where you’re liberated from the confines of yourself, from all the usual thoughts and perceptions and beliefs and ideas and concerns about ourselves and our world, the ones that usually fill our head. Everything that usually goes on in here just seems to kind of let off, and we feel kind of free and liberated from that. In that freedom, we come to a state of pure awareness, pure consciousness, which is very, very important to the mystical world because that’s the pure experience of anything, to be purely aware of it, without any labels, without any thoughts, without any judgments, without any pre-conceptions. To be “mast,” to be ‘drunk’, is to just exist in that state of pure awareness. The closest, or one of the closest, words we have in English that would describe that would be something like ‘ecstasy’, which literally means ‘to stand outside yourself’. “mast,” to be “mast,” in a way, is to come out of the usual self with all of its notions, and perceptions and limitations, and to just turn into pure awareness, pure conscience.

Leyla: Now, this is talking about a moth, but, in a lot of the poems of Hafez or Rumi, it's talking about people being “mast,” so is one interpretation… do you ever take it as a literal interpretation? I mean, these were people who were of the Islamic faith, which is, you know, they can't actually drink, so do you think that there's also a literal interpretation of these people being drunk off of wine?

Omid: It’s a very good question. I think we would have to take that case by case. In this case, and especially knowing that we’re talking about a mystical text, in a mystical text, then, drunkenness almost always has the symbolic meaning, not the literal meaning. They use the idea of drunkenness because on some level, we are familiar with what it feels like to be drunk, and all of these connotations are a little bit part of being literally drunk, but then,they transfer this idea into the symbolic kind of reading, which is that you feel all those things, the freedom, the truthfulness, the lightness, but in a way that doesn’t require actually drinking any wine. Hard to imagine being drunk without actually drinking, but that’s the idea.

Leyla: But I often wonder, I mean, they talk about… here, he's like ‘joyfully’, you know, ‘this joyful drunkenness’, and a lot of times, the poems will end with like 'and now I'm pouring two glasses of wine for us to have' like joy and happiness. I have some very religious family members who say “this is only this,” but me reading them, I think, “Well, we can also see it in that way.” Like, you know, it could be that it's definitely that, also this spiritual meaning, but also, he's very literally saying, people are coming to his house and he's pouring wine for them, so maybe it could be that as well!

Omid: Sure, and again, I think for me, it’s very much depending on the context clues and who is the writer, who is the poet, and what are they really saying in the rest of the poem or the story. That really helps, for me anyway, show where is it that I would lean to, towards a more literal reading or towards a more symbolic. Because we know Attar to be very much a mystic and to speak so symbolically in all of his works, then it becomes fairly clear that this is kind of the symbolic understanding.

Leyla: Great. Well, next, when we do some poems together, we'll go over that as well!

Omid: Absolutely!

Leyla: All right, so then is there anything else to talk about this state of drunkenness? I know it's one of the core pieces of Persian poetry. It’s one of those keys, one of those big keys that we need to know.

Omid: For sure, and I think once we get to the end of this piece and we talk about the overall meaning, we’ll talk more about what drunkenness might imply, but this is kind of the basic understanding of it, yeah.

Leyla: Wonderful! All right, next line?

Omid: dast darkash kard bā ātash bé ham. kheeshtan gom kard bā oo khosh bé ham.

Although one could also say “khash bé ham,” just to keep the rhyme with “ātash.”

Leyla: It took the fire in its arms, embraced it, and lost itself, joyfully united with the fire.

Omid: So this verse starts with “dast darkash kard.” “kash” is one of those more archaic words. The word “kash” is what we call today “baghal,” so “dast darkash kardan” is ‘to take something in your arms’, “baghal kardan,” ‘to embrace something’.

Leyla: “dast” is ‘hand’, so again, we have another thing that stomps his feet and now its hands, a moth doesn’t actually have… okay, “dast darkash kard,” ‘it embraced the fire in its hands, its arms’. And in Persian, “dast”…

Omid: Yeah, “bā ātash.”

Leyla: Okay, “dast” is both hand and the whole apparatus of the arm, so ‘it embraced it in its arms’. “bā ātash bé ham,” so “bā,” ‘with’, “ātash,” ‘fire’, “bé ham,” ‘together’.

Omid: Perfect, and then “kheeshtan gom kard.” “kheeshtan,” I think we had it before, ‘itself’, “kheeshtan.” “tan” means ‘body’; “kheesh” means ‘self’. “kheeshtan,” if you take it literally, it means ‘your own body’, but generally, it just means ‘yourself’. “kheeshtan gom kard.”

Leyla: “gom” is the word for ‘lost’. “gom kard,” it’s the compound verb ‘to lose’, so ‘lost itself’, ‘it lost itself’.

Omid: “bā oo,” “oo” goes back here to the fire, ‘with it’, so ‘with the fire’. ‘With the fire, it lost itself’, “khosh,” which is, again, ‘joyfully, happily, pleasantly’, “bé ham,” ‘together’. This notion of “bé ham,” the idea of coming together, is again very, very key here because now, unlike the other two previous moths, this third moth has really come to the fire, and really, almost, as we see now, it is starting to merge, come really together with the flame of the candle.

Leyla: Right, instead of looking at it from a distance.

Omid: And then, just another note verbally here, as I mentioned, the word “khosh,” which means ‘joyful’ or ‘happy’, would kind of normally, be properly pronounced as “khash,” in order to keep the rhyme with the word “ātash,” which appears in the first half of this verse. Then it also… that sound “ātash” and “khash” is also echoed in the word “kash,” which is also… part of poetic beauty and playfulness of it. These words that have the same kind of sound almost, “kash,” “ātash,” “khash,” they come together in the verse and they give it this musicality, which happens a lot in the work of the great poets.Then the next verse is “chon gereft ātash zé sar tā pāyé oo, sorkh shod chon ātashee a'zāyé oo.”

Leyla: Okay, so “chon,” ‘because’, “gereft,” ‘it got’, “ātash zé sar tā pāyé oo,” so “gereft” means ‘got’.

Omid: ‘Took over’, ‘took hold of’.

Leyla: ”ātash," ‘the fire’, so ‘the fire got’… ‘because the fire got’. “zé sar,” “zé” is a way to say “az” shorter. “az” takes too long to say(!), so “zé,” which means ‘from’, and then “sar tā pā,” so ‘head to toe’. “pāyé oo,” ‘of it’, the moth. So that's a pretty easy… those are all words that we use today.

Omid: Perfect. I would only add that maybe “chon” here, again with our funny prepositions, it could mean ‘because’, but it could also mean ‘when’. In this case, both of them could apply, ‘because the fire took the moth over’ or ‘when the fire took the moth over’. Go on.

Leyla: And then we have “chon” again in the next part, where “sorkh shod,” ‘it became red’. “chon ātashee,” which now… what is “chon” here?

Omid: Here, “chon” starts to have the connotation of ‘like’ or ‘as’, so again, a preposition with many different meanings. Even in the two halves of this verse, it carries two different meanings. Here, “chon” is a point of comparison, so ‘like a fire’, “chon ātashee.”

Leyla: “ātashee,” “ātashee,” ‘a fire’. The “-ee” that we add on the end of it makes it into ‘a fire’. “a'zāyé oo,” and what is “a'zā”?

Omid: “a'zā” is the plural of “ozv,” which means a ‘member'. Here, it means a ‘body part’, your limbs, basically your different body parts, so “a'zāyé oo,” it's different body parts. “sorkh,” ‘became red’, “chon ātashee,” ‘like a fire’.

Leyla: Wonderful, okay, that's a big occurrence that happens!

Omid: It sure is, and a very serious contrast to the other two moths, right? This one is going in and fully embracing the fire, and the fire, in a way, it’s taking this moth over to the point where it becomes red, like the fire. It starts to take on the characteristics of the fire, the characteristics of the fire.

Leyla: Right, and it very willingly did it and very joyfully did it.

Omid: Exactly, exactly, the other two had a lot more, well, they had a lot more distance. Then they both got… they both were reprimanded by the sage or at least kind of told that they haven’t had fully the experience. I still want to cut the sage a little bit more slack than you!

Leyla: They got “bless-your-heart”-ed by the sage!

Omid: Exactly!

Leyla: All right, okay, well, I think that that is… Is there anything else that we should talk about about this section, or does that kind of…?

Omid: No, I think it’s great, and I think this really sets us up to see now what happens from here and whether the sage steps in again and has perhaps a different comment to give now that this third moth has a different kind of experience, so we’ll find that out in the next part!

Leyla: Very exciting! Okay, well, thank you, everyone, for listening, and we'll have the show notes for this lesson where you can see all of the vocabulary, the meanings and the notes, on a PDF guide. You can listen to this poem also line by line on the lesson page as read by omid jān here and see it written out in Persian and English phonetic and the translation that he has done of it as well. That's all in the lesson notes. Study it up, and we will be back next week with part four!

Omid: Perfect, thank you, Leyla!