Steganographic Poetry

In vītā arcāna mea altē cēlā.

Ā tēipsō abde meās rēs etiam.

Sī vīvās, mē abde velut vīta illa,

Et dux fideī infidēlitās iam mea sit.

Translation of Rūmī’s quatrain #1472, Foruzanfar, ed.; 

pg 27 in Houshmand’s Moon and Sun; 

quatrain #874 in Gamard’s The Quatrains of Rumi.

See blog entry for October 31, 2021 about Latin and Persian poetry. Note: from this

blog entry on, I will no longer use end-rhymes.

اسـرار مــرا نــهانــی انـدر جـان کـن

احــوال مـرا ز خویش هـم پــنهان کن

گر جان داری مرا چو جان پنهان کن

این کــفـــر مــرا پـــیش رو ایـمان کن

asrār-e marā nehānī andar jān kon

ahwal-e marā z xīsh ham panhān kon

gar jān dārī marā chō jān panhān kon

[w]īn kofr-e marā pīsh-ravā-y īmān kon

Hide my secrets within life.

Hide even how I am from you.

If you’re alive, hide me like life.

And this faithlessness of mine, make it the leader of faith.

 

An important word in today’s poem is jān [جان], pronounced like “John.” Jān means “life, soul, life-force, spirit, mind, courage, dear one.” In other words, jān is a name for the essence of life, the being of being. In this poem, it also seems to be a place where you can hide your secrets as well as yourself. 

Perhaps, instead of “secrets” I should translate asrār [اسرار] as “mysteries,” since we often talk about life as a mystery. Rūmī seems to be saying that he has mysteries and he wants these to be hidden in the life force. But how do you hide a mystery within life, which is a mystery itself? Does the answer lie within the word “hide”? 

There are all kinds of ways to hide something. You can conceal the thing, you can camouflage it, you can, if a message, encode it. Some Persian texts have instead of the usual word for hide [نهانی nehānī], a very rare word, a word not in the best Persian dictionaries: nehāna [نهانه]. However, a search online gave translations that have to do with steganography—a word unknown to me before yesterday. Steganography (a sixteenth-century word) is used today for encoding information on a computer. Originally it had to do with concealing a message within another message, as in WWII when the BBC broadcast innocuous, often silly-sounding messages in order to convey vital information to fighters in occupied France.

So, what if Rūmī is asking to be encoded in the life force, to become part of the message of life? In other words, to disappear from view, to become hidden and one with something greater? This is pretty dangerous stuff—talking about messing with the DNA of life, even of faith and religion. This gets too close to God, too close to Him, to being like Him. Ana al-haqq [انا الحق], “I am the Truth” (read: “I am God”) was the cry of one mystic who was prompty carted off and hanged. But this impiety is essential to mystics. Thus, Rūmī calls on such superficial faithlessness to be his leader of faith. The paradox is only apparent. The implications enormous. (See Gamard's note on pg 272 of his book about infidelity being an advanced state of mysticism, outwardly impious but inwardly deeply religious.)

Brandon Stone, my friend in reading Persian literature, pointed out several other facets to the quatrain, as he attempted to answer these two questions: From whom do we hide these secrets? and Why do we hide them? Brandon writes: 

The first three lines may be different ways that the speaker beseeches someone (the Beloved? God?) to hold his secrets and conditions and his very person in confidence. "Hide me!," he asks. But in the fourth line he asks that his impieties, his faithlessness should become the leader of the faith. Which seems very odd.

I can only reconcile these points by supposing that putting his worst features on public display (as the leader of the faith) is a trick to conceal the secrets of the faith. Why do that? Maybe to deflect the attention of those who cannot and will never understand the secrets, but who will only persecute those who live by those secrets. You say something close to this (but different) in your own comments. 

One other part of my argument is that what Rumi means by "impieties" might actually be the same as the behavior of "regular people." So Rumi's "impieties" might actually refer to the hypocritical piety, lies, cruelty, intolerance, and cluelessness of most everyday folks, as well as most religious leaders. Thus, a member of any in-group might find it safer to thread the needle of everyday life by publicly showing his "impieties" in order to "pass" in polite society: a hippy might cut his hair; a jazz musician might wear "civilian" clothing and eschewed his dark glasses; a qigong master might not mention or demonstrate his abilities except to trusted initiates, etc. The last line, then, would be read as an ironic statement, easily understood by those in the in-group, those in the know:

Let my "straight behavior" (i.e., my "impieties") be our guide to faith, (at least in public). Perhaps a simpler reading would be, Let my "impieties" be our guide to faith, i.e., Let my hidden spiritual practices be our guide to faith. It might come down to how many layers of irony are intended. Sort of like when various in-groups invert the meanings of "bad" and "good" so that "good music" is referred to as "bad," and interesting jazz passages are called "filthy." "Impiety," then, could be taken straight, to mean behavior that is literally bad, evil, etc. Or "impiety" could be taken to mean the opposite, i.e., [wink, wink] the behavior of the knowing Sufis. It gets deep!

Finally, Brandon wonders whether it is possible that this poem was written for his followers or students. If so, the poem serves as a guide to their behavior in front of non-Sufis.

Here is a free translation:

Encode my mysteries within the life force

Hide even from you where I am on this journey

You have that force, so hide me just as it is hidden

Make this religious outrage a guide for faith  

And now a post scriptum for the blog of December 29, 2021. Brandon Stone, pointed out to me that the takhalos, a word for a poet’s pen name, is used by the poet to talk about himself. Thus the last line of the poem should be punctuated like this:

 

“It can be seen.” It can’t be said, Rūmī. 

In other words, it is the wise old man who says that it can’t be seen, but it is Rūmī chiding himself by writing that it can’t be said. Brandon Stone is right. But before I genuflect, I will just give a nod, hoping that I find a poem which shows that I might be right, too—that the takhalos can be used as a term of address by someone other than the poet.