Masnavis

You are like a fortress of brass with your rules and codes; even imagination fails to force you open. A strange beloved, an odd sort of lover: silent within, yet speaking without. Sometimes you hang your head like a narcissus; sometimes your mouth, like a flower, is stuffed with gold. You pressed your lips shut like a bud because your heart is bound to gold and silver. You have ten tongues like a lily, yet all your secrets stay safe with you. Your form shows in all six directions, an open thing and yet a hidden vault. You never hand your secret to the frivolous, even when your tongue is in others' hands. Like a harp with a hollow belly, your tongue only speaks under the touch of fingertips. You speak softly yet you are stubborn; you give nothing until you have first taken. You never return what is entrusted to you until, from the start, they take charge of you. Until they rub and press your tongue, they will not share their secret with you. Whoever forms a bond with you first ties your tongue for their own sake. I told you: you are bound to gold and silver, once I saw you were a slave to your belly. You swallow everything down at my word; you have given your head over to your appetite. Because of you the scribe keeps his ledger; the treasurer keeps his account upon your head. You were smooth at first, and in the end a line of writing appeared around your lips. Like a shell shut over its inner treasure, your seal is on your lip and your tongue on your head. You have four feet, yet you go nowhere; they nail you to four stakes and you never sigh. Your belly is opened like a woman with child, standing on your feet as if to give birth. You have taken blows without quarrel or war; your four walls are a mint for coining money. Though you have no fear of the pain of poverty, you are battered like this because of silver too. Fortunate is the one in a good state whose treasury has your form. You have bound the old Zal in chains, because his body turned out to be invincible. Whatever you say to friend and kin, you say it all in riddles and hidden tongue. Few can grasp your language, even one who knows a great many sciences. May every grasping long hand be cut short of you; may the mind behind your thought be tenfold sound.

As long as my tongue can move in my mouth, it is busy praising the chief of Lanban. What a chief? That stingy master of deceit, the source of tyranny and the shadow of Satan. Out of sheer greed he never opened that hand; he kept himself wholly wrapped up in miserliness. One whose name cannot be seen for the shame of it; in evil and beastliness he has no equal. He is the leader of thieves, the head and chieftain of hired pimps. An ugly little man with a foul, smelly armpit, head to toe nothing but lies and cheating. He is shameless, a beggar, a keeper of whores, a pickpocket, a thief, a burglar who tunnels through walls. His nature is base, his trade unknown, his company brings ruin, his conduct is despised. That worker of dark deeds who, in broad daylight, would steal the very brightness from the sun. Wherever he passes, he carries off the iron from the wood and the straw from the wall. Like an autumn wind, in a single breath he strips the branches bare of their garments. If the narcissus so much as glances at him, he empties it of its silver and gold. Hand him the purse of a flower bud and he steals its gold away, bit by bit. If he passes by a branch in blossom, he carries off all its silver clean into the air. That donkey would haul off a whole harvest of straw, straw by straw, like a magnet pulling it in. When he stretches out his filthy hand, say, toward an onion, for instance, he strips it of its garments one by one and leaves it naked, like a peeled clove of garlic. And if he sniffs the sweet-scented jasmine, he robs it of its fragrance and leaves it destitute. Out of pure stupid greed he would unfasten the ring of feathers from the turtledove's neck. Were it not for the nightingale's outcry, he would tear the shirt off the flower bud. And unless it crowed and shrieked louder, he would snatch the crown off the rooster's head. If he gathered a dove into his arms, he would pull the trousers off its very legs. If a hoopoe flew onto his roof, he would whisk the crest off its head in an instant. Give him a peacock's tail to hold and he would strip it clean of all its feathers. If his cursed hand struck the sword-blade of the sea, it would empty its depths of every pearl. If he laid his palm upon it, he would not leave the leather binding on a bow. He would steal the magic bead from the snake's mouth, and cut the belt-thin waist off an ant. Even a mountain's mighty flank is in danger any time his path happens to cross it. Give him a whole coin of gold right now and it wanes into loss like a crescent moon. And if his hand ever clasps your hand, he walks off with a sliver of your fingernail. That frantic man is a thief through and through; if only he would settle for stealing just half. When it comes to other people's gold and silver, he holds the creed of a shameless swindler. A man who believes such things, you can judge for yourself how trustworthy he could be. Nothing can be pried back out of his hand, for he is stingy and full of tricks. He hands over nothing to anyone; whatever he gets, he throws at you as a claim against you. Such is his meanness that, if he lived on, he would swallow every last scrap he could scrape together. So miserly is he, so tight-fisted, that even if they cut off his filthy hand, it is impossible that even half a drop of blood would come out of that wretched hand of his. Look at this trustee I picked out, and see what I have suffered from him. Two chests full of gold and silk he carried off from before me in broad daylight. So my eyes and my two lips, full of curses, stay fixed on his back day and night. He took it all and reckons it lawful for himself, yet he still recites my supposed faults. And from the accounts he cooked up all by himself, he has even piled a leftover debt onto me. A man who commits deeds like these, a dead dog outranks him in honor. His breath is colder than the autumn wind; when I so much as recall him, I shiver. He borrows his teeth from a pig, so he can chew on false oaths. He feels no grief at becoming a sinner; without a flinch he keeps swearing oaths. To him nothing at all goes down more sweetly than swearing the triple divorce oath. Look closely: he is a very wolf; the fang of a ravening wolf sits in his jaw. His belly is a sack of garlic and onions; his mouth is a sheath for boar's dung. None of the men of skill has ever seen a ... -guzzling woman with teeth like these. If you saw the shape of even one tooth, you would call it a tongue of hellfire. He never feels the least bit of decency; no shame ever enters his eyes. He is utterly weak in his faith; his grasping hand is harder than his brazen brow. If you roamed through every land of the faithful, and every country of infidels and heretics, in wickedness, beastliness, and dog-faced spite you would find no second to him, however hard you searched. In the eye of reason it is hard to say which is uglier, his face or his character. He is a pimp who for so many years has been raking in gold from the unlawful and the lawful alike, who gives not a barleycorn of it to anyone, and never returns what he has seized. Stranger still, to the men of talent he speaks coldly with those very lips and teeth. He is no worse than the other stingy men; the shame and disgrace belong to all the bosses. His conduct and character are of this sort, and yet he still craves the reputation of learning. He keeps company with cheats and swindlers; odd or even, he is a partner in nothing but wind. If there were no business partner or associate, his own dinner cloth would never spread to feed his belly. Wherever he settles, he is an unbeliever, an unbeliever; wherever he travels, he is a debauchee, a debauchee. That great mustachioed dung-heap, Shihab Umar, that catamite, that petty miser, that cuckold. It is not right to say such a thing, to call the shadow of a demon by the name Umar. The fame of Umar's justice is vast; this man's tyranny is a hundred thousand times as much. How could he ever point the way to the right word, when demons were bound and chained by dread of a shooting star? His very name is offended by his disgrace; so what title could ever suit him? Whoever makes his trade eavesdropping and thieving deserves to be burned like a demon struck by a meteor. He is fit for no office or leadership; he is fit for nothing but punishment. Rejoice, you chief of the village, you lord of nothing; truly, a dog is better than you. How well the sweet-mouthed, silver-bodied beloved suits you, since you strip men of their silver. You, who among human beings have thrown your head into the crowd, what are you doing there? By your talk, or by your table and bread, on what greens would they seat you at their feast? You are a dung-beetle circling the trash heap, not a moth circling the torch. Whoever is famous for asininity like you is not renowned but merely well-fed like cattle. You who are a master among highway robbers, how did you ever stumble into commerce? Since your trade is to plunder it all, why bother counting the ten-percent profit of an honest merchant? Every trait of this man and that is yours; so why do you run left and right? I have profited from your trade; I have gained insight from watching you. Partnership with you is like ascribing partners to God; his hope is like the cold wind of autumn. Your good clings like a fever; your evil spreads like the mange. Since you do not believe in resurrection or the day of judgment, you are free of any care for God or Prophet. For you there is no difference between forbidden and lawful; when would you ever fear sin and its consequences? Why eat the dust of the road and the pain of travel? Go rob the caravan right at the city gate. The people who sit at the head of Lanban see, for someone like you, this as the fitting course. No, I misspoke, I misspoke; why did I even call you a highway robber? By God, those who truly belong to that trade are disgusted by you and your ways. Get away from the company of lords; plant a tree instead: your place is hauling dung around its roots. Go back to mixing mud, you ignorant donkey. How could a merchant's silver ever end up in your hands? Now from Kazerun to Fasa they write of you: 'the most heretical of chiefs.' Your purse grew fat on other people's goods, and your beard filled up with the farts of others. You may shake your head at this account, but you are the shame of Lonban's dung haulers. You keep this state on two miserable scraps: your beard reeks of farts, your head of Lonban filth. Hear one piece of advice from me for once: give my gold back, then go to hell. Since you've already scraped up all my gold, why go on skinning me alive, man? After I gave you gold and coins, did I ever wrong your household in any way? What harm did I ever do you, that I went and made you the master of my affairs? How much longer will you bully us this way? Who even are you, and who are we? I've never once seen your dwelling, nor ever fouled your beard with an insult. In all my life I never so much as put a fart on your mustache, you pimp. Why do you keep torturing me? Why do you leave me stuck in the muck? Whoever raises up a base man is only working to fatten a wolf. How can I call you bear or pig, when I count you as less than both? Though it looked ugly in my own eyes, I have written down the whole tale of you and me, so that whenever they speak of us, this will remain as a memento of you and me. All that I've written, though it runs long, is barely a penny out of a thousand gold coins' worth. My words fall short of praising you; I'm helpless before your praise, what can I do? So from praise I turn now to prayer, for all my talk till now has been nonsense. Since the only cure for a peasant's thick skull is a heavy club and mace, may a stout collar of goat's hair be twisted tight around your neck, may your head bob nimble as a tumbler on the rope, like a little acrobat, may the torturer's rack be granted its wish, to bind your two shins together, whatever the rack has clamped and joined, may its blade then cut clean apart, may they drive spikes under your nails, root to tip, like stakes in a vineyard wall, and, by your wretched fortune, may you rot for ages locked in a black dungeon. And if they ever call out for your release, may it be a Friday, after the prayers, with people on foot and riders crowding all around you in the bazaar road. You strut about with your head held high, while silver comes running behind you. Your head has freed your neck from the yoke, your body has thrown off its burden. And though these words come harshly from me, from now on, may the donkey have its way with your wife. Though this curse brings me no real gain, I had no other means at hand. Lord, do not leave my prayer unanswered: the plea of the wronged is always granted.