“The Raven’s Gait”

Last updated on: February 17, 2020 at 11:22 pm by Dan Peterson

“The Raven’s Gait” 2020-02-17T23:22:28-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Some time ago, I participated in a Mormon-Muslim event at this mosque in Tucson, Arizona (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I’m using portions of Munther A. Younes, Tales from Kalila wa Dimna: An Arabic Reader (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989) as material for one of my classes. The Kalila wa Dimna is a collection of animal fables, the core of which derives originally from India. It was translated into Middle Persian and then famously rendered from Middle Persian into Arabic and probably supplemented with an undetermined number of original Arabic tales by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. ca. AD 756 or 759). Kalila wa Dimna is generally considered the first great literary masterpiece of Arabic prose.

Munther Younes’s “reader” is a selection of stories, somewhat simplified but graded by increasing length and difficulty, from the original by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘. So what you’ll get in just a second — a translation of Younes’s retelling of the early medieval Arabic — is a few times removed from the eighth-century first version, to say nothing of the intermediate Middle Persian translation and the Sanskrit basis before that. But I give you my rendering of the short and simple little anecdote that appears first in Tales from Kalila wa Dimna. I think it both charming and, despite its brevity, meaningful:

There was a raven who lived in a tree, and in the tree there were many other birds. One day, the raven looked beneath the tree and saw a partridge walking. And he fell in love with its gait. The raven said to himself, “I want to walk like this partridge.” So he tried and he tried, day after day. But he was unable to walk like the partridge. Then he tried to return to the gait to which he was accustomed — and he found that he had forgotten it. His gait had become the ugliest gait among the birds. It was neither the gait of a raven nor the gait of a partridge.

***

And here are three links of vaguely Middle Eastern relevance:

Religion News Service: “A priest’s anti-Muslim comments reveal US Catholics’ Islamophobia problem”

From The Times of Israel: “The Jewish nightmare of Bernie vs. Trump: In his first months in office, President Trump emboldened the far-right fringe. President Sanders would do the same with the far left”

The Dispatch: “Religious Liberty: Not Just for Social Conservatives: An Arizona federal court flips the script.”

Posted from Phoenix, Arizona

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