PODCAST #31: THREE PARABLES ABOUT JESUS            

My latest book, Persian Poetic Renaissance: 15 Sufi Poets in “Verse Interviews” contains 3 parables about Jesus that are delightful, highly original poetic masterworks. The poets are Nizami (on Jesus and the Dead Dog), Goethe (on Jesus, Peter, and the Horseshoe), and Attar (on Jesus and the Soup Pot). For context I may add: greatly respected as a teacher and prophet, Jesus in the Qur’an is called Messiah and said to have been born of a virgin.            

By each of the 15 poets I chose to translate for this book (from Joseph Hammer’s German encyclopedic anthology of 1818 containing 200 poets) I offered 7 poems, and I added to each a verse “reply” and a more broadly focused interpretive “blogatelle.” In this podcast I’ve chosen to read my “reply” to Attar’s Jesus parable to explore the psychological implications, and in my supplementary podcast comments I offer possible tie-ins with the Sufi teaching of the ultimate unknowability of both our own essential selves and the Ultimate Being in Whose likeness we are fashioned.