“Meditations” Reviewed

In Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj, out this year from Chax Press, Pierre Joris offers his own meditations on the mediations facing his text. In a note occurring after the ninety pages and forty meditations, we’re let in on the procedure. These are translations of Mansur al-Hallaj, a “tenth century revolution poet, sufi teacher & thinker [who was] executed (after much torture) in a Baghdad jail” (91). These are also translations of translations of translations. al Hallaj’s crime, we’re told, was “to have said ‘ana al-haqqq’ or ‘I am the truth’—an expression that traditionally names one of the attributes of god” (91). Although in complicating al Hallaj’s claims to the Godhead’s singular linguistic authority, Joris finds his (and by extension our) access to the poet profoundly fractured.

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