Chasing away the dogs

Time, Place

In the spring of 1956, when Dag Hammarskjöld recorded in his private journal the striking aphorism in this week’s edition, he might well have been in the Middle East conducting shuttle diplomacy. The aphorism has the scent of the desert in it, and the scent of the long history of desert peoples. The armistice agreement of 1948 between Israel and its Arab neighbors had been increasingly ignored: Arab fedayeen guerrilla attacks at borders were answered by Israeli military attacks, and military attacks by fedayeen attacks in a vicious circle promising wider violence. The Security Council sent Hammarskjöld on a mission to restore adherence to the armistice. He did well, he earned the trust of the Egyptian and Israeli leaders, Gamal Abdel Nasser and David Ben-Gurion, and things quieted down. For a few months. Then everything flew apart again in a burst of deception and violence: the Suez Crisis had begun.

Hammarskjöld wrote:

On the field where Ormuzd has challenged Ahriman to battle, he who chases away the dogs is wasting his time.
(Markings, 1956, p. 128)


Minds that coin aphorisms are of more than one kind. Some see the details of life in a colorful way, and voilà, the aphorism appears. A quick brush stroke, no great depth, but delicious, true, and witty. Others—this was so for Hammarskjöld—come to highly compressed statement by other routes: they encompass complex experience in a single flash of insight, they prefer simplicity and few words to complexity and many. And in Hammarskjöld’s case there is some detectable drive to record a maxim that will serve later as a reminder, a quick way to recall the essence of a lesson learned. Brevity is proof that the lesson has been learned.

Who knows what experiences led him to these few words? He was rarely one to perceive all of the good on one side of a dispute, all of the bad on the other, and the Middle East was no exception. His adoption of the ancient Zoroastrian pattern of eternal struggle between Ormuzd (or Ahura Mazda), the beneficent divinity, and Ahriman, the destructive divinity, is absolutely not symbolic shorthand for the adversaries in the dispute he was attempting to resolve. As almost always, he found positive, sensible impulses somewhere in the agendas of all parties—and on this basis sought their recognition of common ground (see earlier blogs on his view of the search for common ground).

But in the politics surrounding the border violence he must have noticed the handiwork of the two divinities, and must have noticed a tendency—perhaps his own, perhaps evident in others also—to be distracted by trivial issues when the great issue remained urgent and unresolved. From this perception, so valuable to any participant in political processes, came—surely in one fine flash—an aphorism which, once encountered, is unforgettable.

Somewhere toward the end of that difficult spring of 1956, Hammarskjold recorded another aphorism in the private journal: ‘Let me read with open eyes the book my days are writing—and learn.’ (Markings, 1956, p. 131)

The official weekly blog has just ended. But here are two supplementary paragraphs for readers who sometimes enjoy tramping through the scholarly weeds bordering all sorts of clarities. In this instance, two sets of appealing weeds: the remarkable etymology of the word used by Hammarskjöld, Ahriman; and the translation of the aphorism from Swedish. Where word origins are concerned, Middle-Persian Ahriman is said to derive from Early-Persian ‘Angra Mainyu.’ Here is the joy of the thing: Angra is cognate with our 'angry', and ‘mainyu’ cognate with our ‘mind’. And so we can hear nearly lost at the bottom of the word ‘Ahriman’ this meaning: angry mind. Is it ‘angry mind’ that pushes political processes in unhappy or destructive directions? That makes sense.

Translation issues recur frequently in the standard English version of Markings, created by the great 20th-century poet W.H. Auden, who knew no Swedish, in collaboration with a university scholar, Leif Sjöberg. In this instance, the Auden/Sjöberg translation is a marvel—it evokes worlds of meaning, one wouldn’t want any other words. But it fudges a point or two. Here is the Swedish original:

På den arena där Ormuzd tagit upp kampen med
Ahriman spiller den sin tid som jagar bort hundarna.

A literal translation would be: ‘In the arena where Ormuzd has taken up the struggle with Ahriman, he wastes his time who chases away the dogs.’ So it’s an arena, not a field, and the struggle between the gods has already been taken up, it’s not a challenge. And yet… the Auden/Sjöberg translation is beautifully worded, more spacious in its ‘field’ than Hammarskjöld’s ‘arena’, clear and sharp in its use of ‘challenge’. Let’s live with it.

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