Culture | Attar's Parable of the Moths, Part 1
Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation
Chai & Conversation
4.9 • 548 Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation, we begin a brand new series on one of the most powerful mystical stories in Persian literature: The Parable of the Moths by Attar, taken from his masterpiece Conference of the Birds.
I'm joined by the brilliant Omid Arabian of YOUniversal Center, who walks us through the first 4 lines of the poem—exploring its language, imagery, and deeper meaning.
This lesson is perfect for those with some background in Persian who want to experience the richness of mystical poetry and engage with timeless questions of love, longing, and transformation.
📄 Download the accompanying PDF guide: chaiandconversation.com
🎧 Listen to the second episode of our podcast: Spotify link
🔗 Learn more about Omid’s work: YOUniversal Center
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Learn Persian with Chaiang Conversation, Atar's Parable of the Moths that me today. |
| 0:40.8 | Salam, al-Hanom, I'm really happy and honored to be. |
| 0:43.7 | Yeah, we've been talking about doing this for so, so long, so I appreciate your patience. |
| 0:48.3 | This is a really important project. |
| 0:50.0 | I'm very excited about it. |
| 0:51.3 | And so today what we're going to be talking about is we're going to talk about Atars, |
| 0:55.0 | Parable of the Moths, for short. |
| 0:57.5 | And this is for our more experienced Persian language speakers, |
| 1:02.8 | because similar to the poetry program that we have, |
| 1:05.7 | we are going to be going through the entire parable, |
| 1:08.5 | which is 16 lines that Omid has chosen for us. We're going to be |
| 1:12.5 | going over it in Persian and in English, and then we will be going over the overall meaning of |
| 1:18.2 | the parable and the words and phrases in them, but we're not going to go into as much detail |
| 1:23.3 | as we do in the poetry program, which is for complete beginners. This is more about using the language to understand the meaning of this poem. |
| 1:30.7 | And so I'm super excited to do this, this project, long time coming. |
| 1:34.9 | And with that, Omidjan, can you introduce yourself and tell us who you are and what you do? |
| 1:39.8 | Sure, my pleasure. |
| 1:41.1 | I am Omidana Beyond. |
| 1:42.2 | I am the co-founder and director of Universal Center. |
| 1:46.0 | That's Universal with the Y-O-U, so it is about you in the end. |
| 1:50.0 | And our mission is basically to help more of our fellow human beings access the message |
| 1:57.0 | and the ideas of primarily the Iranian mystics, like Rumi, like Hafez, like Atar, |
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