Classical Persian Poetry Research Articles

Mahsati of Ganja's Wandering Quatrains: Translator's Introduction

Mahsati of Ganja, whose name combines the old Persian words for moon (mah) and lady (sati), is among the most famous of all classical Persian woman poets. Born in early twelfth century Ganja, at that time the literary capital of Azerbaijan, Mahsati pioneered the rubā’iyyāt (quatrain) form. Best known to an Anglophone reading public from Edward Fitzgerald’s translations of Omar Khayyām (d. 1131), rubā’iyyāt is the plural of rubā’i (“four”), an Arabic word denoting two verses bound together by an aaba rhyme scheme. The rhyme scheme admits of variations, such as aaaa (employed in four out of the ten poems translated here). Mahsati shares much in common with the elder poet-astronomer: a pessimistic orientation to life, distaste for organized religion, impatience with social mores, a predilection for transgressing convention through wine-drinking, and a preference for authorial anonymity, which has accounted for many misattributed poems in the case of both poets (see Sharma 2007; Davidson 2004). Mahsati is distinguished from Omar Khayyām, and, for that matter from most of her Persian predecessors and contemporaries, by one major biographical detail: alone of the major medieval Persian poets, she was a woman. Scholars will always debate the relevance of gender to Mahsati’s literary output. Some will decide it is better to foreground her seemingless gender-free genius for poetic form; others will regard this as evasion, but that Mahsati’s body inflected her words no less than Marina Tsvetaeva inflected hers cannot be denied. The question is how the gendered inflection affected her verse. Persian does not distinguish grammatically between male and female, even for pronouns, so, context aside, there is no way to determine whether the lover or speaker in any Persian text is male or female. For a true connoisseur of this tradition, this difficulty is in fact the point: you are not supposed to know; ambiguity is classical Persian poetry’s highest aesthetic value (see Davis 2004). Gender ambiguity does however create a challenge for the translator; American and British poets, especially in the modern age, tend to prefer to concrete rhythms of daily life, just as their readers assume that the more literal the poetry, and the more obvious its referents, the better. The closest approximation in American literature to Mahsati’s aesthetic preference for “telling it slant” may be the studied indeterminacy of Wallace Stevens, or Emily Dickinson. Mahsati’s rubā’iyyāt will fare best in English when read with a non-literalistic aesthetic, and without any attempt to reduce her multivalent texts to singular meanings. Mahsati’s poems deal with sex, divinity, death, and love all at once, even and especially when they seem to be occupied with other subjects. This is thematically and formally true;

Hafiz and the religion of love in classical Persian poetry

Hafiz and the religion of love in classical Persian poetry

Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

Mul "Wine" in Classical Persian Poetry

AbstractThe paper examines the historical and literary characteristics of mul "wine" in Persian poetry. Unlike may, which is a wide-spread term denoting "wine" in New Persian, mul is never employed in the writings of many outstanding representatives of Persian poetry—from the early period until Rūdakī and Daqīqī. The first occurrences of this lexeme are attested in the Shahnameh by Firdousū.

Recite in the name of the red rose: poetic sacred making in twentieth-century Iran

Recite in the Name of the Red Rose introduces Western readers to constructions of the sacred in twentieth-century Iranian poetry. Sifting through the lives and writings of modern and classical poets, Fatemeh Keshavarz provides a systematic examination of the array of religious impulses in recent Persian verse. Viewing poetry as the site of the emergence of the self and the sacred, she confirms that sanctification is not static in its forms but continuously in flux and that the poetic modes used to articulate the sanctified are equally fluid. Keshevarz begins by introducing the core concepts that define and detach religion and secularity in contemporary Iranian society. By thoroughly discussing the nature of classical Persian poetry she makes clear that expressions of the sacred in verse have been open to negotiation and change even in the premodern period. However, in Iran's modern poetic landscape Keshavarz uncovers many new patterns of expressing the sacred. In individual chapters on the writings of Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967), Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1981), and Ahmad Shamlu (1925-2000), she discusses the paradigmatic ways prominent poets of the twentieth century have related to the sacred in a nation forging its vision of modernity. While most scholars perceive current Iranian culture to be sharply divided between literalist conservatives and secular progressives, Keshavarz identifies provocative shades of spiritual expression less rigidly defined and hence neglected by the established critical tradition. Bringing such expression to the fore of scholarly attention, her study invites a more nuanced appreciation of the crosscurrents of religion and literature in recent Middle Eastern culture.

Classical Persian

Classical Persian Olga Merck Davidson (bio) The study of oral traditional elements in Classical Persian poetry was recognized by Albert Lord (1986:476). The monumental poem known as the Shâhnâma of Ferdowsi is a case in point. Its poetic diction reveals a system of phraseology that approximates Lord’s definition of the formula in oral tradition studies (Davidson 1988). To the extent that formulaic structure is a basic feature of oral traditional poetry (Lord 1960), the diction of the Shâhnâma provides conclusive evidence for the oral traditional poetic background of this poem. In the study of Classical Persian poetry, the concept of oral tradition is problematic for those who assume that “orality” and “literacy” were incompatible in medieval Persian civilization (see Davidson 2000 for a survey of the ongoing debates). But recent work on oral traditions has made it clear that the essence of oral poetry does not depend on the absence of writing. In his later works, especially in Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (1991) and The Singer Resumes the Tale (1995), Lord showed that there exist patterns of coexistence and even compatibility between literacy and oral poetry in various poetic traditions. Lord’s focus was on medieval Western European traditions, but there are striking parallels in Persian medieval traditions (Davidson 2000). Perhaps the most dramatic parallel is the conceptualization of oral performance in terms of a written book. The Persian Shâhnâma, which in fact means “Book of Kings,” is not only an actual book that records the composition of the master poet Ferdowsi; it presents itself as a figurative performance, describing itself simultaneously as an ongoing performance and as a book waiting to be activated in performance. So also in medieval French and English traditions, among others, the concept of the book is linked not only to the recording of performance but also to the performance itself (Davidson 1994). An essential feature of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâma is its performativity, which is expressed by the poetry itself in its various references to the authoritative performance of its stories by performers conventionally [End Page 244] described as wise men who know by heart the traditions of the poetry that conveys the essence of their civilization. A most interesting new direction in oral tradition studies as applied to Classical Persian poetry has to do with the testimony of the prose texts that serve as prefaces to the manuscript versions of the Shâhnâma. These “prose prefaces” are mythologized or quasi-mythologized accounts of the poet’s life and times (Davis 1998). Such myths, however, are also a matter of history. They provide evidence for the historical contexts in which the actual performance traditions of the Shâhnâma took shape; they are in effect aetiologies of the oral traditions that became recorded in the Book of Kings (Davidson 2001). A source for electronic publications on oral tradition studies as applied to Classical Persian poetry and to Near Eastern and Mediterranean studies in general is http://ilexfoundation.org/public/index.html. Olga Merck Davidson Harvard University Olga Merck Davidson Olga Merck Davidson is Adjunct Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Brandeis University. She has published numerous studies on Persian and Iranian oral tradition, including Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings (1994) and more recently Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetry (2000). References Davidson 1988. Davidson 1988 Olga Merck Davidson. “A Formulaic Analysis of Samples Taken from the Sh’hn’ma of Ferdowsi,” Oral Tradition, 3:88–105. Google Scholar Davidson 1994. Davidson 1994 ———. Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Google Scholar Davidson 2000. Davidson 2000 ———. Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetics. Bibliotheca Iranica: Intellectual Traditions Series, 4. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda. Google Scholar Davidson 2001. Davidson 2001 ———. “Some Iranian Poetic Tropes as Reflected in the ‘Life of Ferdowsi’ Traditions.” In Philologica et Linguistica: Festschrift für Helmut Humbach. Ed. by M. G. Schmidt and W. Bisang. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Supplement, pp. 1–12. Google Scholar Davis 1996. Davis 1996 D. Davis. “The Problem of Ferdowsi’s Sources.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 116:48–57. [End Page 245] Google Scholar Lord...

Ahmad Kasravi on economics

Ahmad Kasravi (1890-1946) had a great impact on the intellectual transformation of Iran, and his writings continue to influence the modem generation of Iranians. His enduring importance is evident in the continual reissue of his books, in the number of books, dissertations and articles published about him in Persian, English, Russian, German and other languages,' and in the testimony of many intellectuals of diverse persuasion.' The attention Kasravi has received should come as no surprise. What may need some justification is a study of his ideas on economics - the subject of this article. Kasravi was not an economist; indeed, he noted that he did not know economics.3 There are two important reasons for discussing Kasravi's economic ideas. First, if economics was his weak point, an exploration of his economic ideas may tell us more about the limits of his method of inquiry and his thinking in other areas. In order to have a complete picture of Kasravi's system of thought, one must scrutinize all aspects of his life and work. More important, we may ask that beyond the criticism of Shiism, Sufism, Bahiism, superstition of all kinds, and classical Persian poetry, what did Kasravi envisage as a working model of social life in Iran? The answer to this question hinges on understanding his economic ideas. It is also in this sphere that flaws and inconsistencies in his ideal model can best be observed. Among the scholars who have written about Kasravi, only one was an economist. Most studies of his work have either overlooked his economic ideas or simply summarized their salient features.4 The exception is an article by Katouzian, which reviews the book Kar va Pisheh va Pool (Work, Employment and Money) but does not discuss the economic issues raised in any of Kasravi's other writings. Katouzian's approach is to take Kasravi's ideas on economics and compare them to textbook economics or to Adam Smith's ideas. His Procrustean approach misses the point. Are we to learn economics from Kasravi's writings, or are we testing Kasravi's economic knowledge? Either way it is a futile exercise, since Kasravi himself noted that he had not studied economics - his work criticized the existing economic system and suggested alternative arrangements.

Exile and dissonance: the poetry of Naanaam (Hossein Fazeli)

Naanaam's Poems Represent One Of The Most Subversive, Eclectic, and marginal styles of contemporary Persian poetry written by exiled Iranians. His knowledge of contemporary world poetry as well as classical Persian poetry provides him with solid grounds for a peculiar style that is at once thoughtful and playful, serious and sarcastic, engaged and apathetic, violent and kind. He jolts his readers out of routine readings in a variety of ways: he uses English words in the middle of Persian writings; he parodies the well-known lines by the dominant figures of contemporary Persian poetry; he splendidly highlights the ironies and contradictions of everyday life experiences that we normally tend to take for granted; he antagonizes and subverts all that is dominant, be it poetic style, linguistic norm, Logic, or Truth.

A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry: A Guide to the Reading and Understanding of Persian Poetry from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century

Primal Africa: An Introduction The Aid Debate Belgian Experience: Zaire and Rwanda English Experience: Sudan French Experience: Niger North Africa Experience: Egypt Portuguese Experience: Angola Spanish Experience: Equatorial Guinea A Continent for Tomorrow Bibliography.

Medical Imagery in the Description of Seasons in Classical Persian Poetry

Medical Imagery in the Description of Seasons in Classical Persian Poetry

AḤmad Kasravî and the Controversy Over Persian Poetry

In his extensive work on Iranian society and its problems, Aḥmad Kasravî (1890–1946), Iranian scholar, jurist, and social thinker, identified much of Classical Persian poetry as a major source of those problems. He discussed his views in a series of articles, in public lectures, and in two books dealing exclusively with the subject.1 In addition, he touched on the subject, in passages short and long, in many others of his hundreds of articles and dozens of monographs and books, published between 1934 and 1946, when he was assassinated.2

Ahmad Kasravî and the Controversy over Persian Poetry 1. Kasravî’s Analysis of Persian Poetry

The period between the early 1930s and 1946 witnessed in Iran an intellectual phenomenon unique in the recent, history of that country. This phenomenon was embodied in the person of Ahmad Kasravî (1890–1946), one of the illustrious figures of Iran in the realms of scholarship and social reforms. Kasravî was a man of considerable and varied intellectual talents and great courage. His activities were spread over a very wide range.He became the center of many controversies, not the least important and widespread of which was that concerning classical Persian poetry. It is with this aspect of his work that the present series of papers is concerned.