Persian Literature: From the Gathas to Rumi, Hafez, and the Shahnameh
Listen to this, and tell me whether the tradition begins here or not.
Yā ārmaiti, spəntā Ārmaiti, hā vō ī urvānəm stūrācā zarazdāθrācā vohū mānō ārmaitiš hudānō ārmaitiš hudābyō, haθrā vohū vāstryā ārmaitiš ī ašāunąm…
I transliterate badly from the Avestan, but the verse is Gathic, the dialect of the Gathas of Zarathustra. The Avestan, in the original, is metrical: a strophic form of three to five lines, with a fixed syllable count, and a syntax that is famously dense. Most modern readers, even most modern Iranian readers, cannot read the Avestan without a commentary. The Avestan vocabulary is archaic, the morphology is preserved from an Indo-Iranian stage that is older than classical Sanskrit, and the conceptual world — the asha (truth, cosmic order), the druj (the lie), the daena (the personified conscience of the soul), the Chinvat Bridge — is the conceptual world of a prophetic religion that has been refined through thirty centuries of commentary. To read the Gathas is to read the foundation document of a civilisation.
The Gathas are, in my view, the starting point of the Persian literary tradition. The argument is not universal; some scholars would put the start of “Persian” literature at the Old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenid chancery, or at the Middle Persian Pahlavi literature of the Sasanian period. But the Gathas are Persian, in the sense of belonging to the Iranian cultural tradition, and they are poetry of a high order, and any account of the Persian literary tradition that begins anywhere else is, I think, missing something. The Achaemenid Old Persian inscriptions are chancery, not literature. The Sasanian Pahlavi literature is theology and history, with flashes of high poetry. The New Persian literature of the Samanid, Ghaznavid, Seljuk, and Timurid periods is the great classical tradition, the part that is read in the modern world. But the Gathas are the underground stream that feeds the whole.
The standard references in English are Jan Rypka’s History of Iranian Literature (1968), still the most thorough single-volume treatment in English; Ehsan Yarshater’s editorial work on the Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica; A. J. Arberry’s Classical Persian Literature (1958) and his translations; and the more recent de Blois, Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey (vol. V of the Royal Asiatic Society’s Persian Texts series), the working tool of the field. The wider context is in the Persian Culture and Society pillar.
The Sasanian interval
The Sasanian period, 224–651 CE, is the second major stratum of the Persian literary tradition. The principal texts are the Khwaday-namag (the “Book of Lords”), the historical compilation that served as the source of Ferdowsi’s later Shahnameh; the Bundahishn, the Zoroastrian cosmogony; the Denkard, the encyclopedia of the Zoroastrian tradition; the Arda Viraf Namag, the vision of the afterlife; and the Zand-i Wahman Yasn, the apocalyptic text. The Pahlavi corpus is, in part, religious in a way that the New Persian literature is not, and the Sasanian literary tradition is theological in a way that the classical Persian poetry of the Islamic period is not. But the Pahlavi tradition is the medium in which the Sasanian state, the Zoroastrian church, and the pre-Islamic Iranian identity were preserved, and the translation of the Pahlavi corpus into European languages, beginning with Anquetil-Duperron’s Zend-Avesta in 1771, is the foundation of the modern academic study of Iranian literature.
The Kalila wa Dimna — the collection of animal fables translated from the Sanskrit Panchatantra via Middle Persian into Arabic and then into New Persian — is one of the most influential prose works of the medieval Islamic world, and its influence on European literature, through the Latin translations of John of Capua and the Spanish translations, was substantial. The story of the tortoise and the geese, the story of the lion and the bull, the story of the four treasure-hunters — these entered European literature in the Middle Ages and have been part of the global Aesopic tradition ever since.
The Samanid spring
The New Persian literary tradition begins in the ninth century CE, in the eastern Iranian lands, under the Samanid dynasty, with the poetry of Rudaki, Daqiqi, and Ferdowsi. The Samanid court in Bukhara saw itself as the heir of the Sasanian tradition, and the Samanid chancery deliberately cultivated the New Persian language as a vehicle of literary and political expression. The Samanid court was a small state on the edge of the Islamic world, ruled by a Persian-speaking Iranian dynasty, and the cultivation of Persian poetry was, in part, an assertion of identity against the Arabic-speaking Abbasid caliphate.
The form that became the central vehicle of New Persian poetry was the ghazal, a lyric poem of between five and fifteen couplets, with a single rhyme and a refrain, traditionally devoted to the theme of earthly and divine love. The ghazal was developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by Sanai, Attar, and the early Rumi, and reached its highest expression in the works of Saadi and Hafez. The ghazal was also the central form of the Sufi tradition, in which the earthly beloved was understood as a symbol of the divine beloved, and the wine, the tavern, the nightingale, and the rose were the conventional images of the mystic’s path.
The qasida, the formal ode, was the second major poetic form. The qasida, which was often used for panegyric, satire, and religious themes, had a more public character than the ghazal, and the great qasida-writers of the tradition — Khaqani, Anvari, Unsuri, and Farrokhi Sistani — were the court poets of the Ghaznavid, Seljuk, and Khwarezmian dynasties. The masnavi, a long rhymed couplet poem, was the form used for the great epics and the great mystical poems of the tradition. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Rumi’s Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, Nizami’s five Khamsa poems, and Jami’s seven Haft Awrang are all written in masnavi form.
Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh
Ferdowsi (c. 940–1020 CE) is the national poet of Iran, and the Shahnameh, the “Book of Kings,” completed in 1010 CE, is the national epic. The Shahnameh, a masnavi of more than 50,000 couplets, tells the story of the Iranian people from the creation of the world to the Arab conquest, and its heroes — Jamshid, Zahhak, Feridun, Rostam, Sohrab, Siavash, Kay Khosrow, Bahram Gur, Khosrow Parviz, and Yazdegerd — became the canonical figures of Persian identity. The Shahnameh drew on the Sasanian Khwaday-namag and the prose Shahnameh of Abu Mansuri, and Ferdowsi claimed, with some plausibility, that he had “resurrected” the Iranian heritage with his poem.
I think this is right, but the word “resurrected” needs care. Ferdowsi was not recovering a lost tradition; he was rewriting the Sasanian Khwaday-namag in a New Persian masnavi, with a deliberately archaising vocabulary and a Zoroastrian theological framework, and the Shahnameh is, in part, a politically loaded text. Ferdowsi’s attacks on the Arab conquest and on Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, his eventual patron, who in Ferdowsi’s view rewarded him too stingily for the work of decades, are not decorative. They are the political heart of the poem. The Shahnameh is a New Persian national epic, written in a classical register, in a genre inherited from the Sasanian court, with a Zoroastrian theological structure that survived the conversion to Islam because the Islamic Persian literary tradition had a long memory for the older Iranian material.
The Shahnameh was the most influential book in the Persian literary tradition. It was the school textbook of Persian-speaking children for centuries; it was the model for the great Turkic and Mughal epics of the Islamic world; and its stories were the subject of countless paintings, miniatures, plays, and modern adaptations. The key figures of the Shahnameh — the white-haired hero Rostam, his son Sohrab whom he kills in ignorance, the tragic Siavash, the wise Kay Khosrow — became the canonical heroes of the Persian-speaking world, and the moral vocabulary of the Shahnameh — loyalty, justice, the defence of the realm, the use of force in the cause of right — is still the moral vocabulary of modern Iran.
Rumi and the Masnavi
Rumi (1207–1273 CE), born in Balkh in present-day Afghanistan and educated in Konya in present-day Turkey, is the most widely read of all Persian poets. His Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, the “Spiritual Masnavi,” a six-volume work of more than 25,000 couplets, is often called the Quran in Persian. Rumi was also the author of the Divan-e Shams, a vast collection of ghazals, odes, and quatrains named after Shams-i-Tabrizi, the wandering dervish who became his spiritual master. Rumi’s poetry, full of images of the whirling dervish, the reed flute, the nightingale and the rose, the tavern and the wine, has been translated into every major language, and the opening reed-flute lament — “Listen to this reed, how it complains, telling a tale of separations” — is one of the most quoted passages in the modern world.
The Masnavi is a difficult book, and not only because of its length. It is a poem in which Rumi is, as he says, “the reed that has been cut from the reed-bed,” and the central image — the reed flute, cut from the bed of the garden, lamenting its separation — runs through all six volumes. The Masnavi is also a Sūfī textbook, full of stories, parables, and digressions, and the order of the material is not always the order a Western reader would expect. Reynolds Nicholson’s 1930s translation, in eight volumes, is the standard English version. The newer translations by Franklin Lewis, the essays of Annemarie Schimmel, and the more recent Coleman Barks versions are useful as a contrast.
Hafez and the Divan
Hafez (c. 1315–1390 CE), the great ghazal-writer of Shiraz, is the most quoted of all Persian poets, and his Divan-e Hafez is the most widely used book of fortune-telling in the Iranian world. The Hafez omen, the practice of opening the Divan at random to receive a verse as a guide to action, is one of the most distinctive cultural practices of the Persian-speaking world. Hafez’s poetry is technically perfect, and his verses combine the erotic, the mystical, the political, and the satirical in a manner that has resisted exhaustive interpretation. The famous “I have no learning in the school of love, the lesson I have learned is from a cup and a beloved’s curl” is a single ghazal, and a translator’s lifetime can be spent on it.
Saadi, Nizami, Jami
Saadi (c. 1210–1291 CE), the great ethical poet of the Persian tradition, is best known for the Bustan, the “Garden,” and the Golestan, the “Rose Garden,” two works of ethical and didactic poetry that have been the school textbook of Persian-speaking children for centuries. The Golestan, a prose work interspersed with verse, is one of the great works of Persian prose, and its anecdotes, jokes, and ethical maxims have become part of the everyday vocabulary of the Iranian world. The English phrase “talking like a book of Saadi” — the cliché to which early British orientalists gave currency — was popularised less by Edward FitzGerald (whose fame rests on Omar Khayyam) than by earlier translators such as William Jones and Gladwin, whose prose versions of the Golestan circulated widely in the eighteenth century.
Nizami (1141–1209 CE) of Ganja, in present-day Azerbaijan, was the great master of the romantic masnavi, the long rhymed couplet poem that combines love, heroism, and mystical teaching. His five poems, the Khamsa — the Makhzan al-Asrar, the Khosrow va Shirin, the Layla va Majnun, the Haft Peykar, and the Iskandarnameh — became the model for the romantic tradition in Persian, Turkish, and Indian literature. The story of Layla and Majnun, in particular, became a model of tragic love that was adapted by poets in Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and the modern European languages.
Jami (1414–1492 CE), the last of the great classical Persian poets, was a Herat-based Sufi master and scholar who produced a Haft Awrang, seven masnavis in the Nizami tradition, as well as a Diwan of ghazals, a collection of prose works, and a number of biographical and mystical treatises. Jami’s work marks the end of the classical period and the beginning of the later tradition, which was characterised by greater emphasis on Indian, mystical, and literary forms.
What we don’t know
The hardest question, I think, is the question of the audience. The classical Persian poets — Ferdowsi, Sanai, Attar, Rumi, Saadi, Hafez, Nizami, Jami — were court poets, Sufi masters, or both. The audience for their work was the educated class of the Persian-speaking world: the dawawin (the chancery officials), the ulama (the religious scholars), the shaykhs (the Sufi masters), the merchants, and the educated women of the household. The wider reading public is a modern phenomenon, made possible by the printing press and by the spread of literacy. The Golestan of Saadi was, in its own time, a court text, not a school text, and the Hafez omen is a modern, broadly based practice. To read the classical Persian poets as if they wrote for a “people” is, I think, anachronistic. They wrote for a court and a learned class, and the reception history of their work is part of the modern history of the Persian-speaking world, not the medieval one.