Lecture given by Farhang Jahanpour at the Iran Society, London, 21 November 2002
As the English language is becoming the lingua franca of mankind and English literature is exerting a growing influence on other literatures of the world, it is right to look at the sources which have fed this mighty river and have turned it into the repository of world literature. I am sure that I do not need to remind this audience that the Persian language also acted as the lingua franca of a huge area stretching from the Mediterranean right up to the walls of China. Many Ottoman sultans, including Sultan Muhammad the Conqueror, Suleyman the Magnificent and Sultan Selim, were not only familiar with Persian literature, but each of them had a collection of poetry or divan in Persian.
For many centuries, from about the 11th century to 1834, when the British government changed the official language of India from Persian to English, Persian was the language of government and literature in the Sub-continent. The influence of the Persian language spread even further. Ibn Batuta, the great Arab travelle,r writes that when in 800 AH/1397 he went to China, he noticed that in a meeting in the presence of the Crown Prince of China, they were reciting the following poem by Sa’di:
Ever since you have stolen my heart,
I have no other thought but for thee,
Anytime I stand to pray,
You are the Ka’ba towards which I turn.
In this lecture, I do not wish to dwell on the works of leading Iranian poets such as Ferdowsi, Rumi, Sa’di or Hafiz, as I have referred to their work elsewhere.[1] Here, I want to say a few words about some aspects of pre-Islamic Persian literature that have formed the basis of some works in post-Islamic Persian literature, and later on Arabic and Western literatures.
According to T.S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” It might be more accurate to say that great poets conquer what has gone before.
As Shakespeare says, great poetry “oozes from whence ‘it’s nourished,” yet, to use his own beautiful imagery, the fire in the flint also requires to be struck. In that sense, all great literature sustains and inspires the works of those who come into contact with it. Persian literature provided such a function for a number of English poets and writers, and when it was first introduced to the West, it was received with extreme enthusiasm and interest.
One dominant feature of Persian literature for the past one thousand years and more has been its opposition to religious fanaticism and bigotry, stressing the essential oneness of truth behind all religions and advocating the need for love, tolerance, and reconciliation. Another feature of Persian literature has been its love for life, for beauty, music, wine and roses. Even in Iran’s mystical poetry, there is no monkish piety but a jubilant celebration of life as a reflection of the Divine Beauty.
The literary contact between Iran and Britain goes back many centuries. It is interesting that not only the British men of letters but even diplomats and soldiers also produced works of great scholarship. Sir William Jones, Sir William Ouseley, Sir Gore Ouseley, James Morier, Sir John Malcolm, Edward Eastwick, Charles Murray, Sir Henry Rawlinson, Richard Burton, to mention but a few, were diplomats and all became scholars of Persian and played an important role in introducing Persian literature to the West.
Sir Gore Ouseley (1770-1844) became the first ambassador to go out from England to Iran since Sir Dodmore Cotton, ambassador from Charles the First. In 1823, Sir Gore Ouseley assisted in the founding of the Royal Asiatic Society of London. In 1842, he was appointed president of the Society for the Publication of the Oriental Texts. It was under his direction that the Gulistan of Sa’di, with a translation by Francis Gladwin, was printed. Sir Gore’s only printed work was Biographical Notices of Persian Poets, with Critical and Explanatory Remarks.[2]
The first person to truly introduce Persian language and poetry to the English-speaking world was Sir William Jones (1746-1794). Jones was an extraordinary character. He was a judge, a diplomat, a great linguist and a poet. Samuel Johnson called Sir William ‘one of the most enlightened of the sons of men.” Jones should be acknowledged as one of the founders of both comparative religion and comparative literature. He did a great deal in introducing some great Indian masterpieces to the West, but his role as one of the first serious students of Persian studies is also very important. As R. M. Hewitt says in a delightful essay, ‘Harmonious Jones’: [Sir William] takes every opportunity to associate the East and the West. He compares Firdausi with Homer, Hafiz with Petrarch and Shakespeare. His treatment of Islam and Hinduism shows a similar absence of condescension.[3]
At Harrow, Jones had studied Hebrew; this in turn took him on to Arabic, and this to Persian, which made a great impact on his life. His biographer tells us: “His life was permanently changed by his first reading of Hafiz, which acted to him as the Fairie Queene on Keats, and for about six years he engaged in advocating the claims of Eastern poetry…”[4]
His Persian Grammar was published in 1771. Jones’s Persian Grammar became very influential and very popular. By the end of the century, it had gone through nine editions.
He complains that “Thus, while the excellent writings of Greece and Rome are studied by every man of a liberal education, and diffuse a general refinement through our part of the world, the works of the Persians, a nation equally distinguished in ancient history, are wholly unknown to us…” He expressed the hope that this lamentable situation would change. He goes on to say: “By one of those revolutions, which no human prudence could have foreseen, the Persian language found its way into India; that rich and celebrated empire, which, by the flourishing state of our commerce, has been the source of incredible wealth to the merchants of Europe.”[5]
He says that when the servants of the East India Company received letters from Indian rulers, they discovered that they were all written in Persian, and therefore they had to learn Persian. However, Jones points out that in addition to its utilitarian value as the official language of India, the Persian language has to be learnt for its own intrinsic merits. He writes: “The Persian language is rich, melodious, and elegant; it has been spoken for many ages by the greatest princes in the politest courts of Asia; and a number of admirable works have been written in it by historians, philosophers, and poets, who found it capable of expressing with equal advantage the most beautiful and the most elevated sentiments.”
In his other major work, An Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations, Jones again lavished extravagant praise upon Persian literature and wrote: “Persia has produced more writers of every kind, and chiefly poets, than all Europe together.” The Persian language, he went on to say, is “the softest, as it is one of the richest in the world.” Of Sa’di’s works, he said: “A century or two ago, they would have been suppressed in Europe, for spreading with too strong a glare the light of liberty and reason.”
In 1632 the Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic was established at Cambridge; but it is interesting that most of the famous holders of that chair from Professor Storey with his erudite bibliography of Persian literature, to E. G. Browne the greatest Western scholar of Persian literature, to R. A. Nicholson the great translator and interpreter of Rumi and Persian mysticism, and to Professor A. J. Arberry with his numerous works on Rumi, Hafiz, Omar Khayyam and others, were mainly scholars of Persian.
The same story is true to some extent for Oxford University. One of the most distinguished early English orientalists was Thomas Hyde (1636-1703) of Oxford, who became Professor of Arabic and Librarian of the Bodleian. Although Professor of Arabic, one of his main interests was in the ancient Persian religion of Zoroaster. At about 1690, he had translated into Latin the first Ghazals of Hafiz. He is also to be credited with the first translation of a Ruba’i of Omar Khayyam.
Kalila and Dimna
Here, I wish to refer to some remarkable Persian texts that have survived from pre-Islamic times and have exerted an enormous influence both on post-Islamic Persian literature as well as on Arabic and Western literature. One of these remarkable works is the book of animal fables, Kalila va Demna. This book was based on the Indian Panchatantra, which was brought to Iran during the reign of Khosrow Anushiravan (AD 531-570) and in 570 AD it was translated into Pahlavi by an Iranian philosopher and physician, Borzuyeh. The original book consisted of only ten chapters, but the Iranian translator added a further eleven chapters to it. Borzuyeh also wrote a fascinating introduction to the book in which he talked about the essential oneness of all religions. This book was later translated into Arabic by another Iranian scholar, Ibn Muqaffa’ in 750 AD. Later, it was translated again from Arabic into modern Persian and back to Sanskrit as the original had been lost.
A Persian version of this book written in 1500 A.D., under the title of Anvar-i Suheili (The Lights of Canopus), was the source of Fables of Bidpay [or Pilpay] as they are known to most modern Europeans. It cannot be conclusively determined if the original version of this book also inspired the Greek Aesop’s Fables. However, a French translation of Fables of Bidpay in 1644 supplied La Fontaine with a source for his verse parables. A Hebrew translation of that book, later translated into Latin, and from Latin into Spanish, and from Spanish into Italian by a man named Doni, was rendered in English in 1570 by Sir Thomas North, the translator of Plutarch, under the title of The Moral Philosophy of Doni. For long, it was believed that the source was Italian, while in fact it was a translation six times removed from the Persian original.[6]
The Shah-Nameh and the Persian epic
The most notable example of the epic genre was the Shah-Nameh or the Book of Kings, composed in nearly 60,000 verses by the great epic poet of Iran, Firdowsi, the millennium of whose composition was celebrated a few decades ago in Iran and the West. Ferdowsi has been called the Homer of Iran, and his masterpiece is regarded as one of the greatest literary works in Persian. The book deals with the history of 50 Iranian kings from the time of the Pishdadi dynasty to the Arab invasion, which Ferdowsi portrays in a very contemptuous manner.
In 1814, James Atkinson issued his translation of the Sohrab and Rustam episode, when the mighty Rustam unknowingly kills his own son and only discovers his son’s identity after he has dealt the fatal blow. In 1832, Atkinson published an abridgement of the entire book. James Atkinson’s version, as well as Jules Mohl’s translation of the Shah-Nameh into French in 1823, formed the basis of one of the most successful epic poems in English, Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustam.”
Matthew Arnold did not know Persian, but through his brother William D. Arnold, who was Director of Public Instruction in Punjab and through some of his own friends who were familiar with Iran, he gained some knowledge of Persian poetry. In addition to Sohrab and Rustam, Matthew Arnold also wrote a prose essay entitled “A Persian Passion Play”, which deals with the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, which is still enacted regularly in Iran.
The Arabian Nights
Speaking of the Arabian Nights, it is often not realised that the so-called Arabian Nights, or to give them their proper Arabic title Alfa Leila val-Leila or One Thousand and One Nights, were originally based on Hezar Afsaneh or One Thousand Tales, which was one of the first books to be translated from Pahlavi into Arabic.
The fact that the Persians were accustomed to spending their leisure time listening to amusing stories is evidenced by many stories and romances which are left to us from early Islamic centuries, which were based on pre-Islamic Iranian models. These include the famous Khamseh or the Five Books of Romances left to us by Nezami (1141-1203), which include Khosrow-o Shirin about the love between the Sassanian king Khosrow and his Armenian wife Shirin. In another of his romances, Haft Peikar (the Seven Beauties), Nezami writes about another Sassanian king, Bahram Gur, who allegedly had seven wives of seven different nationalities, each of whom entertained the king on one night of the week in her own special palace, decorated to suit her colour. Wearing the national costume of his mistress, the king was entertained by each mistress in turn with different stories in favour of her nationality and her own colour. It has been suggested that these and similar romantic works influenced Islamic Spain and, through the troubadors, paved the way for the appearance of courtly love in European literature.
The same Persian connection is equally true of another major work that had a great influence on the West, namely Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Avicenna (983-1037), “the Prince of the Learned,” whom Dante meets in Hell among the sages who have not recognised Christ, was the author of the philosophical romance, Hay ibn Yakdhan and Salaman and Absal, which was later on taken by the Persian poet Jami as the theme for a love romance which was also translated by Robert Fitzgerald. In this romance, Avicenna speaks about the development of the soul in the form of an imaginary and poetical personage, cut off from society, the development of whose mind was the result of contemplation in tranquillity. This book influenced the Spanish Arab Ibn Tufail, when he wrote a book with the same title as that of Avicenna’s work, on the adventures of an imaginary thinker, also cut off from society.
In her exhaustive study of the influence of these Persian and Arabic tales on the West, M. P. Conant writes: “With the exception of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Orient has given us no book that has become so intimate a part of our imaginative inheritance. “Aladdin’s Lamp,” “Open Sesame,” “Changing Old Lamps for New,” and “The Old Man of the Sea” have entered into familiar household speech.”[7]
What appealed to many English writers was the philosophical and moralistic nature of most oriental tales, the transitoriness of life, the subjectivity of time, personal identity, and so on. Frequent phrases suggest that in oriental thought and imagery, what appealed most forcibly to Addison’s reverent nature was “likeness to those beautiful metaphors in scripture.”[8]
One brief story is quoted by him in the Spectator, to illustrate that life is a pilgrimage and those who pass through it are like strangers and travellers staying in a caravanserai. The Persian story is as follows: A dervish mistakes a palace for an inn, and when the king asks for an explanation, the Dervish says: “Sir, give me leave to ask your Majesty a question or two. Who were the persons that lodged in this house when it was first built?” The king replied, his ancestors. “And who,” says the Dervish, “was the last person who lodged here?” The king replied, his father. “And who is it, “ says the dervish, “that lodges here at present?” The king told him that it was he himself. “And who will be here after you?” The King answered the young prince, his son. “Ah, Sir,” said the Dervish, “a house that changes its inhabitants so often and receives such a perpetual succession of guests, is not a palace, but a Caravanserai.”[9]
Not only did the translation of Persian and other Middle Eastern literature influence British poets, but they could be said to have started the Romantic Movement in the West. When I refer to the term ‘romantic’, I have in mind the start of a new sensibility of which the Romantic poetry was the expression. It exalted Imagination as the noblest of human faculties. Romantic poets – like Persian poets – gave free vent to their imagination and saw the world through their inner eyes rather than through their senses or their rational faculties. Nature is invested with personality; human moods and moral impulses are seen as reflected in it. Romantics see nature through the lenses of emotion, usually coloured with melancholy as well as joy, with nostalgia as well as regret, and above all with spirituality, seeing in it a reflection of the divine.
These happened to be the qualities which permeated most of the Persian literature, from the pantheistic poems of Sa’di,
به جها ن خرم از آنم که جهان خرم از اوست
عا شقم بر همه عالم که همه عالم از اوست
(I take delight in the world because the world is delightful by reflecting Him; I love the whole universe because the whole universe belongs to Him):
to the popular and colloquial quatrains of Baba Taher
به دریا بنگرم دریا تو بینم
به صحرا بنگرم صحرا تو بینم
به هر جا بنگرم٬ کوه و در و دشت
نشانی از رخ زیبا ت بینم
(When I look upon the ocean, I see your face in the ocean. When I look upon the desert, I see your face in the desert. Wherever I look, the mountains, the plains and the gardens, a manifestation of your face I see there). In the mystical poetry of Sana’i, Attar, Rumi and many others, one finds the same feeling of joy in the world as a revelation of divine beauty.
The word ‘romantic’ itself dates from the middle of the seventeenth century. F. W. Bateson, in his English Poetry, writes: “The revolutionary character of the 1650s might almost be demonstrated from the history of one word – the word romantic.” He goes on: “Until 1650, no need seems to have been felt for an adjective for the common word ‘romance’. But between 1650 and 1659, the word romantic is used by no less than seven writers.” It may not be a mere coincidence that the coining of the word romantic coincides with the introduction of Oriental and particularly Persian literature into Western languages, and was in fact used in reference to a Persian translation.
In order to see how literary taste changed from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and how Persian literature featured in this change of attitude and helped to bring about the Romantic Movement, one can look at the reaction of some early critics to Persian poetry. In 1790, when Joseph Champion translated parts of the Shah-Nameh of Ferdowsi, invoking the Persian bard in the introduction to his poem:
Pleas’d if the imitative line should give
In British verse, Firdausi’s song to live…
Strengthen my feeble pinions from thy throne!
To bear thy wonders to the frigid zone,
To lead thee to a world that knows thy name,
Though still unconscious of thy soaring fame…[10]
A leading British critic castigated the work in these words:
“… fictions so romantic, and characters so monstrous as are here introduced in the white giant and his co-adjutors, the Dives and demons with horns, tusks and long talons, lead us greatly to doubt, whether amidst such a mass of absurdity, the vestiges of genuine historical truth can ever be successfully explored.”[11]
This critic misses the point and confuses literature with history. Literature, of course, is history, but in a deeper sense. It is not historiography. It holds a mirror to the history of a culture or a people. This passage is also a clear example of the distaste felt against what the critic calls “romantic fiction”. Yet when in 1853 Matthew Arnold provided a free translation of the episode of “Sohrab and Rustam” based on Jules Mohl’s French translation of the Shah Nameh, it was described by some critics as the greatest example of epic poetry in English.
Many Romantic poets show clear signs of borrowing from Persian literature. One of the poets who was inspired by Jones to study Arabic was Percy Bysshe Shelley. He actually wrote some poems in imitation of the ghazals of Hafiz as translated by Sir William Jones. His poem “From the Arabic”, despite its misleading title, is in fact more an imitation of Jones’s translation of Hafiz. The combination of rhyme and refrain in its opening lines closely approximates the ghazal form:
My faint spirit was sitting in the light
of thy looks, my love;
It panted for thee like the hind at noon
For the brooks, my love.
The poem even imitates Hafiz’s habit of weaving in his name in the last stanza of the poem:
Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind
Than calm in waters seen.
The above lines remind one of the last two verses of a ghazal by Hafiz:
Say not, O friend, to Hafiz, “Quiet thee now and rest!”
Calm and content, what are they? Patience and peace, O where?
Tennyson was not only familiar with Persian poets through English translations, but together with his friend Edward Fitzgerald, he started his study of Persian and finished reading the Divan of Hafiz with the help of Rev. Edward Cowell, a Persian scholar who was also Fitzgerald’s teacher of Persian. In addition to several early poems which show that he was strongly influenced by the example of Lord Byron, such as his pseudo-Oriental poems including “Written by an Exile of Bassorah”, “The Expedition of Nadir Shah”, “Babylon”, “Egypt”, and “Persia”, in his later life he was so imbued with the influence of Persian poetry that some of his own poems read almost like translations of Hafiz. For instance, the following lines:
Then stole I up, trancedly,
Gazed on the Persian girl alone,
Serene with argent-lidded eyes
Amorous, and lashes like to rays
Of darkness, and a brow of pearl
Tressed with redolent ebony,
In many a dark delicious curl,
Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone.[12]
This poem may be compared with a few lines of Hafiz translated by John Hindley, which Tennyson must have been familiar with in the original:
Thy soft down and sweet mole of thy cheek,
Eyes and eyebrows and stature my senses enchain…
On my memory thy locks have a grateful perfume,
Far more fragrant than jasmine’s sweet scents.
While I gaze, not one word can I speak.
Even clearer is the resemblance between the following lines from Maud, which have a more distinctly Persian flavour:
She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.[13]
The above lines clearly remind one of the beautiful ghazal of Hafiz as translated by Gertrude Bell:
Where are the tidings of union? that I may arise –
Forth from the dust I will rise up to welcome thee!
When to my grave thou turnest thy blessed feet,
Wine and the lute shalt thou bring in thy hand to me,
Thy voice shall ring through the folds of my winding-sheet
And I will arise and dance to thy minstrelsy.
And another ghazal:
When I am dead, open my grave and see
The cloud of smoke that rises from thy feet!
In my dead heart the fire still burns for thee;
Yea, the smoke rises from my winding-sheet.
[1] See “Western Encounters with Persian Sufi Literature”, The Heritage of Sufism, volume III, ed. By Lewonard Lewisohn and David Morgan (Oneworld Publications, London 1999), pp 28-63.
[2] Published posthumously, London, 1846.
[3] R. M. Hewitt, Essays and Studies, p. 43 ff.
[4] Jones, Sir William, Works, with a Life by Lord Teignmouth (London, 1807), II, 146.
[5] Ibid, xi.
[6] Joseph Jacobs, The Earliest English Version of the Fables of Bidpai (London, David Nutt, 1888), “Preface”, quoted by J.D. Yohannan, ibid, p. xii.
[7] M. P. Conant, The Oriental Tale in England (Columbia University Press, New York, 1908), p.1.
[8] Spectator, No. 289.
[9] Spectator, No. 289; attributed by Addison to The Travels of Sir John Chardin.
[10] Champion, The Poems of Ferdosi (Calcutta, 1790), “Dedication,” pp. vii.
[11] British Critic, XIV (1799), 121.
[12] 11. 133-40.
[13] Part I, XXII, xl.
F Jahanpour 