Denison Ross, E.

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PERSIA'S CONTRIBUTION TO LITERATUREBY SIR E. DENISON ROSSTHE PURELY literary output of Persia, in the pre-Islamicperiod between the sixth century B.C. and the seventh centuryA.D., consisted primarily of the sacred books of the Zoroastrians, towhich were added a few secular works. The sacred books includedthe Zend Avesta, the Gathas, and the later translations and commen-taries on the Avesta. The secular literature was, first, narratives,of which the most famous was the lost translation from the Sans-krit of the Fables of Bidpai ; and histories dealing with the exploitsand adventures of the Sasanian kings, of which only a few exam-ples have come down to us. All these were in the old Persian aswritten in the Pahlevi script, which is so difficult that it is little morethan a code. The sacred books naturally had no influence on Islamicliterature ; the historical, however, were mainly responsible for Fir-dawsi's great epic of the kings.With the arrival of the conquering and proselytizing Arabs inPersia, Zoroastrian literature was supplanted by the Qur'an ; andfor a century or more the illiterate masses of Persia, to whom theclumsy Pahlevi script had been quite unintelligible, were broughtface to face with a sacred book written not only in a practical alpha-bet, but also in a language actually spoken by those who taught it,so that the people as a whole were rapidly becoming literate. Xotall the Persians accepted Islam, but the vast majority did, and thus,while Persian in its various dialects continued to be spoken through-out the country, the intelligentsia were learning Arabic. Indeed,many of the finest works in the Arabic language were written byPersians, so that in estimating the literature of Persia we must notconsider only works in the Persian language. The great Avicenna,for example, who wrote in Arabic was Persian by birth. Xo evi-dence is forthcoming as to the first attempts made to write thePersian language with Arabic letters, but there are indications thatthis was done in the eighth century very shortly after the establish-ment of the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad.The Persians originally took their verse forms and meters fromthe Arabs, but later added new forms and meters of their own. TheArabs had written mainly in the style known as the Oaslda, invented22 THE OPEN COURTby the desert people in pre-Islamic times, an ode or panegyric com-posed of a large number of couplets on one single rhyme. Fromthis the Persians derived the ghazal or lyric, which does not usuallyrun to more than ten or a dozen couplets. They also introduced forlong narrative poems the mathnazn form, composed of rhymingcouplets varying with each verse.The earliest examples of Persian poetry which have come downto us are isolated poems of the lyrical type, and we do not reachreally well-authenticated composition until the rule of the Sasanidsin Bukhara, which was the center of a real nationalist revival inthe tenth century, and saw the full development of the new Persianlanguage, written in the Arabic alphabet and containing an enor-mous quantity of Arabic loan words.The blind poet Rudaki, in addition to panegyric and odes whichhad for their model the qasida, also produced the first poem in themathnazn- or epic style, setting a model which was later followedby many of the greatest poets of Persia. Rudaki's mathnavi wasa rendering in rhymed couplets of the Arabic translation by IbnMuqaffa' of the Kalila and Dimna book of fables. Unfortunatelyonly isolated verses of this work have come down to us by quota-tions in dictionaries and elsewhere, for the book itself has unac-countably disappeared.The next poet of importance to compose in this style was Daqiqi(tenth century), a professed Zoroastrian, who had begun to writean Epic of the Kings of Persia, when his life was brought to an un-timely end by the hand of an assassin. This Epic was next takenup by the greatest poet of the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna(eleventh century), Firdawsi, who lived to complete in sixty thou-sand verses his famous Shahnanm or Book of Kings, which is oneof the most valuable documents in the modern Persian language.It was possibly due to the fame of this work, which was so essen-tially nationalistic in character, that the Kalila and Dimna of Rudaki,which was non-Persian in origin, sank into comparative oblivion.Since Firdawsi, as it were, exhausted the materials of the heroicage, only a few writers after him attempted to treat of the earlykings. He himself turned to the romantic epic in mathnavi form inhis Ynsuf and Zalaykha, and set a model which was to be copiedand surpassed by later poets like Nizami and Jami. It was this styleIfe&pfoJfi \^J^jS^\ l-T(&'&M:THE ASCENT OF MUHAMMAD TO HEA\ ENSixteenth Century(British Museum, London)24 THE OPEN COURTof composition which proved most attractive to the great paintersof the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.The range of topics dealt with by the mathnavi writers is strictlylimited. It was no part of a poet's ambition to discover new sub-jects. His business was to give a perfect setting to a familiar story,very much as the religious artists of Europe seldom went outsidea limited number of stereotyped subjects, to which they gave theimpress of their style without any attempt to treat their subjectin an original way. The favorite themes were the story of Josephas told in the Qnr'an, the story of the Loves of Layla and Majnun,and of Khusrau and Shirin as told in the Shahnama, and the fabu-lous adventures of Alexander the Great.It is not, however, in the mathnavi that we must look for thechief beauties of Persian poetry, but in the ghazal or love-lyric, inwhich the great Hafiz of Shiraz (fourteenth-fifteenth centuries)reigns supreme. Persia is the land of poetry, and the number ofpoets who have left behind them large volumes of qasidas, ghazals,and rubaiyat is very great. These volumes of collected poems areknown as divans, and in them each type of verse-form is arrangedalphabetically according to the rhyme.Persian prose is mainly confined to history, though there areone or two works of belles letters which are of outstanding excel-lence, notably the ChaJudr Maqala or the Four Discourses, ofNizami Aruzi (twelfth century), which contains anecdotes regard-ing poets, astronomers, doctors, and state officials ; and the Siyasat-nama or Book of Government by Nizam ul-Mulk (twelfth century),the great prime minister of the Seljuks. Both these are models ofsimple style and clear thinking. For works on theology, philosophy,and science the Persians employed the Arabic language, but manyPersian writers, including Sa'di, the poet, wrote in both.The histories are of two kinds, those in which the author's soleobject is the recording of events in the form of uncritical chronicles,and those in which the author regards the recording of events asof secondary importance to the display of his own gifts of rhet-oric. The truth is that the Persian language, which owing tothe simplicity of its grammar and syntax, . lends itself to themost lucid and concise treatment, was at an early stage in itshistory converted into an instrument of mental torture for thePERSIA'S CONTRIBUTION TO LITKRATi'RK 25reader by prose writers whose whole aim was to exhibit their knowl-edge of the Qur'an and of the Arabic language. Thus, for example,one of the most important histories of the Mongols, known afterits author's name as the History of J'assaf, while it contains themost valuable and accurate information regarding the history ofPersia during the thirteenth century, is so over-charged with rhe-torical phraseology and irrelevant passages in Arabic as to renderit almost unserviceable. This style commanded such admiration andrespect among the intelligentsia that it came to be the model bothfor histories and for correspondence, especially among the IndianMuslims. The great history of the Emperor Akbar by his trustedminister, Abul Fazl, is written throughout in this fantastic manner.In Persia this style is no longer admired and modern authors aimat simplicity of form, while there is a tendency to replace Arabicloan words by old Persian words which had fallen into disuse.Nevertheless, the influence of the high-flown style has survived inthe conventional phraseology of private letters, which usually be-gin with meaningless expressions by way of introduction, acknowl-edgment of letters received and inquiries after health.The influence of Persian literature on that of the other Muslimlanguages, except on Arabic, from which, as we have seen, thePersians themselves derived their verse forms, meter and rhymes,has been overwhelming. It is most noticeable in the case of theOttoman Turks, who imitated the Persian poets and prose writerswith slavish fidelity, in spite of the utter dissimilarity of the Per-sian and the Turkish languages. It never occurred to any Turkishpoet to break away from this self-imposed tutelage till the mid-dle of the nineteenth century, when a first step was taken by writerswho attempted to compromise between French and Persian models.As is well known, the last few years have seen a wholesale break-away from all the old traditions, so that there is rapidly beingformed a Turkish style, freed from all the old bonds of exoticArabo-Persian culture.A similar influence was exercised by Persia on the poetry andprose of the Urdu language, but in this case there is less excuse forany radical change, since this language would never have existedin upper India except for Persian, and it owes its entire literatureto purely Persian models. On the other hand, Persia's contributionto the literature of the West has been slight compared to that in26 THE OPEN COURTthe fine arts. Only three of her poets have attained to anythinglike world fame,—Omar Khayyam (twelfth century), Sa'di (thir-teenth century), and Hafiz (fourteenth century). Of the greatEuropean poets, Goethe and Riickert were the first to appreciatethe beauties of Persian poetry, which in England found its inter-preters in Thomas Moore, Matthew Arnold, and Edward Fitz-Gerald. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which in Persia itselfwas more or less ignored for centuries, has by the inspired render-ings of FitzGerald done more to make Persian literature knownto the West than any other work. The reason is not far to seek,for the whole essence of the Persian lyric lies in its harmoniouschoice of words and its musical meters, neither of which can bereproduced in any Western language, while the subject matter isso conventional and its metaphors so highly stylized that they canappeal only to one versed in the traditions of the country. The Ru-bayi differs from all other Persian verse not only in form but alsoin contents, so that it is universal in its appeal. It concentrates onone particular thought, and is bound by no conventions other thanthose of meter and rhyme, and thus it is readily translatable intoother languages, though it required the genius of a FitzGerald tomake so faithful a rendering into an English classic.Many attempts have been made to render some of the lyrics ofHafiz into English, and the complete divan was admirably renderedinto German verse by Rosenzweig-Schwannau. Of the English ren-derings the most successful in conveying the meaning of the originalsare those of Miss Gertrude Bell, although she made no attempt toimitate the Persian meters or rhymes.Of Sa'di's Gidistan several translations have appeared in Eng-lish, but this most delightful collection of anecdotes in mixed proseand versa by one of the most gifted sons of Persia has never re-ceived that measure of appreciation in the West which it certainlydeserves.The following translation of a lyric by the poet Jami (fifteenthcentury) offers a typical example of the Persian ghazal. It also il-lustrates a form of rhyme much favored by the Persian poets, inwhich the actual rhyming words are followed throughout by a re-peated phrase. It was the rule for the poet to introduce his ownname at the conclusion of a ghazal.PERSIA'S CONTRIBUTION TO LITERATURE 27AX ODE OF JAMITranslated in the Persian Form and Measureby Sir William Jones (d. 1794)How sweet the gale of morning breathes!Sweet news of my delight he brings;Now that the rose will soon approachThe tuneful bird of night he brings.Soon will a thousand parted soulsBe led his captives through the sky,Since tidings, which in every heartMust ardent flames excite, he brings.Late near my charmer*s flowing robeHe pass'd, and kissed the fragrant hem;Thence, odour to the rose-bud's veil,And jasmine's mantle white, he brings.Painful is absence and that pain,To some base rival oft is owed;Thou knowest, dear maid! when to thine earFalse tales contrived in spite, he brings.Why should I trace love's mazy path,Since destiny my bliss forbids?Black destiny ! my lot is woe.To me no ray of light he brings.In vain a friend his mind disturbs,In vain a childish trouble gives,When sage physician to the couch.Of heartsick love-lorn wight, he brings.A roving stranger in thy townNo guidance can sad Jami find,Till this his name, and rambling layTo thine all-piercing sight he brings.

Persia\u27s Contribution to Literature.

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Persia\u27s Contribution to Literature.

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