This volume assembled in honor of Dick Davis, the distinguished scholar and translator of Persian literature, is a major contribution to literary scholarship. His festschrift is not a collection of miscellanea but contains lengthy chapters of original and occasionally innovative research. Dick Davis, who received his primary academic formation in English literature, has intertwined his gifts and training as an Anglophone poet and literary scholar with a love for and an intimate knowledge of Persian literature, a combination that has produced exceptional insights into Iranian culture. The initial approach of this poet-scholar was translation, an intellectual activity that is regrettably marginalized in today’s concepts of academic research. Davis’ scholarly works display a thorough understanding of the source texts that springs from intense linguistic and cultural engagement characteristic of the translation process.
The volume contains twenty-one papers that are divided into three parts, entitled “Love, Wine & Romance,” “Studies Related to the Shahnameh,” and “Studies on Modern Persian Literature,” respectively. The papers are closely connected to the central issues of Davis’ work, i.e. classical and modern literature, comparative approaches, and particularly translation. This last focus accounts for a relatively large share of high-quality translations in this volume. After the editor’s introduction and an address by the late Ehsan Yarshater, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak’s long-term synopsis of Persian literature is a well-chosen opening chapter. Transferring Bahār’s scheme of stylistic categories labeled with geographical entities (Khorasanian, Iraqi and Indian style) into a systemic approach, he presents the history of Persian literature as a development within the framework of an aesthetic system whose long-term growth and stability relied on its flexibility. Another broad view of premodern Persian poetry is offered in Saeed Honarmand’s contribution, which explores the function of love in medieval Persian epics and romances. The paper combines various theoretical approaches and analytical devices (Aristotelian and Platonic definitions of friendship and love; Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari) to present love as the driving force both in literature and society and as a system to establish power relations.
In a highly focused approach, Christine van Ruymbeke scrutinizes the character of the old King Mobad in Gorgāni’s Vis-o Rāmin (translated by Dick Davis in 2008). Her perceptive and meticulous analysis, running contrary to the prevalent negative perception of the king’s role, also includes a different reading of the two young lovers and offers a fresh look on the main characters of the epos. In a striking parallel to the foregoing essay, she conceives of love as the main agent of the mathnavi, confining the characters to the roles of “almost passive vectors for their particular type of love” (p. 96), and highlights how love and political power are interwoven. The connections between Vis and Ramin and Tristan and Ysolde are mentioned in passing as a desideratum in research. The comparative approach, however, is central to the paper of Asghar Seyed-Ghorab, the editor of the volume, who compares Middle English Floris and Blanchefleur with Persian Warqa and Golshāh. The section concludes with two chapters on anacreontic poetry that share not only the genre but also, albeit in different ways, the inherent topic of identity. Interpreting Rudaki’s iconic qasideh “Mother of Wine,” Kamran Talattof connects early New Persian poetry in its historical setting and linguistic formation to an ideological concept of identity, “one modeled on the Sasanian’s” (p. 131). Talattof’s perception of the Iranian renaissance that evolved in the milieu of the Samanid court is informed by contrasting Iranian to Arab/Islamic schemes. Given the fact that the Samanid realm was an uncontested part of the Caliphate and early New Persian Poetry is firmly rooted in Arabic prosody, not to mention the existence of a large corpus of early Arabic Khamriyya poetry, the reviewer would rather opt for an inclusive perspective where Rudaki’s poem and Samanid court culture and politics are incorporated into the overarching Islamic power. The translation of the complete qasideh in the appendix to the chapter presented in bilingual layout offers an excellent access to this important text. Paul Losensky’s contribution is in large part a thorough rhythmic translation of a Sāqi-nāmeh composed by Mohammad Sufi Māzandarāni (sixteenth/seventeenth century), a poet who eventually left Iran for India. In his concise and instructive introduction, Losensky discusses the function of wine as “agent of transformation” (p. 174) and a vehicle in pursuit of the authentic poetic self-identity.
Pertaining to Dick Davis’ opus magnum, his translation of Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh (published in 2006), the second and largest part of the volume is dedicated to Shāhnāmeh studies. Two chapters scrutinize ancient narrative traditions incorporated in the Shāhnāmeh. Saghi Gazerani’s study follows the Avestan dragon-snake Azhidahhaka’s development to the evil king Zahhāk. Merging narratives from India to Mesopotamia, this conglomerate figure lends itself to test the mechanisms of how stories are transmitted, combined, interpolated and transformed. Gazerani demonstrates that the changes that can be traced in this mythological figure originate from political issues against the backdrop of changing rulers and dynasties. Gazerani succeeds in unraveling the threads of this vast and ramified narrative tradition not only as a philological search for roots and dependencies but as highly relevant research into the historical and political functioning of myth and story-telling.
Reza Shaghaghi Zarghamee’s chapter aims at shedding light on the blurred origins and geographical attributions of the Rostam legends by drawing on Herodotus as a source for Achaemenid history. By comparing particular motifs and examining linguistic and historical evidence, the Scythian and Sistan components of the legend are identified. Close reading of specific parts of Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh is the basis of Sunil Sharma’s and Franklin Lewis’ contributions. Sharma, comparing the stories of Sekandar and Bahrām Gur, tests a quotation from one of Davis’ studies: Do the historical parts of the Shāhnāmeh aesthetically reflect on “motifs, preoccupations, and stories from the poem’s first half”? (p. 284). Lewis defines “Shifting Allegiances” as a motif in Ferdowsi’s epos and analyzes two cases of “primordial relationships and how they change”: a religious transition, exemplified by the conversion of Shāh Goshtāsp to Zoroastrianism, and the transfer of loyalty of Jamshid’s sisters to the usurper Zahhāk and eventually to the legitimate ruler Fereydun.
Olga Davidson confirms her position in the longstanding debate about oral poetry as a source for Ferdowsi. Based on the reference to Davis’ study “The Problem of Ferdowsi’s Sources,” she refers to misinterpretations, misunderstandings, misconceptions, inconsistencies and lacunae in studies that put emphasis on the textual character of Ferdowsi’s source material. Oral performance is the focus of the work of Margaret Mills, who contributes the transcript and translation of a story-teller’s performance, recorded in Afghanistan in the 1970s. The story narrated in the recorded session is found in the appendix to some popular Shāhnāmeh editions. Mills' chapter is a fascinating glimpse into the material and narrative techniques of living oral tradition of the recent past, irretrievably lost today.
Several contributions fall into the category of shāhnāmeh-nevisi, the continuation and prolongation of Shāhnāmeh-style epic composition in the service of contemporary rulers. Charles Melville examines the general Shāhnāmeh tradition in Mughal India before focusing on Tavakkol Beg’s Tārikh-e Delgoshā-ye Shamshir Khāni, a prosimetric, abridged Shāhnāmeh version from the era of Shāh Jahān (seventeenth century), a popular work that lacks an authoritative textual version. Melville’s analysis presents the complicated but intriguing textual history that sheds light on the underlying aesthetic, functional and authorial concepts. Abbas Amanat examines the Shāhnāmeh-ye Nāderi, a poem of limited circulation composed in the early 1730s. The combination of Shiite and Shāhnāmeh epic traditions identified as a new feature of shāhnāmeh-nevisi of the eighteenth century, is considered by the author a clue to an emerging sense of national identity. Firuza Melville draws our attention to European literary reflections of the Shāhnāmeh and studies two renderings into English from the Victorian era composed by Ella Sykes and Ethelreda Wilmot-Buxton for young European readers. The focus of this chapter lies on the orientalist adaption in style, commentary, point of view and specific elaboration of scenes.
Based on his expertise in the modern history of sports in Iran, Houchang Chehabi explores the wrestling scenes in the Shāhnāmeh and subsequent epic works from the Garshāspnāmeh to a twentieth century poem about the life of Abraham Lincoln. Based on the original texts and combining a vast apparatus of international research literature with iconographic evidence, the chapter discusses questions of geographical and narrative origins, sources and linguistic particularities, at the crossroads of poetry and practice. The paper is an excellent example of how much interdisciplinary approaches can contribute to literary studies.
In the section on modern literature, two contributions share the topic of disillusionment of politically engaged poets, namely Lahuti, the Iranian-Soviet poet who has received growing scholarly attention during recent years, and Qaysar Aminpur, the celebrated poet of the Islamic Revolution and Republic. Natalia Chalisova and Leyla Lahuti, the daughter of the poet and holder of the Lahuti archive, present an unusual piece, a hitherto unpublished letter poem to Stalin. Written from a personal perspective, the study confirms Lahuti’s genuine concern for a better social order and sheds light on the context in which the poem was written. The textual analysis shows that this context is essential to decipher the poetic imagery of the poem and its fundamental criticism of Stalin’s terror. Fatemeh Shams pursues the life and political biography of Qaisar Aminpur, one of the leading figures of Islamic revolutionary poetry. Citing a few poems in English translation, the paper focuses on the interplay of political, institutional, personal and literary factors that inform Aminpur’s literary work and trigger changes in attitude over time. The chapter makes us aware of the complex setting of political poetry supportive of the Islamic Republic. Another tribute to Dick Davis’ work as literary translator is presented by Saeedeh Shahnahpur’s paper on Pezeshkzād’s seminal novel, My Uncle Napoleon, and the extraordinary quality of Davis’ translation. The volume concludes with John Walbridge’s cheerful reportage about his futile attempts to find an astrolabe on sale in Pakistan.
The papers collected in this volume offer a representative image of the high standard of studies on Persian literature, corroborated by the extensive integrated bibliography at the end of the book. The diversity of approaches realized in studies on motifs, textual history, literary variations and reflections, historical settings and political implications, performative aspects, biographical conjunctions, and the theoretical reflections inherent to these topics, present a vibrant panorama of literary scholarship in Iranian studies.
