by Dick Davis
My lord, the world’s [i.e. Jahan’s] a faithless whore;
Aren’t you ashamed of this whore’s fame?
Go, seek some other cunt out – God
Himself can’t make Jahan feel shame.
The surviving line from another poem states that even if her poems should reach India, it would be quite clear that they were written by a woman (this is obviously meant as dismissive), except that he uses the same obscenity as in the previous poem instead of the word for “woman.” A sixteenth-century commentator wrote that Jahan Khatun was the center of her own group of poets at the Inju court (holding what would later be called in Europe a literary salon) and that Obayd was jealous of her success and popularity, which is why he wrote so vituperatively about her. The story may have some truth in it, but it could also have been elaborated simply in order to provide a context for Obayd’s poems about Jahan Khatun. If the poems are indeed by Obayd, it’s very easy to see why courts quickly grew tired of his company. It also probably says something for the Inju family’s tolerance that nothing further seems to have happened to him as a result of this; one can imagine a different princess demanding his head on a platter, and perhaps getting it. On the other hand, a more depressing possibility is that insults to women just didn’t matter that much, even if the woman in question was a princess.
Even though it’s hard for us not to feel that Obayd comes out of his quarrel with Jahan Khatun looking like a graceless lout, this should not blind us to the fact that many of his targets were much more worthy of his contempt. Like Swift he seems to have been eaten up with “savage indignation” at the venality of much of the world. His satirical prose works often have an easy-going, jokey surface but the anger keeps breaking through. One of his prose works is a kind of Devil’s Dictionary, written long before Ambrose Bierce had the same idea, in which he provides facetious and damning definitions for words. Here are a few (slightly adapted from the admirable translation by Hasan Javadi):
The Man of Learning: A man who cannot even earn his own livelihood.
The Ignorant: Fortune’s favorite.
The Judge: A man who is cursed by everyone.
The Sufi: A freeloader.
The Aphrodisiac: The leg of someone else’s wife.
Virginity: A word with no referent…
And he doesn’t spare his own professions:
The Courtier: A sycophant.
The Poet: A greedy braggart…
Perhaps the most poignant definition of them all is
Man: One who is not a hypocrite.11
Another prose work, The Ethics of the Aristocrats, gives similar but more lengthy definitions, this time of virtues (wisdom, courage, chastity, and so forth). In these he first sets out the “abrogated” version of each virtue, and by this he means what everyone normally understands the word in question to mean. He then says that these abrogated versions are obsolete, and goes on to describe the new version, which is the exact opposite of what the virtue is supposed to be (for example, the new version of courage is cowardice, and includes “Running away in time…”). The new definitions are defended with an elaborate show of specious learning, with (often genuine) quotations from religious and learned authorities to back up their travesties of meaning.
But Obayd is best known for his obscene poems, some of which have been translated for this book. Because he is so open about sexual matters, unlike virtually all his contemporaries, his evidence as to sexual mores is valuable, even if we have to take its habitual hyperbole with a good pinch of salt. Until very recently, Obayd’s poems were always printed with gaps to indicate the obscene words, or with the first letter of the word followed by suspension points (which wasn’t very helpful as a number of the most obscene words in Persian start with the same letter). A complete unbowdlerized text was not published until 1999, in New York; it has yet to appear in Iran. Often the reason given for this censorship was that the poems were so open about pederasty. It’s true that they are, but then they are very open about heterosexuality too, and in fact Obayd has some poems that debate the relative virtues and disadvantages of male and female genitals, and of boys or girls as sexual partners.12 He also has a long poem (not included here) in praise of masturbation; the poem is, among other things, an attack on Sufis, who he says are much given to the practice, and about whom he is even more contemptuous than Hafez manages to be.
Like many satirists, Obayd seems to see himself primarily as a truth-teller; this is borne out partly by his pen-name, which is simply a shortened form of his given name (Obaydullah). It’s not an adopted, chosen name that has a special meaning, or meanings (like “Hafez”), and neither is it a part of his own name that has an especially resonant implication that he can make elaborate rhetorical points with (like “Jahan”). It’s simply a shortened form of his given name that by itself means “servant,” although he makes no great play with this fact. It’s as if by adopting this very modest, almost anonymous, pen-name – almost a non pen-name, in fact – he is saying, “I’m not pretending to be anything; I’m just who I am.”
Despite his fame primarily as an obscene poet, Obayd-e Zakani’s single best-known poem is not concerned with sex at all, but with the politics of Shiraz and the fall of the Inju family at the hands of the Mozaffarid conqueror Mobarez al-din. This is Cat and Mouse (see pp. 217–23), an animal fable that tells the tale of Mobarez al-din’s conquest as a kind of cautionary tale, one that might be thought to be primarily a children’s story – as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has sometimes been considered to be – were it not for the satirical edge of Obayd’s scorn for human folly. Again, we see Obayd using the rhetoric of “serious” literature in order to write something facetious and scurrilous. He parodies a number of “high” literary styles in the course of his poem, most obviously those of panegyric and epic. This kind of playing with the rhetoric of particular literary genres is, unfortunately, largely lost in translation, although a general mock-heroic tone can give a broad idea of what is going on. For both Persian and English readers alike, it must be assumed that many of Obayd’s particular satirical points now pass us by unremarked, because we no longer know the individuals or circumstances to which he was referring; political satire probably has the shortest shelf-life of any literary genre. Nevertheless, the poem has retained its popularity as the most famous pre-modern verse satire in Persian, partly because of the evident zest with which the tale is told, partly because of the memorable vignettes of the argumentative, cowardly mice and the aggressive, vindictive cat, and I hope something of these characteristics comes through in the translation.
THE TRANSLATIONS
Translating lyric poetry presents particular problems when we compare it to translating narrative or epigrammatic verse. In both the latter forms there is a verifiable out-there-in-the-world content to consider and convey: in the narrative there is the story; in the epigram there is a particular, snappily put insight about human nature. In the lyric, by contrast, the actual verifiable content can be very slight (lyrics tend to say a fairly small number of things, “I want you”; “You’re absolutely marvelous”; “You’re making me really miserable”; “You make me deliriously happy”; “Is there any hope for me?”). In so far as the interest resides in the content, it is usually to be found more in how that content is presented rather than in what the content is. But the real subject of a lyric is very often something inward, and to this extent more inapprehensible, and so harder to paraphrase than a story with heroes and incidents; the lyric deals in feeling rather than fact. What the translator finds himself trying to bring over is style and sensibility. If, at times, the feeling and form of a narrative passage elude a translator, he has at least the story to fall back on; if the feeling and form of a lyric poem elude the translator, he has, practically speaking, nothing.
This means that the form of a lyric poem is particularly important for the translator who wishes to convey at least something of what reading the poem in its original language is like. This accounts for
the use of rhyme and fairly strict metrical verse in the translations included in this book. Medieval Persian poetry is highly formal – one could say without exaggeration that it makes a fetish of its formality – and the fact that it is poetry is considered to reside precisely in such formal, technical considerations. The twelfth-century poet Shatranji says in one of his rubaiyat, “The beauty of a verse is in its rhyme,” and it would be hard to find a medieval Persian poet who would have had much of a quarrel with this. Shatranji’s name means “the chess player”; rhymes, and the complicated, elegant, rule-generated game of chess are together a good image for what a medieval Persian lyric tends to be like. There is a virtuosic element in the formality of even the simplest medieval Persian poems, and if a translator is to convey what such poems are like in the original, he needs to make at least a gesture in this direction.
Metrical poetry in English has many forms (the sonnet, the ballad, the heroic couplet, and so on), but only two meters that are at all common (iambic and its derivative iambic/anapestic, and trochaic); Persian poetry has many meters (Hafez, for example, uses in all twenty-three different meters, though some of them only once), but only two forms – monorhyme and the couplet. All Persian poetic forms are variants of one of these two (a few rare forms include both monorhyme and the couplet). In general, narrative poems are written in couplets, while all other poems are written in some form of monorhyme (that is, the same rhyme sound is used throughout the whole poem).
The great majority of the poems included here are translations of ghazals, which is a monorhymed form. A ghazal is a lyric poem, as we have seen, usually of between seven and twenty lines. Persian poetic lines are very long compared with lines in English verse, and they are divided into two half-lines; usually each of these half-lines is equivalent in length to a complete (and long) English verse line. For example, over seventy percent of Hafez’s ghazals are made up of half-lines that contain fourteen or fifteen syllables, and so have twenty-eight or thirty syllables to the complete line. In a ghazal the first two half-lines rhyme, and after this the same rhyme comes at the end of each complete line, but not within the line.
How to give some indication of this form in English, if one wishes to do so, is obviously a problem. I have to get a little technical here, and the reader who is not interested in verse technique is welcome to skip the rest of this paragraph and the next two. First we need to bear in mind that a half-line in a Persian lyric tends to be made up of around fourteen syllables. And it so happens that there is a fourteen-syllable line, called, unsurprisingly, the fourteener, in English prosody; it is, for example, the form into which the sixteenth-century translator George Chapman cast his version of the Iliad. The fourteener in its original form is now rare, but it has continued to exist in a “broken” form in the ballad stanza, which is typically made up of two fourteeners, “broken” as 8/6, 8/6. This gives us twenty-eight syllables, the complete line length of a great many lines in Persian ghazals. Although it might look very far from the original form, I have translated many of the lines of the ghazals in this book as ballad stanzas, or as close approximations (sometimes breaking in a different place, for example 10/4, or with a slightly different number of syllables, for example 8/4). Strangely enough, this does, I think, give some notion of the rhythm of the Persian. The half-line itself in Persian often has a natural pause around its middle (corresponding to the caesura in an English verse line), and the equivalent of this is indicated by the break within the fourteener in the translations. This break is less emphatic than the stronger break between the fourteeners – that is, between lines 2 and 3 of the English stanza – corresponding to the break between the two half-lines in Persian. The approximation of rhythm is of course little more than this, mainly because English meter is accentual (based on syllabic stress) and Persian meter is quantitative (based on syllabic length); nevertheless the use of this form does, I feel, usually bring a reader closer to the rhythmic movement of the Persian than any other English form is able to do. Even so, I haven’t translated all the ghazals in this way, as other forms sometimes seemed equally or more apposite, particularly for poems written in shorter lines than the more usual twenty-eight or thirty syllables. I have translated a number of poems as simple couplets, with one couplet in English equaling two half-lines in the Persian. Sometimes, when the lines seemed naturally to form themselves into groups, I have arranged the lines as stanzas to indicate this, although the reader should be aware that there are no “stanzas” in the Persian.
What can a translator do about monorhyme? This rhyme scheme is relatively rare in English poetry; indeed there are probably only two well-known monorhymed poems in the canon of English verse, both from the late nineteenth century: Tennyson’s beautiful “Frater, Ave Atque Vale” (“Brother, Hail and Farewell”), written as an evocation of Catullus, and Browning’s “Home Thoughts from the Sea.”13 Both are about Englishmen abroad (Tennyson in Italy, Browning in a ship off the coast of Spain), as if the poets associated the form with foreign, non-English, experiences. Tennyson’s use of monorhyme may possibly owe something to the Persian model; he was for many years a close friend of Edward FitzGerald, the Victorian translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and for a while he tried to learn Persian. (He had dreams of Persian letters parading around his room; unfortunately his wife thought Persian was bad for his eyes, and hid his Persian books, which put a stop to the venture.) These poems by Browning and Tennyson are similar in two other ways. Both use what is by the standards of English verse, a long (fifteen syllable) trochaic line, and this too may be a nod to a Persian model; and both rhyme on vowels unclosed by consonants, which is by far the easiest kind of monorhyme that can be attempted in English. I have tried monorhyme for some of the versions in this book, and the interested reader will notice that, like Tennyson and Browning, I too have often availed myself of vowel rhymes. Usually, however, I have used a new rhyme for each “stanza” or couplet. Sometimes I have kept the rhyme where it is in Persian (that is, after twenty-eight or thirty syllables), but this is a long stretch to go without a rhyme in English (it can become virtually unnoticeable, which it emphatically isn’t in Persian), and usually I have rhymed within the “stanza” or couplet. A number of the translations follow the Persian rhyme scheme exactly – for example, the poem by Jahan Khatun, on p. 179, “I know you think that there are other friends for me than you. Not so.”
The rhyme word in this poem is “you,” and every time the rhyme appears the phrase, “Not so” comes after it. This device (called a radif ), of repeating a phrase after each iteration of the rhyme, is quite common in Persian lyric (and epigrammatic) poetry, and I have tried to reproduce it where possible. Its effect is to bury the rhyme within the line, while the repeated phrase is like a richer amplification of the rhyme; the repetitions, coming in such a prominent metrical position, also emphatically underline the meaning of the phrase, which becomes an integral part of the theme of the poem. Sometimes the same phrase can be used with a different meaning in at least one of its repetitions – for example, by a pun on one of its constituent words – and this strategy is particularly prized (it’s also particularly hard to translate).
I have remarked above on both the lack of gender markers in Persian, and the androgynous nature of the rhetoric that celebrates human beauty and sexual desirability in Persian poetry. I’ve drawn attention to the generally pederastic nature of the conventions of this kind of verse, but I have also indicated that when these poets do talk, rarely, about gender directly, what we seem to have is a situation similar to that which we find in some Classical European verse, in which both genders are celebrated with some impartiality. Unfortunately a translator of Persian lyric poetry into English usually has to make a decision as to the gender of the person being addressed in a given poem. Where the gender is, very occasionally, made clear, the decision has been made for me. Otherwise I have been fairly even-handed in my distribution of boys and girls, but the reader should be aware that this is in most cases an
arbitrary decision, so that he or she is perfectly welcome to change most instances of “he” to “she” and “she” to “he,” as he or she wishes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND FURTHER READING
There is little on either Jahan Malek Khatun or Obayd-e Zakani in English. For information on Jahan Khatun and the milieu in which she lived I have consulted the admirable articles on her life and poetry by Dominic Brookshaw (his article on her in the Encyclopedia Iranica, and his “Odes of a Poet-Princess: the Ghazals of Jahan-Malik Khatun,” Iran 43, 2005, pp. 173–95). Apart from these, my main source for information on Jahan has been the introduction to her Divan, edited by Dr. Purandokht Kashani-Rad and Dr. Kamel Ahmadnezhad (Tehran: Zavar, 1374/1995). Hasan Javadi’s book on Obayd-e Zakani, Obeyd-e Zakani: Ethics of the Aristocrats and Other Satirical Works (Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 2008) has been an invaluable source of information, not only on Obayd but on the literary life of Shiraz in the fourteenth century. Paul Sprachman has written entertainingly on Obayd, notably in his Suppressed Persian (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1995). A great deal has been written about Hafez, but not much that is useful in English; the best source in English for information on Hafez is the excellent series of essays on his poetry and life in the Encyclopedia Iranica. There are valuable discussions of the structure of Hafez’s ghazals in Michael C. Hillmann, Unity in the Ghazals of Hafez, (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1976), and Julie Meisami has written a number of illuminating essays on Hafez’s verse. I have consulted various commentaries on Hafez’s poetry in Persian, including the oldest, by Sudi in the Persian translation of the Turkish text by Dr. Esmat Setarzadeh, Sharh-e Sudi bar Hafez (Tehran: Enzali, 1362/1983), as well as a number of contemporary examples of the genre. The French translation of Hafez’s Divan, together with an extensive commentary, by Charles-Henri Fouchécour, Le Divan (Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2006), is an encyclopedically helpful source, although it can sometimes stress mystical/Sufi interpretations at the expense of more literal readings. For general information on the city of Shiraz in the 14th century I am indebted to John Limbert’s Shiraz in the Age of Hafez (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), a book I cannot praise too highly. Many friends have given me help and advice over the years that I have worked on the translations included here. My chief personal debts are indicated in the dedication, but I must also single out for particular mention the many useful and sometimes brilliant suggestions made by two poet friends, Catherine Tufariello and Robert Wells, both of whom have read much of this book at different stages of its development. Remaining infelicities and mistranslations are, needless to say, my own.
