Richard Jeffrey Newman

Often called the national epic of Iran, the Shah­nameh or Book of Kings, was writ­ten in the 10^th cen­tury CE by Abolqasem Fer­dowsi, who took as his sub­ject the pre-Islamic his­tory of the Iran­ian peo­ple, start­ing with the cre­ation of the world and end­ing with the 7^th cen­tury Arab con­quest of the Per­sian empire. A lit­er­ary expres­sion of what San­dra Mackey calls in The Ira­ni­ans “the sep­a­rate iden­tity within Islam that Ira­ni­ans [have always] felt” (64−5), the Shah­nameh rep­re­sents an act of cul­tural resis­tance, an asser­tion that, despite Mus­lim rule, the val­ues and tra­di­tions of ancient Iran were not only still rel­e­vant, but per­haps even supe­rior to those of Iran’s con­querors, whose reign, as A. Sha­pur Shah­bazi sug­gests in his Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy, was threat­en­ing to reduce the majes­tic sweep of Iran’s past into a sin­gle chap­ter in the his­tory of Islam (34). The suc­cess of this resis­tance can be seen most promi­nently in the fact that, even today, in the words of Dick Davis, the Shah­nameh is “one of the chief means by which both Per­sian rulers and the peo­ple of [Iran] have sought to define their iden­tity to them­selves and to the world at large” (3). The last Shah of Iran, Moham­mad Reza Pahlavi, for exam­ple, invoked the Shah­nameh in order to under­score Iran’s his­tor­i­cal, cul­tural, racial and lin­guis­tic dif­fer­ence from (and supe­ri­or­ity to) Iran’s Arab neigh­bors; and then, after the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in 1979, when Iran’s new and theo­cratic gov­ern­ment wanted to dis­cour­age its cit­i­zens’ iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the nation’s pre-Islamic past, the Aya­tol­lah Khome­ini him­self attested to the cul­tural impor­tance of the Shah­nameh when, along with dis­cour­ag­ing the use of Per­sian first names and express­ing the hope that peo­ple would stop cel­e­brat­ing Norooz, the Per­sian New Year, a hol­i­day with deep Zoroas­trian roots, he sin­gled out Ferdowsi’s poem as rep­re­sent­ing every­thing the rev­o­lu­tion had fought against when it ended the Shah’s reign.

More recently, to take another exam­ple, it could not have been an acci­dent that the scenes of pro­tes­tors car­ry­ing green ban­ners through the streets in the weeks fol­low­ing Iran’s con­tested pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in 2009 bore such a strik­ing resem­blance to the scene near the begin­ning of the Shah­nameh in which the black­smith Kaveh marches through the streets car­ry­ing a ban­ner and call­ing the Per­sian peo­ple to rise up against the evil Arab king Zah­hak. Kaveh is an unapolo­getic rev­o­lu­tion­ary, intent on over­throw­ing the despot who has killed all but one of his eigh­teen sons, but he is also a Per­sian call­ing for the over­throw of his people’s Arab monarch, which makes it very tempt­ing to read Fer­dowsi as more sedi­tious than he really was, as if his pur­pose in writ­ing the Shah­nameh had been to foment a rev­o­lu­tion against Islam. Noth­ing, how­ever, could be fur­ther from the truth. Just as the pro­tes­tors in Iran sought to have their votes counted in the con­text of the gov­ern­ment they already had, not to over­throw that gov­ern­ment, Fer­dowsi, who was a prac­tic­ing Mus­lim, wanted to pre­serve and trans­mit Iran’s cul­tural her­itage within an Islamic con­text, not present that cul­tural her­itage as a replace­ment for Islam.

In this pur­pose, Fer­dowsi was not alone. He may have been a prac­tic­ing Mus­lim, but he was also a proud dehqan, a mem­ber of Iran’s landed gen­try, a group Shah­bazi calls “the back­bone” of Iran­ian soci­ety, pow­er­ful enough that Arab com­man­ders some­times felt it nec­es­sary to nego­ti­ate peace treaties with them, and a group that saw itself as duty bound to pre­serve the “mem­o­ries of the golden days of [the Per­sian] empire and the heroic tra­di­tions and cul­tural her­itage of [their nation]” (20−21). After three hun­dred years of Mus­lim Arab rule, the dehqan had rea­son to be con­cerned. Not only had Ara­bic replaced Per­sian as the lan­guage of law, lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy and sci­ence, but there was also a grow­ing accep­tance among Mus­lim Ira­ni­ans that it might be pos­si­ble to rebuild Iran’s impe­r­ial struc­ture within an Islamic con­text. Indeed, revi­sion­ist his­to­ries of Iran, such as Tabari’s Tarikh, which is con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous with the Shah­nameh, were writ­ten in sup­port of this idea. In Tarikh, Tabari incor­po­rates Iran’s ori­gins into the cre­ation story as told in the Koran. His goal is to demon­strate that the reigns of the Per­sian mon­archs fit into Koranic chronol­ogy, plac­ing Iran’s leg­endary kings and heros into the world inhab­ited by, and ulti­mately sub­or­di­nat­ing those kings and heros to, char­ac­ters like Adam and Nuh (Noah), who are far more impor­tant to Islam’s over­all nar­ra­tive than Iran could ever be.

In the eyes of the dehqan, this was an unac­cept­able diminu­tion of Iran’s cul­tural her­itage, and so when Fer­dowsi wrote of the begin­ning of the world in the Shah­nameh, he placed Iran squarely at the cen­ter of the nar­ra­tive, and when he told the sto­ries of Iran’s myth­i­cal mon­archs, he told the sto­ries in their own terms, with­out try­ing to jus­tify their exis­tence within the dom­i­nant cul­tural, polit­i­cal and spir­i­tual con­text of Islam (Davis 14). Yet it would be a mis­take to under­stand the Shah­nameh purely as a his­tor­i­cal or polit­i­cal text, of inter­est pri­mar­ily not for its lit­er­ary worth, but for its role as a repos­i­tory of ancient Iran­ian leg­ends. To do so would be to ignore not only Ferdowsi’s lit­er­ary intent – he was, very self-consciously, writ­ing a poem – but also the fact that, as any of the apoc­ryphal sto­ries told about him illus­trate, both in their con­tent and by the fact of their exis­tence, it was as a poet, not a his­to­rian, that Fer­dowsi made his rep­u­ta­tion. In one tale, that rep­u­ta­tion was pre­or­dained. Ferdowsi’s father, this story goes, had a vision of his recently-born son climb­ing a roof and call­ing out loudly towards each of the four cor­ners of the earth. Each time the child called out, a strong voice answered him. Najm-al-Din, who was a dream-interperter, explained to the boy’s father that the vision fore­told Ferdowsi’s achieve­ments. “Your son will be a genius, a poet whose name will be known to the four quar­ters of the world and whose songs will be learned and revered every­where” (Shah­bazi 39, n. 1).

In another story, Fer­dowsi trav­els from his home in Nishapour to Ghazna, the cap­i­tal city of Sul­tan Mah­moud, who was a great patron of the arts and about whom I will have more to say later. Upon enter­ing the city, Fer­dowsi encoun­ters three of Mahmoud’s court poets, Ansari, Asjadi and Far­rukhi, who did not want to be dis­turbed by some­one whose man­ner of dress so clearly marked him as provin­cial. Think­ing to have some fun at Ferdowsi’s expense, and to make sure he did not bother them again, they issued him a chal­lenge. “We are the king’s poets,” Ansari, who was the most senior, said, “and only a true poet can keep com­pany with us. So, to test your abil­ity, each of us will com­pose one line of a qua­train using a sin­gle rhyme. If you can pro­vide the fourth, we will allow you to join us.” Fer­dowsi, con­fi­dent in his skill as a poet, agreed.

The rhyming word Ansari chose was roshan (bright) and, at least accord­ing to Edward G. Browne, in whose Lit­er­ary His­tory of Per­sia I first read this tale (129−30), he chose that word because he was sure there were only two other words in Per­sian that would rhyme with it: gol­shan (rose gar­den), with which Asjadi ended his line, and joshan (cuirass), with which Far­rukhi ended his. The dif­fi­culty of repro­duc­ing Per­sian rhymes in Eng­lish forces Browne to offer two trans­la­tions. The first, in the main body of Browne’s text, pre­serves the rhyming chal­lenge – though the rhyme he chooses is hardly chal­leng­ing in Eng­lish – while los­ing both the mean­ing and, because he has to change the images and metaphors, the Per­sian char­ac­ter of the lines. The sec­ond trans­la­tion, which he gives in a foot­note, pre­serves the mean­ing of the qua­train but loses the rhyming chal­lenge entirely. In each trans­la­tion, though, his ren­der­ing pre­serves the sense of Ferdowsi’s com­plet­ing line. Here is Browne’s mono-rhymed quatrain:

Ansari:      Thine eyes are clear and blue as a sun­lit ocean
Asjadi:       Their glance bewitches like a magic potion
Far­rukhi:   The wounds they cause no balm can heal, nor lotion
Fer­dowsi:  Deadly as those Giv’s spear dealt out to Poshan.

And here is the qua­train that more accu­rately ren­ders the sense of the quatrain:

Ansari:       The moon is not so radi­ant as thy brow
Asjadi:       No garden-rose can match thy cheek, I trow
Far­rukhi:   Thy lashes through the hard­est breast­plate pierce
Fer­dowsi:   Like spear of Giv in Poshan’s duel fierce.

The court poets were deeply impressed. Not only had Fer­dowsi sur­vived their poetic chal­lenge; he had done so by refer­ring to an obscure story from Per­sian lore, demon­strat­ing not only that he was a fine poet, but also a man of some learn­ing. Real­iz­ing that they had under­es­ti­mated him, Ansari, Asjadi and Far­rukhi decide to present Fer­dowsi to Sul­tan Mah­moud as a poet wor­thy of com­plet­ing the ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the national epic begun two or three decades ear­lier by another poet, Daqiqi, whose mur­der had left the court with only a thou­sand or so com­pleted verses. This the poets did and the rest, as the say­ing goes, except that the story I have just told you is almost entirely apoc­ryphal, is history.

Works Cited

Davis, Dick. Epic & Sedi­tion: The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shah­nameh. Wash­ing­ton, DC: Mage Pub­lish­ers 2006.

Mackey, San­dra. The Ira­ni­ans: Per­sia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation. New York: Dut­ton 1996

Shah­bazi, A. Sha­pur. Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy. Costa Mesa: Mazda Pub­lish­ers, 1991.

It is Norouz, the Per­sian New Year, which is cel­e­brated far and wide through­out what used to be the Per­sian Empire, and I thought I would share with you the sec­tion of Shah­nameh, the Book of Kings, often called the Iran­ian national epic, in which the story of the first Norouz is told. The Shah­nameh is a work of pro­found nation­al­ism, an asser­tion of Iran­ian national iden­tity against the power and influ­ence of the Mus­lim Arab cul­ture that con­quered Iran in the 7^th cen­tury CE. Com­posed by Fer­dowsi in the 10^th cen­tury, the poem con­sti­tutes a kind of mythopo­etic and his­tor­i­cal arche­ol­ogy, telling the story of pre-Islamic Iran through the sto­ries of the empire’s rulers, start­ing with the first, myth­i­cal king, whose name was Kayu­mars. Kayu­mars and three kings who fol­low him, Houshang, Tah­mures and Jamshid, are respon­si­ble for bring­ing civ­i­liza­tion to the world, each one deep­en­ing and strength­en­ing the social order that is nec­es­sary for human­ity to survive.

The great­est, and also the most dis­ap­point­ing, of these four is Jamshid, for it is Jamshid who estab­lishes social classes, brings the sci­ence of med­i­cine to human­ity, teaches his peo­ple to make cloth­ing and per­fume, and in gen­eral orders the soci­ety if his time such that it is rec­og­niz­able to us as the kind of social world in which we live. Jamshid, also, how­ever is the first king to allow his pride to get the bet­ter of him, declar­ing him­self a deity and los­ing the farr, which peo­ple often trans­late into Eng­lish as aura, but is more accu­rately described as the vis­i­ble qual­ity in a king that sig­ni­fies for his sub­jects the fact that God favors his rule. If you imag­ine the halos that were drawn around Christ’s head in medieval paint­ings, but pic­ture them around the heads of kings and under­stand them to be vis­i­ble proof of what the Euro­peans used to believe was the divine right of kings, you have some­thing close to what the farr is.

Once Jamshid loses the farr, there is room for evil to enter the world, which it does in the form of Zah­hak, part of whose story you can read in my trans­la­tion on Eklek­so­graphia. In addi­tion to the word farr, you need to know that peris are super­nat­ural crea­tures upon which are based the faeries of Vic­to­rian Eng­land; and you need to know as well that “Demon Binder” was the name given to Jamshid’s father, Tah­mures, because he bound Ahri­man – the source of evil – and rode him, more or less like a horse, around the world.

Here is my trans­la­tion of Jamshid’s story, which is also the story of the first Norouz:

Filled with his father’s wis­dom, when the world
was done mourn­ing the Demon Binder,
Jamshid joined the line of men
to ascend the throne and wear the crown.
Peace spread across his king­dom,
and the birds and peris bowed to him too.
“I will,” he said, “keep evil from evil-doers’
hands, and I will guide souls to light.
The royal farr rests with me. I rule
as shah and priest.”

He turned first
to mak­ing weapons, paving for his war­riors
a road to glory and renown. Iron,
beneath his farr, soft­ened, became swords
and hel­mets, chain mail and horse armor,
and he gave fifty years to train­ing
the men he charged with build­ing his armory.

The next five decades, Jamshid devoted
to cloth­ing, con­triv­ing dif­fer­ent fab­rics—
linen and silk, bro­cades and satin—
teach­ing peo­ple to spin and to weave,
to dye what they’d woven, and then sew a gar­ment
for feast­ing or fight­ing. When he fin­ished, he divided
men by their pro­fes­sion, send­ing
first to the moun­tains, to wor­ship their Mas­ter
and live lives of devo­tion, the Katuzi.
Sec­ond, he sum­moned the Neysari,
lion-hearted fight­ers whose lus­ter
lit the entire land, whose lead­er­ship
and courage kept the king secure,
and whose valor ensured the nation’s rep­u­ta­tion.
Those who farmed the fields came next,
the Basudi, who sow and reap,
who receive no thanks, but whom none reproach
when there’s food to eat. Free peo­ple
who kneel to no one and seek no quar­rel,
despite the rags they wear, their care
makes the earth flour­ish and nour­ishes peace.
A wise elder once said,
“If a free man finds him­self a slave,
he has only his own lazi­ness to blame.”

Jamshid gath­ered the crafts­men last,
the anx­ious and stub­born Ahtukhoshi.
Haughty and con­trary, they work with their hands
to make the goods sold in the mar­ket,
and they are always anx­ious. Fifty years
marched by while Jamshid showed
each per­son breath­ing earth’s air
his proper place and path, teach­ing
the scope of the life he’d been given to live.

He ordered the demons to pour water
over earth, stir­ring it into clay
they filled molds with to form bricks.
With mor­tar and stone, they laid foun­da­tions
for pub­lic baths and beau­ti­ful palaces,
and cas­tles to pro­tect against attack.
From rocks, Jamshid’s magic extracted
the lus­trous gems and pre­cious met­als
he found hid­den there, fill­ing his hands
with gold and sil­ver, amber and jacinth.
He dis­tilled per­fumes for his people’s plea­sure:
bal­sam and amber­gris, rose water and cam­phor,
musk and aloe. He made med­i­cines
to bring the sick back to health
and to help the healthy stay that way.

Jamshid revealed these secret things
as none before him had done. No one
dis­cov­ered and ordered the world as he did.

Yet another fifty years
saw Jamshid build­ing ships
he could sail quickly across the sea,
mak­ing port in each realm he reached;
and then, although he was already great,
Jamshid stepped past great­ness.
He used his farr to fash­ion a jew­eled
throne, decree­ing the demons should raise it
high in the sky, where he sat shin­ing
like the sun, and the world’s crea­tures gath­ered
around him, stand­ing in awe, scat­ter­ing
gems at his feet. It was the first of Far­vadin,
and Jamshid set that day aside,
nam­ing it Norooz, “new day,”
the day he rested, the first of the year.
His nobles declared a feast, a fes­ti­val
of wine and song we still cel­e­brate
in Jamshid’s memory.

For three cen­turies,
Jamshid ruled in peace. His peo­ple
knew nei­ther death nor hard­ship; the demons
stood ready to serve; and all who heard
the king’s com­mand obeyed it. The land,
filled with music, flour­ished. Jamshid,
how­ever, gave him­self to van­ity.
See­ing he had no peer in the world,
he for­got the grat­i­tude that is God’s due
and called the nobles of his court before him
to make this fate­ful procla­ma­tion:
“From this day for­ward, I know no lord
but me: my word brought beauty
and skilled men to adorn the earth!
My word! Sun­shine and sleep, secu­rity
and com­fort, the clothes you wear, your food—
all came to you through me!
Who else ended death’s des­o­la­tion
and with med­i­cine van­ished ill­ness from your lives?
With­out me, nei­ther mind nor soul
would inhabit your bod­ies. So who besides me
can claim, unchal­lenged, the crown and its power?
You under­stand this now. So now,
who else can you call Cre­ator but me?!”

The elders bowed their heads and held
their tongues, silenced by what he’d said,
but when the last sound left his mouth,
the farr left him, and his realm fell
into dis­cord. A sen­si­ble, pious man
once said, “A king must make him­self
God’s slave. Ingrat­i­tude towards God
will fill your heart with innu­mer­able fears.”
Jamshid’s men deserted; his des­tiny
dark­ened, and his light dis­ap­peared from the world.

I’ve been feel­ing guilty that I haven’t posted about the recent goings on in Iran. Peo­ple were out in the streets protest­ing again, and the basij were there to try to beat them back, and it’s impor­tant – espe­cially because of the nego­ti­a­tions hap­pen­ing now about Iran’s nuclear pro­gram – that we in the United States know that the oppo­si­tion move­ment in Iran has not sim­ply retreated. I just have not had the time to gather the pic­tures I have seen, the arti­cles and wit­ness accounts that I have read, and write about them in a way that will make sense. So – and even this is late – I am repost­ing here some­thing I wrote on my other blog¹ dur­ing the protests in June.

Pro­test­ers in Fer­dowsi Square after the June 09 elec­tions in Iran

The con­nec­tion between lit­er­a­ture and pol­i­tics is always a dif­fi­cult one. Treat­ing pol­i­tics as if it were lit­er­a­ture, politi­ciz­ing lit­er­ary texts, are strate­gies that peo­ple use to advance agen­das that are fun­da­men­tally polit­i­cal, and often not pro­gres­sive in nature. Espe­cially in con­nec­tion with what is going on in Iran right now, when peo­ple are really dying and when the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment is doing every­thing it can to iso­late the entire nation of Iran so that it (the gov­ern­ment) can restore what it believes should be the (clearly repres­sive) order of things, to talk about life imi­tat­ing art, to read what is going on in Iran through the lens of Iran’s own lit­er­a­ture, has felt to me like a self-indulgent and gra­tu­itous intel­lec­tual exer­cise. Yet lit­er­a­ture, and in this case specif­i­cally poetry, also helps peo­ple give mean­ing to their lives; it can inspire, and it can con­nect us to some­thing larger than our­selves in ways that polit­i­cal feel­ings, no mat­ter how strongly felt and/or acted upon, often can­not. And so, pre­cisely because peo­ple are really dying in Iran – because I really do believe, along with William Car­los Williams, that peo­ple die every day for lack of what is found in poetry – and pre­cisely because there is so much at stake over there, and because Iran is a cul­ture that loves and reveres its poets, I have decided to write this. Per­haps con­nect­ing the unrest in Iran not only to the spe­cific his­tory of the Islamic Repub­lic and the rev­o­lu­tion out of which that repub­lic was born – which most ana­lysts, rea­son­ably, are focus­ing on – but also to the Iran­ian cul­ture that is larger and older than both the Repub­lic and Islam, will make a dif­fer­ence. What that dif­fer­ence might be, and to whom, I have no way of know­ing, but I just don’t think it is mere coin­ci­dence that the cur­rent unrest finds echoes in a story Iran has been telling itself about itself for cen­turies: the tale of Kaveh and Zah­hak from the poem com­monly referred to as Iran’s national epic, Shah­nameh (Book, or Epic, of the Kings), part of which I am in the process of trans­lat­ing. I will include my trans­la­tion at the end of this post.

Writ­ten by Abolqasem Fer­dowsi in the 10^th cen­tury, Shah­nameh tells the story of the Iran­ian nation by telling the story of its kings, from the nation’s myth­i­cal begin­nings right up to the moment of the Mus­lim con­quest in the 7^th cen­tury CE. One of the themes that runs through the poem is the ques­tion of how to respond to an unjust ruler. The tale of Zah­hak and Kaveh, which you will read below, is one of the nar­ra­tives that explores this theme. First, though, you need some back­story: Zah­hak is Shahnameh’s first evil king. Son of an Arab monarch named Mer­das, Zah­hak is seduced by Eblis (the devil in these sto­ries) into killing his father to assume the throne, and he is even­tu­ally cursed by Eblis with a ser­pent grow­ing out of each shoul­der, to which he must feed one human brain per night. In other words, he must kill two peo­ple a day in order to keep the ser­pents fed. As you might imag­ine, then, Zah­hak does not turn out to be a benev­o­lent ruler, and when he con­quers Iran – whose pre­vi­ous king, Jamshid, made him­self vul­ner­a­ble when he declared him­self a god and so lost the true god’s favor – Zahhak’s cru­elty kicks into high gear.

The statue of Fer­dowsi in Fer­dowsi Square, bedecked in green, dur­ing a rally, June 18

One night, Zah­hak has a dream that dis­turbs him. When he asks his advi­sors to inter­pret it, they say that the dream fore­tells his destruc­tion by a man named Fer­ay­doun, who will kill him and assume the throne. Zah­hak goes on a killing ram­page try­ing to hunt Fer­ay­doun down, and though he is unsuc­cess­ful, he does man­age to kill Feraydoun’s father. Finally, out of a kind of des­per­a­tion – and here is where, if you have not seen par­al­lels to what is going on in Iran until now, the par­al­lels start to get obvi­ous – Zah­hak sum­mons the prince of each province in his king­dom and asks them to sign their names to a procla­ma­tion assert­ing that he, as their leader, has only ever been con­cerned with jus­tice, right­eous­ness and spo­ken only the truth. He wants this pub­lic acknowl­edg­ment so that he can raise an army with which to defeat the neme­sis who is com­ing to chal­lenge him. The heads of the provinces, know­ing that their leader will kill them if they refuse to sign the procla­ma­tion, sign. It is at this point that Kaveh walks in, and from here I am going to let the poem speak for itself, because I think the par­al­lels to today’s sit­u­a­tion – a ruler afraid he will lose power, a rigged state­ment of approval, a (failed) attempt to appease the cit­i­zenry and oppo­si­tion marches – while not exact, need no fur­ther expla­na­tion. (This selec­tion from my trans­la­tions of parts of the Shah­nameh, I should add, has just been pub­lished in the really fine-looking jour­nal The Dirty Goat Mag­a­zine.)

» Read the rest of this entry «

I haven’t been writ­ing and it hurts; it’s a tight­ness in my chest and a twist in my gut, and there is a part of me that wants to scream. Well, maybe not scream, but at least to grunt, let out some excla­ma­tion of frus­tra­tion that I have not been mak­ing poems, and I have not been work­ing – or only recently started work­ing again – on the fore­word I need to write for the trans­la­tion of the begin­ning of Shah­nameh that has been sit­ting on my desk more or less com­pleted for the last cou­ple of months. The other day, while I was wait­ing in a hotel lobby in Wash­ing­ton DC for a friend to call, I was able to get just a lit­tle bit of work done on that intro­duc­tion, but it wasn’t writ­ing. I was tak­ing notes on a book that has been sit­ting on my shelf for at least a month wait­ing for me to read it. It’s an inter­li­brary loan, and I am sure it is very, very over­due. (I find it funny that they abbre­vi­ate inter­li­brary loan ILL; when­ever I get an email telling me that a book I have requested has arrived, the sub­ject head­ing is some­thing like “Your ILL Request,” and it just makes me smile. I have a strange sense of humor that way.) Any­way, I was tak­ing notes on this book and just that lit­tle bit of work made me so happy. Because it was my work, not for school, not to make money, but just the work that I do, or one kind of work that I do, to make my life mean­ing­ful, to make mean­ing­ful and beau­ti­ful things to send out into the world.

The book is called Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy, and it’s by A. Sha­pur Shah­bazi. Fer­dowsi is the pen name of the poet who wrote Shah­nameh, an epic poem of about 50,000 cou­plets that tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, from the nation’s mythopo­etic begin­nings to the moment right before the Arab Mus­lim con­quest in the 7^th cen­tury CE. Shah­nameh is often called Iran’s national epic, and for good rea­son. Not only do the sto­ries in the poem still res­onate in Iran­ian cul­ture, in ways that few poems or poets do in the West, but as the Ger­man scholar B. Spuler puts it in the excerpt of his work that Shah­bazi uses as an epi­graph to the book:

In the last analy­sis it was The Shah-nama […] that became the mile­stone for the self-affirmation of the Iran­ian iden­tity. [T]he impor­tance of the poems of Fer­dowsi (and sub­se­quently of later poets) for the preser­va­tion of the Iran­ian char­ac­ter can in no way be over­es­ti­mated. They pro­vided the entire Iran­ian folk – nobles, towns­peo­ple, arti­sans and peas­ants – with that “Ira­ni­an­ness” which despite all social dif­fer­ences united them, per­fectly mir­rored their image, and allowed them to iden­tify them­selves as fully and totally Iranian.

The book is called “a crit­i­cal biog­ra­phy,” at least in part because Shah­bazi arrives at his under­stand­ing of Ferdowsi’s life through a crit­i­cal read­ing of Shah­nameh. The poet left no note­books, no mem­oir and the infor­ma­tion that we have about his life from out­side the epic, as Shah­bazi shows, is entirely apoc­ryphal. Indeed, an inter­est­ing ques­tion raised by this book, though I doubt Shah­bazi intended this to be the case, is whether and why we ought to pre­fer a truth­ful account­ing of a great writer’s life to the myths and leg­ends that grow up around him, espe­cially when the work he is famous for is as impor­tant to a nation’s cul­tural iden­tity as Shah­nameh.

So, for exam­ple, the tra­di­tional story of the poem’s com­po­si­tion has the peas­ant Fer­dowsi labor­ing for 25 years to write the poem, hop­ing to earn from it a dowry for his daugh­ter. When, through the good offices of an inter­me­di­ary, he presents the poem to Sul­tan Mah­mud of Gazna, how­ever, the intermediary’s ene­mies among the Sultan’s advis­ers con­vince the ruler that the poem really is not worth all that much, espe­cially since Fer­dowsi is a Shi­ite and there­fore a heretic. Tak­ing his advis­ers’ advice, the Sul­tan pays Fer­dowsi only 50,000 pieces of sil­ver, not gold, an amount which Fer­dowsi sees as an insult. So, instead of tak­ing the pay­ment for him­self, he divides the money between two peo­ple who have served him. He then flees to another ruler’s court, where he attacks the Sul­tan in a satire of which only a small num­ber of lines sur­vive. Even­tu­ally, he returns home, though he con­tin­ues to live in con­stant fear of the Sultan.

One day, some­thing hap­pens in Mahmud’s court that reveals to him the great­ness of Ferdowsi’s poem, and he repents of his ear­lier to deci­sion to under­pay the man. So the Sul­tan sends along with a suit­able apol­ogy, 60,000 gold coins, a 10,000 coin increase over the amount Fer­dowsi had orig­i­nally expected. Just as the couri­ers arrive with the money, how­ever, Ferdowsi’s corpse is being car­ried out of his house so he can be buried. Ferdwosi’s daugh­ter, accord­ing to this story, refuses the Sultan’s money, and so it is used to repair a local hostelry.

Shah­bazi shows that this story is com­pletely false. It is now gen­er­ally accepted, he points out, that Fer­dowsi was not a peas­ant, was never in Sul­tan Mahmud’s court and never had a daugh­ter. Yet which story is bet­ter, which one should be the story about Fer­dowsi that gets told? The one I have just told you, or the truth: that Fer­dowsi was a mem­ber of the landed gen­try, that he com­posed the Shah­nameh while liv­ing on his own income, that he had a son who died at a young age. It’s easy enough to say that what really mat­ters is the truth, but the lessons in the apoc­ryphal story are also truths that are impor­tant to tell and the way that Fer­dowsi and his daugh­ter behave when con­fronted with the dif­fer­ent pay­ments from the Sul­tan embody val­ues it is worth emu­lat­ing, or at least hon­or­ing. I’m not sug­gest­ing that we should accept false­hoods as his­tory, but one of the things I like about Shahbazai’s book is how the false­hoods become part of the his­tory, part of Ferdowsi’s biog­ra­phy, even as he (Shah­bazi) claims to be arriv­ing at as accu­rate a fac­tual biog­ra­phy of Fer­dowsi as can be gleaned from the text of the Shah­nameh itself.

But I started writ­ing about how painful it is to be not to be writ­ing, which is ironic, of course, because I am writ­ing this blog post, and I will admit that sit­ting here in my bed, half lis­ten­ing to the TV pro­gram my son is watch­ing in the next room, peck­ing away at these keys is mak­ing me feel bet­ter. Except that my foot is start­ing to hurt with the onset of another gout attack. I’ve been in the mid­dle of one now for a cou­ple of days, the result of hav­ing lost a decent amount of weight in a short period of time because of a liver detox­i­fi­ca­tion reg­i­men my doc­tor put me on. The pain is start­ing to dis­tract me and so I have lost track of where I wanted to take this blog post next, but it does make me think about the degree to which writ­ing seems to reduce the pain. Or, since I am sure it does not actu­ally reduce it, the way writ­ing is able to take my mind away from the pain, and so I am won­der­ing about the con­nec­tion between the pain I feel when I am not writ­ing, the pain of my gout, and the way writ­ing seems to alle­vi­ate both.

I think it was in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body In Pain that I read about how peo­ple expe­ri­ence pain as some­thing alien, some­thing other, some­thing not of the body. Which is ironic, of course, since it is the body that is in pain. The prepo­si­tion is sig­nif­i­cant. Metaphor­i­cally, it sug­gests that pain is some­thing phys­i­cal we can be in, like a lake, or a car, or the world; and yet, if Scarry is cor­rect, and if I under­stand her – or my mem­ory of what she wrote – cor­rectly, we expe­ri­ence pain as some­thing inside of us that we need to get out of us, some­thing that can­not be inte­grated into who we are. It can be forced on us, as in tor­ture – and the first part of Scarry’s book is a dis­cus­sion of tor­ture – but it is not some­thing that we can inte­grate, that we can make a part of our­selves, the way we make plea­sur­able sen­sa­tions wel­come within us, make them part of who we are in the world.

Lan­guage (I think this is Scarry too) is not just the one way we can give pain mean­ing – lan­guage, after all, is how we give every­thing mean­ing – but it is the only way we can make the real­ity of our pain com­pre­hen­si­ble to some­one else. Indeed, per­haps on some level we need to make our pain com­pre­hen­si­ble in ways that we don’t need to do with our plea­sures. After all, it is – at least for me – per­fectly pos­si­ble to keep one’s plea­sures entirely pri­vate, not to name them, and still find them immensely sat­is­fy­ing. It is not that way with pain. To deal with pain, espe­cially but not only emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal pain, I need com­mu­nity; I need to be able to tell some­one, and while I some­times may be the only one I tell by writ­ing about it, that is never an entirely sat­is­fac­tory solu­tion. I need to know there is some­one else who under­stands me or who has at least tried to under­stand me.

And so I won­der about the degree to which com­mu­nity, the human need for com­mu­nity and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, is rooted in pain, and I won­der if the pain I feel when I don’t write is my body remind­ing me to reach out, that I need to reach out. Because that is what I do when I write. No mat­ter how deeply inter­nal and per­sonal and inte­rior the moti­va­tion to write may be, no mat­ter how soli­tary the act of writ­ing is, every­thing I write is also an invi­ta­tion to com­mu­nity the goal of which is not so dif­fer­ent from the way Spuler describes the Shah­nameh as being “the mile­stone for the self-affirmation of the Iran­ian iden­tity.” Some­times, espe­cially when I feel like no one reads what I write, that thought fills me with a deep sad­ness, because I know I will keep writ­ing any­way, even if no one else ever reads a word I put down on the page. Now, though, I am filled instead with a giddy hope­ful­ness, and that makes me happy.

Zah­hak: We’d Need To Hear His Mother’s Story, an excerpt from my trans­la­tion of parts of the Shah­nameh, the Iran­ian national epic, was pub­lished recently on Eklek­so­graphia. I hope you’ll go check it out.

This panel is on my events page here, but I want to call spe­cific atten­tion to it, given the protests that took place in Iran on Qods day. The oppo­si­tion man­aged to turn out in, accord­ing to some esti­mates, tens of thou­sands. It’s a good time to learn more about Iran­ian cul­ture and his­tory, I think.