Since all that’s been said so far holds true as well for closely related comparisons, a few examples may serve to confirm our assertion.
The hunter glimpsed waking up in the open field compares the rising sun to a falcon:
Life and action penetrate my breast,
I stand firmly on my own two feet again:
For the golden falcon, on broad pinions,
Hovers above his azure nest.
Or, more splendidly still, to a lion:
The mists of daybreak became bright again,
Heart and mind were all at once made glad
When the night, that shy gazelle,
Fled from the lion of the morning’s threat.
How could Marco Polo who witnessed all this, and more, not have been astonished by such comparisons!76
We constantly find the poet writing playfully of curls.
More than fifty baited lines
Stick in every lock of your hair…77
is adorably directed at a lovely head with a profusion of locks and the poetic imagination doesn’t balk at conceiving of the tips of the hair as little hooks. Still, when the poet says that he is hanged on hairs, this doesn’t strike us as quite right. When it refers to the Sultan,
In the ribbons of your curls
The enemy’s throat is choked,
the imagination is presented with either a repellent image or indeed, none at all.
That we are slain by eyelashes may well pass muster, but to be ‘speared by eyelashes’ cannot appeal to us; moreover, when eyelashes, compared to brooms, sweep the stars down from the sky, this seems a bit too gaudy for us. The brow of the beauty as the heart’s grindstone; the lover’s heart as rubble rolled and rounded by torrents of tears; these and similar gambits – mere wit without much feeling – oblige us to little more than a friendly smile.
Even so, when the poet treats an opponent in chess as mere tent-paraphernalia, the results can be quite brilliant:
May you always be splintered like chips! Ripped like rags! Hammered like nails and thrust in like pegs!
In this we glimpse the poet at headquarters; the endlessly repeated setting up of the tents, and striking them down again, hovers before his soul.
From these few examples, which could be multiplied endlessly, it’s clear that no boundary can be drawn between what might be termed laudable and what reprehensible in our sense, simply because all their merits are really the products of their faults. Should we wish to share in the productions of the loftiest minds, then we must ‘orientalise’ ourselves; the Orient won’t come calling on us. And even though translations are much to be praised for enticing and guiding us, it must be obvious from all that’s been said earlier that in this literature, language as language plays the central role. Who wouldn’t want to be familiar with these treasures at their source!
Keeping in mind that poetic technique exerts the greatest influence on every manner of poetry, and necessarily so, we note here as well that the double-rhymed verse of Orientals promotes a parallelism which, however, tends to disperse rather than concentrate the mind, all the more so in that the rhyme indicates two quite disparate objects.78 Because of this their poems display something in the nature of a mish-mash, or prescribe end-rhymes in which, true enough, the most gifted poets were stimulated to achieve the highest excellence. How severe a judgment the nation has imposed in this matter appears from the fact that in five hundred years it has recognised only seven poets as supreme.