Nezami’s Seven Princesses

Belonging to a polygamous rather than a monogamous culture certainly makes things very different. At least in narrative structure (the only area in which I feel competent to give an opinion), it opens up countless possibilities which are unknown to the West.

For instance, one of the most common motifs in Western folktales – the hero sees a portrait of a beautiful woman and instantly falls in love with her – is found also in the Orient, but multiplied. In a twelfth-century Persian poem, King Bahram sees seven portraits of seven princesses and falls in love with all seven at one and the same time. Each princess is a daughter of a ruler of one of the seven continents; Bahram asks the hand of each of them in turn and marries them. He then orders seven pavilions to be built, each a different colour and ‘built to reflect the nature of the seven planets’. Each one of the seven princesses has a corresponding pavilion, colour, planet and day of the week; the king will make a weekly visit to each of his brides and will hear her tell a tale. The king’s clothes will be the colour of the planet of that day and the stories told by the brides will match the colour, and the specific power of the corresponding planet.

These seven stories are folktales full of marvellous happenings like The Arabian Nights, but each one has a moral conclusion (even though it is not always recognisable as such beneath its symbolic cloak), such that the weekly cycle of the newly-wed king rehearses the moral virtues which are the human equivalent of the properties of the cosmos. (The single male king practises carnal and spiritual polygamy on his many handmaid-brides; in this tradition the roles of the sexes are irreversible, so it is pointless to expect surprises here.) The seven tales in turn contain love stories which are presented in a multiplied form compared to Western models.

For example, the typical structure of an initiation-tale demands that the hero undergo several trials to win both the hand of the girl he loves and a royal throne. In the West this structure requires the wedding to be kept for the end, or if it does take place earlier, it is the prelude to further vicissitudes, persecutions or magic spells, where the bride (or groom) is first lost then found again. Instead here we have a tale where the hero wins a new bride with each trial he overcomes, each bride more royal than the previous one; and these successive brides do not cancel each other out, but are cumulative, like the store of wisdom and experience gathered in a lifetime.

The book I am discussing is a classic of medieval Persian literature, now available in a slim volume in Rizzoli’s Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli series, and presented with commendable expertise: Nezami, Le sette principesse (The Seven Princesses), introduction and translation by Alessandro Bausani and Giovanna Calasso. Tackling masterpieces of Oriental literature is usually an unsatisfactory experience for those of us who are uninitiated, because it is so difficult to obtain even a distant glimmer of the original through the translations and adaptations; and it is always an arduous task situating a work in a context which we are not familiar with. This poem in particular is certainly an extremely complex text both as regards its stylistic make-up and its spiritual implications. But Bausani’s translation – which seems to stick scrupulously close to the densely metaphorical text and does not hold back even when it comes to puns (the Persian words are given in parenthesis) – with its copious notes and introduction (along with its essential accompaniment of illustrations) gives us something more, I believe, than the illusion of understanding what this book is about and of savouring its poetic charm, at least as far as a prose translation can do so.

So then, we now have the rare good fortune to be able to add to our library of masterpieces of world literature a work that is both of some substance and highly enjoyable. I say rare good fortune because this privilege has been granted only to Italians amongst all other Western readers, if the bibliography in the volume is accurate. The only unabridged English version, made in 1924, is inaccurate, the German one is a partial and rather free adaptation, while no French version exists at all. (What the bibliography does not say, but it should be stated here, is that this same translation by Bausani came out some years ago, published in Bari by the ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ publishing house, though with far fewer notes.)

Nezami (1141–1204), a Sunnite Moslem (at that time the Shiites had not yet gained the upper hand in Iran), was born and died at Ganjè, in what is now Soviet Azerbaijan, so he lived in a territory in which Iranian, Kurdish and Turkish peoples mixed. In The Seven Princesses (Haft Peikar means literally ‘the seven effigies’, and was written around 1200 AD, one of five poems he wrote) he tells the tale of a ruler of the fifth century, Bahram the Fifth, of the Sassanid dynasty. Nezami thus conjures up Persia’s Zoroastrian past in an atmosphere of Islamic mysticism. His poem celebrates both the divine will to which man must submit entirely and the various potentialities of the earthly world, with pagan and Gnostic resonances (and Christian ones too: there is a mention of the great miracle worker Isu, or Jesus).

Before and after the seven tales narrated in the seven pavilions, the poem illustrates the king’s life, upbringing, love of hunting (he hunts lions, wild asses, dragons), wars against the Grand Khan’s Chinese army, the building of his palace, his feasts and drinking bouts, even his minor love affairs. The poem is thus first and foremost a portrait of the ideal ruler, in which, as Bausani says, the ancient Iranian tradition of the Sacred King blends with the Islamic tradition of the Pious Sultan who submits entirely to divine law.

An ideal ruler – we think – ought to have a prosperous rule and happy subjects. Not at all! These are the prejudices of our rather basic ideas of kingship. That a king is a miraculous mixture of all perfections does not rule out the possibility that his rule should be marred by the most cruel injustices at the hands of treacherous and greedy ministers. But seeing that the king enjoys divine favour, there will come a time when the grim reality of his kingdom will be revealed to his eyes. Then he will punish the wicked Vizier and provide recompense for whoever comes to tell him of the injustices they have suffered: so we have the ‘tales of the victims’, again seven of them, but less attractive than the other seven.

Once he has re-established justice in his reign, Bahram can now reorganise the army and rout the Grand Khan of China. Having thus fulfilled his destiny, he has nothing left to do but disappear: in fact he does disappear, literally, riding into a cavern in pursuit of the wild ass he was hunting. The King in short is, in Bausani’s words, ‘Man par excellence’: what counts is the cosmic harmony of which he is the incarnation, a harmony which is reflected to a certain extent in his rule and subjects, but which resides above all in his person. (In any case, even today there are regimes which claim to be praiseworthy in and of themselves, even though their subjects live abject existences.)

The Seven Princesses, then, blends two types of Oriental wonder-tale: the celebratory epic account in The Book of the Kings by Firdusi (the tenth-century poet whom Nezami follows) and the novelistic tradition which springs from ancient Indian collections and will eventually lead to The Arabian Nights. Of course our pleasure as readers is more gratified by this latter type of narration (so my advice would be to start with the seven tales and then turn to the frame story), but the frame is also rich in fantastic, magic and erotic refinement (foot-caressing, for example, is very much at a premium: ‘the king’s foot inserted itself between the stunning woman’s silk and brocade garments, right through to her hip’). As in fairy tales, cosmic and religious sentiments reach new peaks. For example, in the story of the two men who go on a journey, one who resigns himself to the will of God, the other who wants to have a rational explanation for everything, the psychological characterisation of the two men is so persuasive that it is impossible not to empathise more with the first man: he never loses sight of the complexity of everything, while the second is a malevolent and mean-spirited know-all. The moral that we can derive from this is that what counts is not so much one’s philosophical stance as how to live in harmony with the truth one believes in.

However, it is impossible to separate the various traditions which converge in The Seven Princesses because Nezami’s heady figurative language blends them all together in his creative melting pot, and he spreads over every page a gilded patina studded with metaphors which are embedded inside each other like precious gems in a dazzling necklace. The result is that the stylistic unity of the book seems all-pervasive, extending even to the introductory sections on wisdom and mysticism. (In connection with the latter I will mention the vision of Mohammed, who rises to heaven upon a winged angel, upwards to the point where all three dimensions disappear and ‘the Prophet saw God but no space, and heard words that came from no lips and carried no sounds’.)

The decorations of this verbal tapestry are so luxuriant that any parallels we might find in Western literature (beyond the analogies of medieval thematics and the wealth of fantasy in Renaissance works by Shakespeare and Ariosto) would naturally be with works of heaviest baroque; but even Marino’s Adonis and Basile’s Pentameron are works of laconic sobriety compared to the proliferation of metaphors which encrust Nezami’s tale and germinate a hint of narrative in every single image.

This universe of metaphors has characteristics and constants all of its own. The onager, the wild ass of the Iranian highlands – which if you see it in encyclopedias and, if I remember correctly, in zoos, is no more than an average-sized donkey – in Nezami’s verses acquires the dignity of more noble, heraldic creatures, and appears almost on every page. In Prince Bahram’s hunts the onager is the most sought after and difficult quarry, often cited alongside the lion as the foe against which the hunter measures his strength and skill. When it comes to metaphors, the onager is an image of strength, and even virile sexual power, but also of amorous prey (the onager pursued by the lion), of female beauty and of youth in general. And since its flesh is extremely tasty, we find ‘maidens with onagers’ eyes, roasting onager thighs on the fire’.

Another polyvalent metaphor is that of the cypress tree: used to evoke virile strength as well as being a phallic symbol, we also find it used as a paragon of feminine beauty (height is always especially prized), and associated with female hair, but also with flowing waters and even with the morning sun. Almost all the metaphorical functions of the cypress tree are applied also at one point to a lit candle, as well as having several other functions. In fact the delirium of similes here is such that anything can mean anything else.

There are some bravura passages of strings of metaphors one after the other: for instance, a description of winter in which a series of frosty images (‘the attack of cold had turned the swords into water and water into swords’: the notes explain that the swords of the sun’s rays turn into the water of rain and the rain becomes the sword-like flashes of lightning; and even if the explanation is not accurate, it is still a beautiful image) is followed by an apotheosis of fire, and a corresponding description of spring, full of plant personifications such as ‘the breeze was then pawned for the basil’s perfume’.

Another catalyst of metaphors is each of the seven colours which dominate each tale. How can one narrate a story all in the one colour? The simplest system is to have all the characters dressed in that colour, as in the black tale which tells of a woman who always dressed in black, because she had been the handmaid of a king who always dressed in black, because he had met a stranger dressed in black, who had told him of a place in China whose inhabitants all dressed in black …

Elsewhere the link is simply symbolic, based on the meaning attributed to each colour: yellow is the colour of the sun, therefore of kings; so the yellow tale will tell of a king and will end in a seduction, which is compared to the forcing of a casket which contains gold.

Surprisingly the white tale is the most erotic one, bathed as it is in a milky light in which we see girls moving ‘with breasts like hyacinths and legs of silver’. But it is also the tale of chastity, as I shall try to explain, though everything is lost in a summary of it. A young man, who amongst his many claims to perfection has that of being chaste, sees his garden being invaded by beautiful young girls who dance there. Two of them, after whipping him when they take him for a thief (a certain masochistic element is not excluded here), recognise him as the owner, kiss his hands and his feet and invite him to choose for himself the girl that he likes best. He spies on the girls as they bathe, makes his choice and (still with the help of the two guardians or ‘policewomen’ who guide his every move in the story) meets up with his favourite girl on his own. But in this and in each successive encounter something always happens at the crucial moment which prevents them consummating their relationship: the floor of the room subsides, or a cat trying to catch a little bird lands on the two embracing lovers, or a mouse gnaws through the stalk of a pumpkin on a pergola and the thud of the pumpkin falling puts the young man off his stroke, and so on until the moralising conclusion: the young man realises that first he has to marry the girl because Allah does not want him to commit a sin.

This motif of constant coitus interruptus is one that is also common in popular tales in the West, where however it is always treated grotesquely: in one of Basile’s cunti (tales) the unforeseen interruptions are remarkably similar to those in Nezami’s tale, but out of it emerges a hellish picture of human squalor, scatology and sexual phobia. Nezami on the other hand paints a visionary world full of erotic tension and trepidation which is both sublimated and enriched with psychological chiaroscuro, where the polygamous dream of a paradise full of houris alternates with the reality of a couple’s intimacy, while the unbridled licentiousness of the figurative language is an appropriate style for the upheavals of youthful inexperience.

[1982]