FIFTEEN LOST IN TRANSLATION?

In many ways the interactions between Persian and European culture over the centuries has been sporadic and somewhat limited. In large part this is due to the preponderance of Greek and Roman influences, which came about as the Roman Empire expanded westwards. This contributed also to bringing about the deep religious rift between Christianity and Islam. From this developed the ‘East is East and West is West’ concept that has already been touched upon.

In spite of this, European figures have been prominent in the exploration and dissemination of Persian culture from the late eighteenth century onwards. Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a judge in the supreme court in Calcutta, became acquainted with Persian through its use in India during the late Mughal period. He also learned Sanskrit, the ancient language used in religious and other early writings. From his studies he developed the idea that many of the languages spoken in Europe and those of adjacent Asia as far as northern India belong to one family of languages, which later became known as Aryan or Indo-European.¹ Jones himself went on to translate some Persian texts, such as the poetry of Hafez, into English, but credit for the new discoveries in philology must be shared by the Frenchman Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, a contemporary of Jones who was also a researcher of Sanskrit and Persian. The rivalry and at times outright hostility between them is recounted by Paul Kriwaczek in his book In Search of Zarathustra.²

Similarly, in the field of archaeological discovery in Persia, Europeans were prominent. Figures such as Georg Friedrich Grotefend and Sir Henry Rawlinson were central in recording and deciphering cuneiform inscriptions in such places as Persepolis, Pasargadae and Bīsitūn. Other travellers, many of them diplomats or other employees of European governments, did valuable work in sketching and recording the ancient sites they visited, as John Curtis recounts.3 Their work formed a basis for the subsequent investigations of the Archaeological Service of Iran, carried out by such figures as Ali Sami and Ali Hakemi.

Among the world’s most famous artefacts, the Ardabil Carpet is a product of the great flowering of the arts under the Safavid rulers of Iran, c. 1539–40.

Setting aside this kind of academic work, knowledge of Persian culture in the West was limited and selective. Rather than any in-depth concept, we come across random bits and pieces. For example, several composers touch on Persian themes, such as Schumann in Paradise and the Peri (1843), Rimsky-Korsakov in Scheherazade (1888) and Strauss in his tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896). Even Mozart in The Magic Flute (1791) recalls Zoroaster in the figure of the high priest, Sarastro.

Similarly in literature we know Omar Khayyam through Edward Fitzgerald’s hugely popular, if not entirely accurate, translation of 1859, just as we know something of the tale of Rustam from the Shahnameh through Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ (1853). Many other English writers, such as Thomas Moore, Robert Southey and William Beckford, also share this fascination with Persian and generally Oriental themes, which was echoed in the fashion for Persian carpets, textiles and costumes, always with the emphasis on the exotic and flamboyant. A general appreciation of the wealth of the Persian cultural tradition is more difficult to find.

The bulk of any written literature that might have existed before the Islamic invasion has been lost in successive attacks, such as those of Alexander and the Mongols. An exception is the Avesta, the sacred text of Zoroastrianism. Although the earliest version we know dates probably from the Sasanid period, it is proof of a much earlier body of myth of pre-Zoroastrian origin preserved in the oral tradition. Gods, heroes and fabulous creatures appear mostly in that section of the Avesta known as the Yasht. The Avesta was preserved in part because it was carried east into India by Zoroastrians escaping Islamic rule in Persia. They settled initially in Gujarat and became known as the Parsees.

Following the Islamic conquest in Persia itself, Persian, despite surviving as a spoken language, was largely overshadowed by Arabic in literary use. With customary Persian resilience, it was revived in the Sasanid period by poets such as Daqiqi, Rudaki and Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi’s huge work in verse, the Shahnameh, relishes the Persian language and Persian traditions. It became the national epic and is still treasured by the Iranian people. It traces the history of the Persian kings back through known history and into the world of legend and myth. Interestingly some of the characters and tales of the Shahnameh appear also in the Avesta. An example is Gayomartan, the mythical first human being of the Avesta, who appears as Keyumars in the Shahnameh. Similarly, the character of Yima in the Avesta reappears in the Shahnameh as Jamshid, one of the most famous kings in Persian mythology. He is remembered as having ruled for 300 years in peace and harmony before over-weening self-importance caused him to lose his Divine Glory (farr-i izadi). This opens the way for evil (Angra Mainyu or Ahriman) to appear in the form of the wicked Zahak, who has sold his soul to the devil. His victory over Jamshid brings about chaos in the world, and this same theme of the Divine Glory of kings and its loss through excessive pride and ambition runs through myth and legend into history. Returning to the Shahnameh, after the death of Jamshid there follows a period of turmoil between the kingdom of Turan (identified as being in Central Asia) and Iran (the western region), a conflict still recognizable in historical time, as we have already seen.

Involved in the mythical conflict are three generations of one family – Sam, the grandfather, Zal, the father, and Rustam, the greatest of all the heroes of the Shahnameh. The exploits of Rustam and his splendid horse Ruksh include crossing a huge arid desert and fighting with lions, dragons and other beasts. One episode familiar in English through Arnold’s poem ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ involves Rustam being manoeuvred by the Afrasiyab, king of Turan, into combat against his own son, each being ignorant of the other’s true identity. The scene where Rustam, having killed Sohrab, realizes that he has in fact killed his own son is still very much alive in Persian art and storytelling.

Throughout the Shahnameh the reader will recognize familiar motifs from other mythologies. Rustam’s adventures remind us of other heroes such as Hercules or Odysseus. Another familiar theme is that of a baby of high birth being abandoned by its family and brought up by an animal or by peasants before eventually being returned to its rightful place in society. Zal, Rustam’s father, is brought up by the mythical bird Simurgh, and Cyrus, also abandoned, is fed by a dog before being adopted by a shepherd. We are reminded of Romulus and Remus being brought up by a wolf, or Shakespeare’s Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, also saved by a shepherd.

‘Zal consults the Magi’, from the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, c. 1530–35.

Mythical threads like these, deriving from ancient oral traditions, have worked through into legend and subsequently into what Roger Stevens calls ‘para-history’, where myth, legend and reality become inextricably blurred.4 Ferdowsi tells of the lives and loves of real Sasanid kings like Khusrow II, who falls in love with the beautiful Shirin. The story of the various setbacks in their courtship before they finally marry is picked up by the later poet Nizami Ganjavi in his Khusrow va Shirin (c. 1180). Alexander the Great, as Iskander, appears in the Shahnameh as a rather ambiguous figure, half-heroic Persian prince with a legitimate claim to the Divine Glory and a half-evil destructive usurper. Interestingly, Cyrus the Great is not immediately recognizable in the Shahnameh, but the story of Kay Khusrow, one of the mythical Kiyanian kings in Ferdowsi, bears considerable resemblance to Herodotus’ tale of the birth and upbringing of Cyrus (Kurush) – enough, perhaps, to indicate that they are one and the same person.

Many of the versions of the Shahnameh, in both prose and poetry, were produced in various parts of Persian territory, but that of Ferdowsi remains the most revered. Even travellers up to the present day attest to its being a living part of the national culture. Michael Wood in his BBC television series from 1997 on Alexander the Great describes how professional storytellers (naqqal) still perform parts of the Shahnameh.⁵ A recent novel by Farnoosh Moshiri, The Drum Tower, although set in the period of the Islamic Revolution, is enriched by the symbolic use of the mythical bird, the Simurgh.⁶

Poetry was highly prized by both the Persians and the Arabs. True to their skill of learning from other cultures, Persian poets from the ninth and tenth centuries onwards wrote poetry in the Persian language, but often adapted Arabic forms and metres to suit their purpose. As well as the masnavi form used by Ferdawsi, they also developed the qasida, often utilized by courtly poets to write poems of praise for the various caliphs who were their patrons. The ghazal is a shorter lyric form used often to express love, both sacred and human. This form flourished in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a period often described as the golden age of Persian poetry, surprisingly perhaps in that it coincides with the terrible invasion by the Mongols. Interwoven with expressions of love, works by poets such as Sa’di (d. 1292), Rumi (d. 1273) and Hafez (d. 1389) are philosophical musings on beauty and the fragility of human life. In some ways reminiscent of the Japanese haiku, ghazals are not easy to replicate and there has been a tendency by translators to overdo the more exotic elements – wine, roses, nightingales and so on – and play down the philosophical element. Another form of poetry, the rubais, or quatrain, became famous in English literature through Edward Fitzgerald’s version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the late nineteenth century, which became immensely popular. While it may not be a very accurate translation, it served to introduce English readers to the twelfth-century Persian poet, and at the same time heightened the perception of anything Persian being flamboyant and exotic. This same impression was reinforced by many translations into European languages of The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of tales written down in Arabic but incorporating stories from many sources, primarily Arabic, Persian and possibly Indian. Such sources are inevitably difficult to identify with any certainty, but the framework of the collection is almost definitely Persian in origin. It concerns a king who kills each of his successive wives on the morning after the consummation of their marriage, until he eventually marries the clever Scheherazade, a vizier’s daughter. She avoids death by captivating the king each night with a story, interrupting the narrative every time at a critical point and postponing the denouement until the next night. There are references in Arabic sources to a translation, possibly as far back as the tenth century, of a Persian book, since lost, called Hazar Afsaneh (A Thousand Tales). Muhsin Mahdi has attempted to re-establish this lost archetype in his Alf Layla wa-Layla (1984). Certainly, various versions of the tales became widespread in Europe from the time of Antoine Galland’s translation into French in the early eighteenth century. English versions followed, the most famous perhaps that by Sir Richard Burton in the late nineteenth century. Its self-conscious audacity and exotic eccentricity necessitated its private publication in order to avoid prosecution for obscenity. Countless popular editions followed, some aimed at children, all feeding the insatiable taste in England for so-called ‘Oriental’ tales full of the exotic, the flamboyant and the escapist. Coleridge records having been influenced by his early reading of such tales; Wordsworth mentions them in The Prelude and Dickens recalls seeking comfort in the same way during his miserable childhood.7

Rustam kneeling in grief by his dying son Sohrab. Illustration from a manuscript of Shahnameh of 1649.

The intricacy of The Thousand and One Nights has influenced many modern writers the world over, including Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, A. S. Byatt and Angela Carter, and academic studies have tried to analyse its endless and complex appeal.8 Sadly the tales are probably best known today as the mangled subjects of pantomimes or parallel fantasy films such as Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, again typifying our failure to engage fully with the wealth of Persian culture.

No discussion of Persian literature would be complete without mention of the bookbinders and illustrators who produced the early manuscripts of works such as the Shahnameh. Earlier Persian artwork may have existed but was lost during successive invasions. Certainly in the Islamic period Persian illustrators and decorators of manuscripts became widely celebrated. They became known as miniaturists, referring originally not to the size of their paintings but to the fact that they used red-lead pigment (Latin minium). In speaking of those artists, the word ‘Persian’ must be taken in its widest sense of ‘Persian territory’, since many of them worked in the courts of provincial rulers in distant parts of the Arab Empire. Baghdad was particularly famous for its artists, although some of them may well have been Persian by birth. Many of them were employed to create work for the Mughal rulers in India and from that connection came Chinese influences to enrich the already complex blend of Indian, Arabic and native Persian styles.⁹

With the drive towards modernization, especially since the early twentieth century, European ideas and European forms of literature such as the novel became more widely known in Persia (Iran). Although some writers embraced this development, others warned against modernization, seeing it as ‘Westernization’ and posing a threat to traditional culture and historical identity. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, in an influential book published in 1962, stressed this fear, calling Westernization, or ‘Westoxication’ as it is often translated, ‘a disease imported from abroad, and developed in an environment receptive to it’.10

Many writers typify the Persian tradition of learning from and adapting other cultural influences. Sadeq Hedayat in novels such as Buf-e-Kur (The Blind Owl) is more critical of Islamic influence on Persian life, something that led to the author’s persecution and eventual suicide in Paris in 1951. His works were banned completely by the Ahmadinejad regime in 2006, and the same kind of persecution faced other writers too. The result was that any criticism of the clerical rulers has had to be very carefully managed or disguised, and many writers have become exiles in Europe or America.

In the same way, film-makers have had to negotiate the minefield of bans and censorship, which tends to vary from regime to regime. Amazingly, the ban on the staple Western themes of sex and violence has resulted in several films that have won major international awards for their particular quality of poetic simplicity and humanity, often focusing on the roles of women and children in the country’s male-dominated society. Again, leading figures such as Abbas Kiarostami have been forced to work abroad, producing work such as Taste of Cherry (1997), a film about a man searching for someone to help him to commit suicide, which questions life and Islamic law. In the same way Samira Makhmalbaf in The Apple (1998), scripted by her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, daringly exposes social injustice and sexual discrimination through the true story of twin sisters who, imprisoned since birth by their ultra-conservative father, finally experience the world at the age of twelve. Again, as so often previously, what stands out is how Iranian film-makers, in spite of difficulties, have entered a new field of culture without losing individuality or national character.

Overall, the outstanding quality of Persian/Iranian culture is its sheer tenacity and vitality. In spite of the numerous seemingly overwhelming moves against it by other powers, ideologies and cultures, it has survived as a complex and individual culture, valuing and preserving the riches of the past but with the courage and confidence to negotiate the restrictions of the present day in a thoughtful and creative manner.

The magnificent palaces of the capital Persepolis were built by Darius I (the Great, r. 521–486 BC) around 518 BC. An aerial view of the ruins of Persepolis today.