by Unknown
Like Iran on the map, colorless.
*
Gently I’ll take them off
All the things on my body, my clothes,
A few arsenals of arms, gunpowder,
There’s a battlefield under my blouse
Naked, like the first time
Naked, like a knife that’s bleeding
Naked, in front of your eyes
Like the forbidden poem you’re reading
Gently I’ll take them out
The books in each bookcase
The killed heroes will rise in my soul
Triumphantly in place
Hafez’s and Eliot’s infamous eyes107
Weary Samsa’s hardened claws108
Sex with Don Quixote, Ali Baba,
And rape as a matter of course
My skin’s a book cover that’s torn,
A book of woes, I’m scarcely alive,
Our whole world’s an underground
Like Slaughterhouse-Five109
My joy is nothing but footnotes,
My happiness mislaid in sorrow
365 Nights of Sodom110
365 days of torture
Come on, pour paraffin in my mouth
Come on, set fire to the library—
Blow up all my sulks and moods
And vent your fatigue on my body.
*
Cerebral feudalism
My head exploded on the floor, at your feet
You stepped over my head, not noticing, discreet
Surrealism
My eye exploded, in the depths of my glance there’s a woman
Her pupil is in mid-dream, what’s it staring at?
Futurism
My belly exploded, disgusted with the wind in its gut
The pain grew greater; tea please, and make it sweet
Sado-masochistic eroticism
My sex exploded on the table
You enjoyed the blood, every bit was a treat
Religious romanticism
My heart exploded, and my religion’s loving you
My tribute is kisses, and hugs when we meet111
AgathaChristieism
I exploded from something lost like a loaded rifle
The shadow of a man, in a yard, waiting on a seat
Postmodernism
I exploded from my poems, there were letters—
T . . . A . . . D . . . H . . . N . . . Q . . . P . . . R . . . all over the street
Notes
EPIGRAPHS
1. Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (New Haven: 2017), p. 21.
2. Divan-e Alam Taj Qa’em-Maghami, Zhaleh, ed. Ahmad Karami (Tehran: 1374/1995), p. 149.
THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
1. For commentary on this poem, see the Introduction, this page.
2. Ganjeh is a city in what is now independent Azerbaijan. Because of this poem and others like it, Mahsati is believed to have come from Ganjeh and to have had an affair with the son of a local cleric.
3. The phrase “wine . . . from my eyes” indicates bloody tears that are the color of red wine; the comparison of a heart in love to meat roasting, or grilling over a flame, is commonplace in medieval Persian poetry, and hence in Asian poetry generally. In Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands (1896), the character Babalatchi contemptuously refers to a Dutchman who has fallen in love with a beautiful Indonesian woman by saying, “She has made roast meat of his heart.”
4. This poem is said to have been extemporized by Mahsati when King Sanjar was held up by a fall of snow (the “silver carpet” in line 4). The story goes that Sanjar was so impressed by this impromptu poem that he gave Mahsati a position at his court.
5. The Virgin Mary is revered in Islam; the nineteenth chapter of the Qor’an is devoted to her praise.
6. The last line of the poem means both “I see him in my mind’s eye” and “I weep” (at the memory of his loveliness).
7. This poem is an ambiguous riddle. The primary meaning describes the rose of the opening line. In this interpretation the youngster’s shirt is the rose petals as they open, “tearing” the bud; the sweat is dew; crimson is the rose’s color compared to a blush; the golden coins in the rose’s “mouth” are the yellow pollen on the stamens of the rose. But the poem also has an implied bawdy meaning: the “rose that’s celebrated everywhere” is a young person famous for his or her beauty, and Persian poets (for example, Hafez) quite often mention a youngster’s torn shirt as being erotically attractive (presumably because skin can be glimpsed through the tear); the third line could obviously refer to furtive love-making; the golden coins in this interpretation could be payment for sex, or a bribe to the youngster to keep quiet about the liaison. The last line also explicitly refers to the way that exceptionally fine poems were traditionally rewarded, by the poet’s mouth being filled with coins, and so it is a hint to the listener that the poet would welcome payment for her work.
8. The Iranian scholar Eslami Nodushan’s note on this poem reads as follows: “The speaker is a female musician-for-hire; the poem indicates the wretched circumstances of such women who did not know what awaited them each day. She has been brought from home and is passed from customer to customer. Whoever gave the more money became her temporary master and could do whatever he wished with her.” Mohammad Ali Eslami Nodushan, Nar daneh-ha (“Pomegranate Seeds”), (Tehran: 1381/2002), p. 64. Nodushan’s note indicates that the profession of musician could easily slide into that of prostitution, and to this day some traditional Iranian families still consider musicians to be disreputable (much in the way that “respectable” families in Victorian England would be horrified by one of their daughters becoming an actress, as this was said to lead to the same fate).
9. The fact that her tears run into her ears, which seems at first to be counter-intuitive, implies that she is lying awake weeping as she thinks about the poem’s addressee. The American poet Louise Bogan (1897–1970) uses the same image in one of her poems (“Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell”), with the same implication. Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries (New York: 1968), p. 98.
10. This poem exists in various versions and with varying numbers of lines. The translation includes only the lines that are usually accepted as genuine. The reference to the poet’s veil is interesting as it contradicts what a number of contemporary reports indicate, which is that the women of the Mongol nobility often went unveiled; clearly this was not true of all of them. It draws on a Middle Eastern tradition of the veil as a symbol of power or royal authority as much as a symbol of chastity/sexual modesty; the tradition of kings addressing their subjects from behind a curtain (i.e., “veiled”) goes back to the pre-Islamic Sasanian dynasty (224 ce–651 ce). This “royal” meaning of the veil is often invoked in pre-modern Persian poetry, perhaps even more than as an emblem of “chastity” (and poets often seem to conflate the two meanings, as in this poem).
11. It’s possible that this poem refers to a metaphorical “exile” (absence) from a lover, but it seems more likely that it is meant literally and was written in the brief period between Padshah Khatun’s fall from power, engineered by her enemies at court, and her death.
12. This almost certainly refers to Jahan Khatun’s imprisonment after her family was deposed by the warlord Mobarez al-Din.
13. The comparison of the feelings of someone in love to meat in the process of being cooked is quite common in Persian poetry (see note 3). It’s especially apt here because the liver was seen as the seat of the affections and animal vitality (so that “I’d grill his liver” means “I’d drive him crazy with desire”). And grilled liver is still a tasty feature of outdoor meals in Iran (it is, for example, a common street food).
14. This poem gives us an image of Jahan Khatun after she had been captured during Mobare
z al-Din’s conquest of Shiraz. Even though it is meant metaphorically as much as literally, the detail of the “ruined school” is startlingly specific for poetry of this period.
15. Almost certainly a reference to the poet’s uncle who was deposed and killed by the warlord Mobarez al-Din in 1353. Usually a cypress in Persian lyric poetry represents a beautiful young person (of either sex), but in this case the image seems to draw on the Near Eastern history of a “cypress” indicating a sacred tree or a powerful ruler (as in Ezekiel 31—see Nancy Bowen, Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries: Ezekiel [Nashville: 2010], p. 192), rather than on the cypress as an image of youthful beauty (as in Theocritus, and passim in medieval Persian poetry: see Theocritus 18, the Epithalamium for Helen, trans. Robert Wells [Manchester: 1988], p. 114: “So Helen shines . . . a cypress tree that rears / Its dark adornment over field and garden . . .”). I am grateful to an anonymous member of the audience at a talk given at the University of Chicago in October 2018 for pointing this out to me.
16. The cypress here is envisioned as a sacred tree/presence representing God. See the previous note for the possible meanings of “cypress” in Persian poetry.
17. A pun on Jahan Khatun’s name (one she often makes): “Jahan” means “world,” so “world’s lord” means “Jahan’s lord,” which indicates that she is equating the “friend” she is reproaching with God.
18. “Tartary” is central Asia, from which the most valuable musk came.
19. The story of Jacob’s mourning for his son Joseph, when he thinks Joseph is dead although he has in fact been sold into slavery by his brothers, is recounted in both the Hebrew Bible and the Qor’an. Jacob’s grief is a common trope in medieval Persian verse, particularly—though not exclusively—in elegies.
20. The sense of the last two lines is: “What happens is not a result of time’s vicissitudes but has been fated from eternity.”
21. The “new rose” is the poet’s daughter.
22. Rezvan is the guardian of the Islamic paradise.
23. David and his psalms: The Psalms of the biblical King David are mentioned by name twice in the Qor’an (4:163 and 17:55), and both he and his psalms are often referred to in Persian poetry.
24. The paradox is deliberate: “Unchanging Fate (i.e., what has been ordained since the beginning of time) ensures that our lives will change.”
25. Half-rhymes are so rare in pre-modern Persian poetry as to be virtually unknown, but this poem ends on a half-rhyme in Persian, as in the English translation.
26. The “wretched hovel” is a reference to the world.
27. This is the last poem in Jahan Khatun’s divan (collected short poems), and it reads as a farewell to life. As poems are arranged in a divan alphabetically according to the rhyme, this means that she has written the poem that signals her farewell to life by using as her rhyme the last letter of the Persian alphabet, so that a poem about the end of her life ends her book.
28. See note 30 below.
29. The sense of the poem is that the “friend” wasn’t really interested in her in the first place.
30. The “languid limb” is a euphemism and the line as a whole means “he’s impotent.” Similar euphemistic phrases, with the same meaning, appear in poems by other poets.
31. “Arezu” is a pun since it is the name of the poem’s addressee and it means “longing.” Arezu is an exclusively female name, and the poem perhaps indicates a same-sex relationship, or at least the desire for one.
32. The cypress tree is a common metaphor for a beautiful young person, of either sex (see note 15 on this page).
FROM 1500 TO THE 1800s
1. The curve of the eyebrows is implicitly compared to the curve at the top of a mehrab, the niche in a mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca, and toward which Moslems bow in prayer. The poet is saying that she bows down to her lover rather than to God, and this is why her prayers “cannot be heartfelt” (line 4). The phrase can also be interpreted in mystical terms, in which case it means that the speaker’s allegiance is to Sufism rather than to orthodox Islamic practice.
2. Loqman is a wise sage referred to in chapter 31 of the Qor’an.
3. The poem mixes various motifs (the world is faithless, drink wine to forget your sorrows, orthodox religion is to be rejected in favor of either an earthly or mystical love, no wisdom can circumvent the inevitability of death) that are common in a great deal of Persian lyric verse.
4. The poem is ambiguous; it can mean “I am upset that our friendship is over” or “I was a fool to be friends with you (and trust you) in the first place” or both.
5. Part of the point of this poem lies in the fact that according to Islamic law a man can have more than one wife, but a woman cannot have more than one husband, and so the poet is apparently usurping the male role when she starts out by saying that she’ll have two husbands. But then she says that one of the new husbands is for “you” (her present husband), indicating that she will after all be sticking to the one husband prescribed for her by Islamic law. The fact that she wants to divorce her present husband and hand him over to the “burly Turkoman” implies that she thinks of him as gay, and passively so, which coming from a wife was certainly meant as an insult.
6. Many of the poems translated for this book exist in more than one version, and usually the discrepancies make little difference to the overall meaning. However, the first line of this poem exists in another version that wholly changes what is being said. Here is the alternative version:
Your chastity’s become the cause of my disgrace—
If you were mad enough that this were not the case
You would be guilty of an even worse disgrace
7. A rare instance of a poem in Persian that makes fun of the clichés of Persian lyric love poetry. In this way it’s a little like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun . . .”).
8. This poem is inscribed on Nur Jahan’s tomb in Lahore. She calls herself a “stranger” because after the death of her husband, Jahangir, she was gently but firmly pushed aside. Lamps and roses might well be found in and near the tended mausoleum of someone remembered with affection; but as well as their literal meaning, lamps and roses are common metaphors for the beloved in Persian lyric poetry—lamps being loved by moths (because they cannot resist the lamps’ light, in which they are burned), roses by nightingales. The fact that there are no lamps or roses nearby, and that no moths or nightingales come to her tomb, means that she considers herself unloved and forgotten.
9. The ka’bah is the black stone that marks the geographical center of the Islamic world, and around which pilgrims perambulate. In Islamic tradition it was inaugurated by Ibrahim (Abraham).
10. There are two versions of this line (the difference is a single letter, though this completely changes the sense). The other version can be translated as: “This thing is what you came from, sir.”
11. Layli and Majnun are the archetypal separated lovers of Islamic cultures. The story is originally Arabic, but its best known version is the one by Nezami (twelfth century), in Persian. Layli stays at home and does what she is told to do by her family; Majnun wanders in the wilderness and goes mad (his name means “maddened”). The “chain” in the last line refers obliquely to the fact that lunatics were often chained up; Makhfi is saying that although she is not the one sent mad by love, she is as chained up (by shame) as a madman is. The name Layli is Arabic, in which it is pronounced “Layla”; however it is clear that it was pronounced “Layli” in medieval Persian because poets often rhyme on it, and always with the “i” (like “ee” in English) sound.
12. Musk, in the form in which it was used as a scent, is black. A small black mole on a face was considered especially attractive (as was a beauty spot, imitating such a mole, in eighteenth-century Europe).
13. A reference to two irreconcilables, like oil and water, or
chalk and cheese, in English, with the added implication that stone can break glass. The “friend” here almost certainly means “God.”
14. A reference to Makhfi’s real name, “Zib al-Nissa,” meaning “Loveliest of Women.”
15. Zinat wrote this poem as an inscription for her tomb, which was destroyed in the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (formerly known as the Indian Mutiny), when the British turned the mosque in which her tomb was located into a bakery. The mosque has now been restored to its original function, but no sign of Zinat al-Nissa’s tomb has been found.
16. This poem is said to have made Aysheh famous when, as a teenager, she recited it extemporaneously at the court of Timur Shah Durrani.
17. The poem uses the tropes of erotic verse (the wounded heart, a garden, vowing to be the beloved’s slave) with a mystical implication; “My Love” clearly refers to God, and the garden the poet dreams of is paradise.
18. A lament by Aysheh for her son Faiz Talab, who was killed fighting for the Afghan king Timur Shah Durrani during his war for the control of Kashmir. The “you” of the first line is addressed to Faiz Talab himself (reproaches to a child for dying before the speaker are not uncommon in Persian poetry, the most famous example occurring in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, when Ferdowsi unexpectedly breaks off his narrative and inserts a lament for the death of his son), but it could also be taken as referring to God.
19. Farhad is a legendary figure who appears in the romance Khosrow and Shirin by Nezami (1141–1209); he is a stone mason who is in love with the princess Shirin and when he hears that Shirin has died (which is untrue), he commits suicide. The fact that Farhad is a figure in a romance leads to the next lines in which a garden and a nightingale are evoked, as they are traditional features of romance poetry and of love poetry in general.
20. At the end of the poem Maluli refers to herself as “Malul” rather than “Maluli”; this shortening of a name (to fit a poem’s meter) is not uncommon in pre-modern Persian poetry (for example, Hafez shortens the name Abu Es’haq to Bu Es’haq in one ghazal).
21. It’s interesting that three of Maluli’s poems given here imply that she is in love with someone she shouldn’t be in love with, perhaps an adherent of another religion. Though this is a common motif in Persian poetry, it’s possible that her insistence on this theme had an autobiographical origin.