The Mirror of My Heart

by Unknown

  22. Dervishes were mendicant Sufis, and Sufi writings often implied, or stated quite openly, that all faiths are valid if the believer’s heart is sincere.

  23. Non-Moslems wore a specific kind of belt to indicate their separate status.

  24. Patterns on a hand were usually made by henna (used by both men and women), which looks quite like dried blood; here Mastureh is saying it doesn’t just look like blood, it is blood (hers).

  25. This poem about Mastureh’s husband’s absence makes a pair with the following poem (“The candle-brightness of your face . . .”) about his arrival home.

  26. Khosrow is both the name of the poet’s husband and of a legendary pre-Islamic king. This leads the poet to compare herself to another pre-Islamic king, Jamshid, whose pleasure at his own success was so great that he thought himself equal to God.

  27. Qebleh is the direction in which the ka’bah in Mecca lies. The notion of the beloved as the poet’s own personal qebleh—that is, as the “direction” of her devotion—is common in pre-modern Persian love poetry. Its somewhat blasphemous implication is a part of the effect, as one of the poetic conventions concerning erotic love is that it makes one forget one’s religious obligations.

  28. Layli and Majnun are the archetypal “Romeo and Juliet” lovers of Islamic poetry. In common with a number of other women poets who wrote in Persian, Mastureh compares herself to the male of the couple (Majnun) and the addressee of her poem, who is presumably her husband, to the female (Layli).

  29. The notion that “real” love, whether erotic or spiritual, transcends particular religious denominations is a convention of Persian poetry.

  30. Silver is a common epithet for skin in Persian poetry, but here it perhaps refers to white hairs in Mastureh’s husband’s beard.

  31. As in Mastureh Kurdi’s poem “We’ve gone, we left behind us . . .” (this page), mystical love is seen as something that transcends orthodoxy (the mosque) and blasphemy (the wine shop and the—Hindu or Buddhist; in Persian pre-modern texts the two are often conflated—temple). In Persian poetry religious/mystical ecstasy is quite often compared to drunken dancing, with the implication that “normal” categories of good and bad behavior, the secular and the religious, the orthodox and the blasphemous, have been superseded.

  32. Dogs are considered to be unclean in Islam, and to pollute whoever comes into contact with them. The convention behind the poem is that a lover haunts his or her beloved’s alleyway like a stray dog, and one meaning can be that the poem’s speaker is implicitly comparing herself to the despised dog. By contrast, the beloved is compared to the sun. The poem also has an implied spiritual dimension: the sun is like God, who shines on all alike, whether noble or despised (as you—the beloved—should shine on me, no matter how contemptible you find me).

  FROM THE 1800s TO THE PRESENT

  1. For further commentary on Tahereh, see the Introduction, this page.

  2. This poem has been attributed to other poets as well as Tahereh, although the consensus is that it is probably Tahereh’s. The fact that the last lines include the poet’s name is not decisive, as this could have been added later by a copyist.

  3. The poem is addressed to the Bab, Tahereh’s spiritual leader, although in terms of the traditional rhetoric of Persian mystical poetry, much of it could also be read as being addressed to God; the ambiguity is deliberate. The poem’s tropes and metaphors—wine, drunkenness, the replacement of the speaker’s self by the object of passion, being burned by love, being drowned in a sea of gnosis, the equivalence of various religious traditions, the dust of the beloved’s street being like the Moslem ka’bah for the speaker, and so on—are all stock features of Persian mystical poetry, though Tahereh’s passionate deployment of them reads as a rhetorical tour de force.

  4. In Islamic lore, Christ’s breath could revive the dead; here a kiss, rather than simply breath, is implied.

  5. The ka’bah is the black stone in Mecca at the center of Islam. As in many Persian poems concerned with love, erotic or spiritual, the equivalence of different religious traditions is implied.

  6. A Christian version of the beloved as the qebleh (see note 27 this page, for “Flute-like, while you’re away . . . ,” this page).

  7. Mahsati (this page) was the most famous woman poet from before the nineteenth century, and Shahdokht is claiming that she is the “Mahsati”—the outstanding woman poet—of her time.

  8. The poem celebrates the poet’s wedding night. The comparison of a beautiful body to flowers of various kinds was a customary trope in Persian poetry from its earliest beginnings. Tulips are a conventional metaphor for blood and the phrase “My lap was filled with tulips” (line 5) almost certainly indicates bleeding consequent to her hymen being broken, as this evidence of the loss of virginity was traditionally considered to be an important aspect of the wedding night.

  9. This poem has also been attributed to other poets, including Tahereh (this page). A number of pre-modern women poets boast of their beauty in extravagant terms. This pride in one’s beauty seems to be a female equivalent of the way pre-modern male poets often boasted about their unrivalled poetic prowess.

  10. Both the Bible (Exodus 4:6) and the Qor’an (27:12) mention the miracle of God ordering Moses to withdraw his hand from his cloak, which appears to be preternaturally white when he does so.

  11. This world and the world after death.

  12. The images in the poem (Majnun, the nightingale, the moth, the wine, the pourer and the glass) are associated with worldly, physical love, but the poem’s subject is almost certainly mystical love.

  13. Jamshid and Kay Kavus are legendary pre-Islamic kings, and wine in poetry is often associated with the pre-Islamic era.

  14. The most beautiful rubies were said to be from mines in Badakhshan, in northeastern Afghanistan.

  15. That is, “You’ve confused the ideal and the actual—fantasy and reality.”

  16. This poem was written during the turmoil of the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11), in response to a patriotic poem by the poet Eshqi (1893–24).

  17. Heaping earth on the head is a metaphor for mourning (since this was done literally by mourners in the past).

  18. In this line and subsequently, “you” refers to Iran.

  19. Cyrus is the pre-Islamic king Cyrus the Great (c.600–530 bce), who founded the Achaemenid empire; Feraydun and Kay Qobad are legendary pre-Islamic kings who appear in Ferdowsi’s Persian epic the Shahnameh (completed in 1010 ce).

  20. Anushirvan (501–79 ce) was a Sasanian king, famous for his justice.

  21. Nader (1688–1747) was one of the most powerful rulers in Iran’s history; he spent virtually his whole adult life engaged in warfare, which is why Jannat mentions his “saber.”

  22. Though the poem is a response to a particular event in the First World War, Nimtaj brings in other more general themes that were widely discussed at the time. These include an implicit anti-monarchism (in the figure of Kaveh), a reproach by women to Iranian men for being unable to defend their country, and contempt for those men who say that women should remain veiled and absent from public affairs.

  23. The story of Kaveh appears in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. He is a blacksmith who leads a successful rebellion against the demonic, foreign (Arab) king Zahhak. Because of his status as a plebeian outsider to the royal court, populist political movements in Iran have frequently taken him as a prototypical proletarian rebel.

  24. The decisive battle in 636 ce, in which the Arab Moslem forces defeated the army of the last pre-Islamic dynasty, the Sasanians. This event is regarded ambiguously in Persian literature, as it was the battle that destroyed the pre-Islamic Iranian empire, but it was also the means by which Islam came to the country. Nimtaj is emphasizing the positive aspect of the battle, the fact that the Moslems triumphed.

  25. Andalusia, Spain; the province was Moslem from 711 ce, wh
en it was conquered by an Arab army, until 1492, when it finally fell to the Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. It was thus Moslem for considerably longer than it has since been Christian.

  26. “They” in the previous line and “you” here refer to men.

  27. Orumiyeh (two lines above) and Salmas are both towns in Azerbaijan, in northwest Iran, that were briefly overrun and sacked as a result of a Kurdish attack backed by Ottoman forces, during the First World War.

  28. For further commentary on Alam Taj, see the Introduction, this page.

  29. The word Alam Taj uses for “chamber” means literally a bridal chamber, so that the line can also be read as meaning “Would that they’d perish in their bridal chamber,” that is, that death would be preferable to marriage.

  30. For the first few lines this looks as though it will be a typical “praise poem” about the poet’s husband, but it soon becomes apparent that far from praising her husband the poem is a satirical attack on him.

  31. The major epic of Persian literature, completed in 1010 ce, much of which celebrates Iranian warrior-heroes and their military victories.

  32. Nader Shah, a warlord who seized the Iranian throne in 1736, and overran Delhi, which his army sacked in 1739. See note 21 on this page.

  33. Rostam, the chief hero of the stories of the legendary section of the Shahnameh.

  34. Alexander the Great (see next note). Dara, the name in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh of the king known in the West as Darius III.

  35. In Islamic lore, Alexander is regarded as a kind of proto-Sufi, whose journeys were undertaken in search of wisdom as much as for the sake of conquest. It’s an exaggeration, though, to imply, as Alam Taj does here, that he is seen as a prophet.

  36. Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas was the Arab commander at the Battle of Qadesiyeh (636 ce), which marked the end of the Sasanian empire.

  37. The capital of the Sasanian empire, situated on the Tigris, close to modern-day Baghdad. The “Persian general” who led the Iranian forces at Qadesiyeh was Rostam-e Farrokhzad (not to be confused with the legendary Rostam). In his Shahnameh Ferdowsi presents him as someone who knows that the forces against him are invincible but who chooses to fight on nevertheless. It’s not clear what the “general’s fatal flaw” in the next line refers to; perhaps simply his pessimism as to the battle’s outcome.

  38. The Islamic period in Iran began with an Arab defeat of the country’s last pre-Islamic dynasty, and Iranian culture has always had an ambivalent attitude toward Arabs and their civilization; intensely patriotic Iranians sometimes think of Arabs as Iran’s natural enemies. Throughout the nineteenth century, England and Russia contended with one another for control of Iran, and both countries have been cordially loathed by many Iranians ever since this time. The Ottomans were the chief enemy of the Iranian Safavid dynasty (1501–1736), and an uneasy enmity between the two states lingered for long after this period (as in the Kurdish–Ottoman incursion into Iranian Azerbaijan mentioned in the poem by Nimtaj Salmasi on this page).

  39. The name of Alam Taj’s parents’ family cook.

  40. The Maqamat is a medieval collection of Arabic stories and the Maqulat a commentary by Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126–98) on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Both were used as Arabic teaching texts.

  41. This Aristotelian distinction is elaborated in Ibn Rushd’s Maqulat (see previous note).

  42. In common with some other women poets (e.g., Parvin Etesami, this page), Alam Taj wrote a number of poems to household objects (as well as this poem to her samovar, she addressed poems to her sewing machine, her comb, her mirror, and her curling iron). It’s difficult to read these poems without being aware of the profound loneliness, both literal and spiritual, that seems to lie behind them.

  43. Both “ancient den” and “wretched hovel” (five lines below) refer to the world.

  44. Dust was traditionally poured or smeared on the head during ritual mourning, and “dust upon the head” became a phrase meaning a state of extreme grief. “Dust upon your head” is a fairly common curse in Persian.

  45. For further commentary on the life and work of Parvin Etesami, see the Introduction, this page.

  46. This poem is said to refer to Parvin’s brief marriage, which ended after ten weeks when she returned to her father’s house. She is reported never to have mentioned the marriage again, except perhaps obliquely in this short poem.

  47. Didactic dialogue poems involving non-human characters like these (usually animals or birds, but sometimes aspects of nature or inanimate objects) were a specialty of Parvin Etesami. Verse dialogues of this kind are a conventional Persian form, one that was augmented in Etesami’s case by her familiarity with the verse fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95). A Western reader will probably assume that the poem is primarily about race relations, and it may well be, but it comes out of a tradition of Persian poems that assert a shared human identity that transcends sectarian religious (rather than perceived racial or ethnic) differences.

  48. This poem is often attributed to Parvin Etesami, though it’s not certain that it is hers. Armenians are of course Christians.

  49. Parvin Etesami is emphatic in her obvious anger at the traditionally inferior status of women in Iranian society. The reforms of Reza Shah (r. 1925–41) that began to redress women’s grievances occurred during her lifetime, and the poem welcomes these reforms. In common with a number of other female poets of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century who were concerned with women’s social status, Etesami emphasizes the importance both of women’s education and of women acting in ways that would ensure their opinions would be taken seriously. She can be particularly condemnatory of women whose behavior reinforces cultural stereotypes about women being empty-headed scatter-brains; this accounts for the way that, as the poem continues, she seems to backtrack a little from the implication in the first stanza that women’s inferior status was entirely due to society’s patriarchal structure.

  50. Brushwood is gathered as fuel for a fire.

  51. A reference to spinning, which was seen as the archetypal “task” for a woman, particularly one who was poor.

  52. The expression “to drink blood” means “to suffer.”

  53. The Persian New Year falls at the spring equinox (March 20 or 21), and it is usual at this time to buy and wear new clothes.

  54. A “black crow” was a traditional metaphor in pre-modern Persian poetry for disaster or evil. Here its primary meaning is death.

  55. Houris are the beautiful angels who welcome the faithful into the Islamic paradise; Ahriman is the Zoroastrian principle of evil. Persian poetry commonly mixes references to different religions in one image (here the image refers to the sun emerging from the darkness of the night).

  56. The metaphor is a Sufi commonplace, though here it is given a secular meaning. Like many other women of her time, Etesami saw access to knowledge and the acquisition of an education as the prerequisites of women’s emancipation.

  57. For further commentary on Zhaleh Esfahani and her fellow poets, see the Introduction, this page.

  58. A free-verse version of the fable-dialogue genre frequently used by Parvin Etesami, as in her poem “White and Black” (this page).

  59. The title of this poem in Persian means “ingratitude” colloquially, though etymologically it derives from a word meaning “blasphemy” and both meanings are implied in the poem, perhaps the etymological meaning more than the colloquial one.

  60. The mountain chain to the north of Tehran.

  61. The river that runs through Esfahan, the poet’s birthplace.

  62. An alternative version of “Zayandeh Rud,” the name of the river that runs through Esfahan.

  63. The Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88. Estimates of total casualties vary from one million to twice that number.

  64. A reference to the time of the Pahlavi monarchy, which could be
notoriously arbitrary in its appropriation of others’ property (hence “plunder”); the “sly nightwatchman” is Mohammad Reza Shah (r. 1941–79), exiled by the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

  65. For further commentary on Simin Behbahani, and her friendship with fellow poets Lobat Vala (this page) and Forugh Farrokhzad (this page), see this page.

  66. Traditionally in Persian poetry, tearing one’s clothes and biting the back of one’s hand are gestures that indicate extreme emotion (which can be either positive or negative).

  67. “The book” is Rumi’s (1207–73) major work, the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi.

  68. As she grew older, Simin Behbahani became progressively blind, and these images refer primarily to her gradual loss of sight, but they can also be taken as referring obliquely to the problems of the social/political situation she faced.

  69. The whole poem is about the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88 and its aftermath.

  70. For further commentary on Lobat Vala and her friendship with Simin Behbahani and Forugh Farrokhzad, see the Introduction, this page.

  71. The poem was written in Paris, as is indicated in the books by Lobat Vala in which it has appeared; just as it has for many American and British visitors, Paris has tended to suggest the glamor of romance and (perhaps illicit) love affairs for Iranians too.

  72. The Simorgh is a mythical bird that appears in medieval Persian poetry. In Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds (twelfth century) it represents God, which is probably its primary meaning here. The “Friend” is another way, common in medieval and later poetry, of referring to God.

  73. For further commentary on Forugh Farrokhzad and her friendship with Simin Behbahani (this page) and Lobat Vala (this page), see the Introduction, this page.

  74. The title poem of her first book. The poem came out of the self-questioning that preceded her leaving her husband and the breakup of her marriage.