by Dick Davis
An indulgent ruler, a poet-princess who was his niece, the most famous poet of the age, and a somewhat disreputable hanger-on who also wrote verses, all meeting together for poetic gatherings in a city famous for its gardens, nightingales and roses, its generally mild and gentle climate, and the pleasures of its open-air social gatherings – all this sounds rapturously idyllic in its elegance and charm, and no doubt, for some of the time, it was. But the fourteenth century was an extremely violent and dangerous period in Iran’s history, and although Shiraz could claim in some ways to be something of a haven (it had largely escaped the depredations of the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of the country, for example, as it was also to escape the worst consequences of the conquests by Timur the Lame – Tamburlaine – in the 1380s, in both cases by astutely accommodating political moves on the part of its rulers), it still saw an immense amount of bloodshed and political chaos of a kind that directly affected our three poets, and came close to killing at least one of them. In one five-year period, for example (1339–44), the government of Shiraz and the province of Fars changed hands no less than eight times; each time blood ran in the palaces and usually in the streets too. If Shiraz was fortunate enough to escape the most spectacularly destructive wars that engulfed much of Iran in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the fierce in-fighting of local would-be ruling families was more than enough to ensure constant periods of nightmarish political instability.
The careers of two families, the Injus and the Mozaffarids, are of particular importance in helping us understand the historical reality that lies behind the poems of Hafez, Jahan Khatun, and Obayd-e Zakani. The Inju prince Masud Shah succeeded his father – the dynasty’s founder – as king of the area in 1336. He was driven out by ambitious rivals in 1339, and various claimants to the throne squabbled over the rulership of Shiraz and Fars until 1342, when Masud Shah returned at the head of a sizable army and regained control of the province. His triumph was short-lived though, as he was murdered by a subordinate within a year. His younger brother, Abu Es’haq, avenged his death in 1343, ruling Shiraz and its environs until 1353, when he was in turn driven out of Shiraz by the Mozaffarid warlord, Mobarez al-din. The deposed Inju king fled to Isfahan, but was captured there by forces allied with Mobarez al-din, who had his royal prisoner brought back to Shiraz and put to death in its main square.
As the new king of Shiraz, Mobarez al-din could not have been more different from Abu Es’haq, either in temperament or as a ruler. He was, at least outwardly, fanatically religious, and also extremely brutal. The historian Khandamir (1475–1534) recounts an anecdote that yokes together his piety and ruthlessness. A couple of prisoners were brought into Mobarez al-din’s presence while he was praying; the ruler completed the section of prayer on which he was engaged, stood up, cut off the prisoners’ heads, and returned to his prayers. The same historian reports how Mobarez al-din boasted to his son that he had personally killed over 800 people. The most obvious effect of Mobarez al-din’s rule, apart from the terror it inspired, was his strict enforcement of Islamic religious prohibitions. Wine-shops, which had flourished during Abu Es’haq’s lax not to say dissipated reign, were closed, both wine and music were forbidden, and severe sobriety became the order of the day. Mobarez al-din also doesn’t seem to have been very interested in poetry: at one point he considered having the grave of Sa’di destroyed, because he thought the great poet’s verses weren’t Islamic enough. The Shirazis, who had (and to some extent still have, despite the Islamic Revolution of 1979) a reputation for not holding back when it comes to enjoying life’s pleasures, referred to their new ruler by the contemptuous nickname “the Morals Officer.”
After five years of Mobarez al-din’s rule in Shiraz, his dour brutality proved too much even for his son, Shah Shoja, who had his father blinded, deposed, and imprisoned. Shah Shoja finally sent the old man off to a prison in Bam (near Kerman, Mobarez al-din’s base before he captured Shiraz), where he died. To the relief of at least some sections of the population, Shah Shoja reversed his father’s draconian anti-pleasure policies, and wine and music once again emerged from the shadows where they had been hidden away. Jahan Khatun made her peace with the son (she has some poems that praise him), as did Hafez and Obayd-e Zakani – who had apparently also considered discretion to be the better part of valor and hightailed it out of Shiraz shortly after Mobarez al-din took over – and all three of them returned to the city. Shah Shoja ruled Shiraz for well over twenty years (from 1358 to 1384, with a brief interregnum during 1364–66); by the end of his reign, Obayd-e Zakani was dead, and both Jahan Khatun and Hafez were nearing the end of their lives.
These political events are clearly reflected in Jahan Khatun’s poems, as might be expected, given that she and her family were so deeply involved in Shiraz’s dynastic upheavals, but they are also present as a kind of ground bass in the poetry of both Hafez and Obayd-e Zakani. Most obviously, both poets praise Abu Es’haq, and both express disdain and loathing for Mobarez al-din and the consequences of his reign on the life of their city. More subtly, a constantly repeated refrain in the work of each of them (very different though their poems can be in other ways) is that the world is not to be trusted, and that living in relative seclusion, far from court, is the wisest and the safest course. Although it is a commonplace of medieval Persian verse, this apprehension of the often terrifying instability of human affairs was surely reinforced by the political chaos all three poets witnessed and must to some extent have experienced.
THE CONVENTIONS OF FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PERSIAN LYRIC POETRY
A much more pervasive influence than political events on the content and atmosphere of these writers’ verses was the set of conventions associated with the type of poetry they were writing. Such conventions always exert a strong pull, whether conscious or unconscious, on what a writer feels can be said in a poem, as well as on the ways in which it seems appropriate to say these things. When we read poems from a culture whose genre conventions resemble those of our own, the constraints that genre suggests are perhaps not especially obvious, because we have already internalized them as “natural” (as when an English speaker reads Italian sonnets, for example; there are differences, but they fall within a recognizable range of what can be expected in a sonnet). But the case is quite different when we read poems from a culture with unfamiliar genre conventions; here the “recognizable range” is lacking, and we can feel lost. The conventions of fourteenth-century Persian lyric verse – and most of the poems included in this book can be characterized as lyrics of one kind or another – are not especially close to European lyric conventions (although there is perhaps more overlap than might at first sight be apparent). We need to make some attempt to familiarize ourselves with this unfamiliarity if we are to be able to see what it is that these poets are saying, and why they are saying such things in the particular ways that they do.
Perhaps the most fundamental fact about Persian lyric verse of this period is that it is court poetry, which means that its rhetoric is the rhetoric of praise poetry. Poetry exalting the sovereign and his powerful ministers and friends was in great demand, and produced the highest rewards for those who could excel at it. The most obvious lyric form, the ghazal, began as an offshoot of the praise poem, as a kind of lyrical introduction to it, which then became detached as an independent form, in much the same way that in the west the overture began as an introduction to an opera, but then became an independent piece which could stand alone. The rhetoric of the ghazal was still, in effect, the rhetoric of the praise poem. This had two results: 1) a ghazal’s rhetoric slips easily into hyperbole (princes can always believe the best of themselves, and lovers too apparently); and 2) a ghazal is virtually always concerned with a relationship between a speaker and an addressee in which the addressee is conceived of as infinitely superior to the speaker (the relationship is virtually never one of equivalence, or of the speaker feeling superior to the addressee, except as a reversal of expectation or as a joke). That is
, the relationship is basically that of a courtier to his prince, and the rhetoric in which it is expressed ultimately derives from rhetoric considered to be appropriate to such a relationship. The addressee of a ghazal can be a beloved/lover, a patron, or God. In the work of some poets, it’s crystal clear which of these three is being evoked; in the work of others, the situation is more ambiguous and a whole poem can be read as addressed to either a lover or to God, or perhaps to a patron. In still other poems, the verse can seem to glide from one referent to another – at times it seems that a lover is addressed, at times God, at times a patron. This indeterminacy can seem irritating to a reader, who may be impatiently asking himself, “Well, which is it?” But such implied ambiguity of reference was a prized strategy for medieval Persian poets, something regarded as particularly the province of poetry.
This seems fairly distant from the conventions of European verse, but in reality it isn’t that far away from some medieval and Renaissance European practices. To go back to the analogy of the sonnet, Giles Fletcher in the introduction to his sonnet sequence Licia, published in 1593, wrote:
If thou muse what my Licia is: take her to be some Diana, at the least chaste; or some Minerva; no Venus – fairer far. It may be she is learning’s image, or some heavenly wonder, which the precisest may not mislike. Perhaps under that name I have shadowed Discipline. It may be I mean that kind courtesy which I found at the patroness of these poems; it may be some college. It may be my conceit, and portend nothing.
In effect, Fletcher is saying his “Licia” might be a mistress or a divinity (“some heavenly wonder”), or an emblem of learning or poetic genius (“Discipline”), or an acknowledgment of patronage, or an institution, or simply “my conceit, and portending nothing.” Among his alternatives Fletcher includes a lover, a divine being, and a patron, and he refuses to be pinned down between them. These three – lover, God, patron – were the alternatives a Persian poet also played with in lyric verse, and the possibility is always there in a Persian lyric as well as in Fletcher’s sonnets that the subject is simply “my conceit…nothing,” that is, no more than an exercise in rhetorical skill.
Perhaps because the speaker’s mind is conceived of as being wholly focused on the poem’s subject, to the exclusion of everything else, this subject can be referred to as both “you” and “he” in the course of a poem. This can be confusing for the western reader, who usually expects a “you” and a “he” in the one poem to refer to two different people. Sometimes in a Persian poem they do, but very often they don’t. To further complicate things, sometimes more than one person is referred to as “you” (the reader might be so addressed, for example, as well as the poem’s addressee); sometimes more than one person is referred to as “he” (the beloved, but also a rival). A reader of Persian lyric poetry has to be alert to the possibilities; as a rule of thumb, if both the “he” and the “you” are extravagantly praised, the odds are they are referring to the same person, the subject of the poem. Although the device seems to be relatively rare in European poetry after the medieval period, this use of both “you” and “he” to refer to the same person was present in both western Classical poetry (the Greek critic Longinus remarks on it) and in biblical verse (in Psalm 23, for example, God is referred to at first as “He” and then, as the psalm proceeds, as “You”).
This shifting from second person to third person and perhaps back again, together with the sometimes apparently ambiguous identity of the addressee from moment to moment in the poem, are both similar to a third kind of strategy that, to a western reader, can seem equally disjunctive. Run-on lines are extremely rare in medieval Persian lyric poetry, and each line constitutes, normally, a complete thought unto itself; the apparent disjunctions can come when one moves from line to line – how one line is connected with its predecessor or successor is sometimes not immediately obvious. A sudden shift in what is apparently being talked about is a prized strategy in such poems, and it is the reader’s job to ferret out the underlying continuity. One way to approach such poems is to think of them as meditations on a theme, with each line (sometimes groups of lines) approaching the theme from a slightly different angle. The theme might be mutability, for example, and the poem could open with a few lines on the fickleness of the beloved; then there might be a line on the fall of princes, and an apparent excursion for a line or two on ancient pre-Islamic kings; then the poem could return to the fickle lover, and perhaps close with a hope that the poet, who is referred to by name, will be delivered from mutability in some way. It is usual, though not obligatory, for such poems to close with a mention of the poet’s name; this can be spoken in the first person, or addressed in the second, or referred to in the third person as if it represented someone quite different from the poem’s speaker.
So far I have been referring, deliberately, to “he” rather than “she” when talking about the addressee in these poems. Persian pronouns have no gender distinctions, so that the same word may be translated as “he,” “she,” or “it.” In addition, Persian poetry, when it focuses on physical appearance, only occasionally mentions sexual characteristics (such as a girl’s breasts, or a boy’s incipient beard). Descriptions of beauty tend to be androgynous, ambi-sexual; there is usually no way of telling whether a boy or a girl is being talked about. But scholars have generally assumed that, in reality, we are fairly safe in assuming that a medieval Persian ghazal’s subject, if it is a beloved, is a boy. The Iranian scholar Sirus Shamisa goes so far as to write that, “the beloved in…the independent (Persian) love poem is a boy ninety percent of the time.”1 There is a curious gender distinction in medieval Persian poetic genres: narrative poems such as romances, of which there are many, are virtually always about heterosexual relationships; short lyrical poems tend to be about pederastic ones. The speaker of a short lyric is, all other things being equal, assumed to be a male adult, and the addressee is assumed to be a male adolescent or boy. This has European precedents and parallels, of course: a great deal of Latin and especially Greek lyric poetry was addressed to boys, and Latin poetry to boys continued to be written into the Middle Ages.2 The practice seems more or less to cease in Europe around the time that poetry began to be written in the European vernacular languages, and the two developments may be connected (it was fine for the educated to hear about such things, but God forbid they should reach the ears of the laity). However, there were still, occasionally, poems written to boys well into the Renaissance (by which time it was of course dangerous to commit such notions to print – sodomy was a capital offence in much of Europe): Richard Barnfield’s Certain Sonnets (1595) and his poem The Affectionate Shepherd (1594) are both, albeit rather coyly, about – among other things – the love of boys; Marlowe in one or two passages from his plays and poems makes it quite clear that he finds boys sexy. For such preoccupations Persian poetry had a prestigious precedent much closer to home, in Arabic poetry; among many others, the eight-century poet Abu Nawas, whose mother was Persian and who grew up in a linguistically and culturally hybrid Arab-Persian milieu, was notorious for his poems to boys.
However, a consideration of the Classical precedent perhaps suggests that the issue is not simply a question of “These poems are about boys and that’s that.” We tend to pigeonhole sexuality, taking it for granted that most people are heterosexual, some people homosexual, and an indeterminate number bisexual. This was clearly not how the issue was seen in the ancient world. Horace, for example, refers to both boys and girls in his poems apparently impartially; what’s more to the point is that he seems to take this for granted, as if he assumes this would be everyone’s practice and preference (or lack of preference). In his satires he says he has “a thousand passions for girls, a thousand passions for boys” and in his odes he names specific boys and girls for whom he feels such passions. Taken together, his erotic poems imply that he was quite happy to have lovers of either sex, as long as they were young and pretty. Martial also has poems to both boys and girls, and even Ovid, who
has been considered as a kind of prototype of a later emphatic European heterosexuality (no male poet had taken women’s emotional and erotic lives so seriously before, or had seemed so interested in them), wrote in his Amores that his concerns could center on “Either a boy, or a pretty girl with long hair.”
Interestingly enough, the one Persian poet who repeatedly breaks the taboo on mentioning the sexuality of partners other than in an unspecific androgynous way, is Obayd-e Zakani. Seemingly delighted to talk about sexual characteristics obsessively and at length, he, like Horace, indicates that he was quite happy to have lovers of either sex, again preferably if they were young and pretty. It’s also significant in this context that when the princess Jahan Khatun writes love poems in which a lover is identified by gender, she seems to be talking about a heterosexual relationship. (As we’ll see, this is given a bizarre twist by the fact that she often writes as “the man” and the addressee is the woman; nevertheless, the point remains that Jahan Khatun clearly sees the ghazal as a vehicle for celebrating heterosexual as well as homoerotic relationships.) Despite the fact that the conventions of the short love poem in Persian presuppose a pederastic relationship (and it’s true that, when on the rare occasions gender identity or sexual characteristics are mentioned in such poems, it’s usually clear that a boy rather than a girl is being referred to), I believe it is a mistake to be too dogmatic about this. In the same way that some Victorian commentators and translators tended to bowdlerize these poems by making them always about girls, a blanket insistence that they are always about boys seems to me to be equally tendentious. I believe the situation was probably similar to that which we find in Horace and Obayd (and to some extent Jahan Khatun): both genders are being talked about, sometimes one, sometimes the other, and sometimes it isn’t of major importance which – the real subject is longing and desire, polymorphous and overwhelming – and the lack of gender specificity in Persian makes this not only possible but likely.