In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau (Penguin Hardback Classics)
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The story of Qais and Lailā is set among the nomadic tribes of the deserts of Arabia. Khusrau gave his personal touch to this story by changing the chaste nature of Majnūn and Lailā’s relationship to include physical contact and sexual desire. The two protagonists fall in love when they are children in school but society does not approve. Qais spends much of his time in the wilderness and becomes a madman (Majnūn), wasting away in his love and with animals as his companions. Lailā (or Lailī) is also pining for her lover; when she hears a false rumour about his death, she falls ill and dies. When she is being buried, Majnūn jumps into the grave and dies clutching the body of his beloved. Majnūn’s behaviour is extreme in every respect and his character possesses all the qualities of a typical lover of ghazal poetry (see Poem 12). The intensity of his passion transcends cultural boundaries and has immortalized this story not just in the Middle East, but also in South Asia and beyond. In Sufi poetry, especially, the character of Majnūn is given a mystical spin, symbolizing martyrdom in the path of love.
On the model of Nizāmī’s Iskandarnāma (Book of Alexander), Khusrau versified the Alexander romance and his version is called the Ā’īna-yi Iskandarī (The Alexandrine Mirror). In his version of the adventures of Alexander, Khusrau sought to take Alexander further than Nizāmī had done and portrays Alexander not so much as a prophet and philosopher but as an adventurer and a scientist. The work has a romantic interlude when Alexander weds Kanīfū, the Amazonian Turk whose father served the Chinese emperor, after he defeats her in a duel.
The other works in Nizāmī’s quintet, the first and the last in the set, also contain themes of love. The Makhzan al-asrār (Treasury of Secrets) consists of twenty ethical and spiritual discourses followed by short anecdotes. Khusrau’s version, Matla’ al-anvār (Rising Place of Lights), includes a story that fits the cultural context of the poet: a pious Brahmin who is crawling towards his idol impresses a Muslim pilgrim with his devotion, and by example educates him about Islam. It was in his last work, which required the inclusion of new stories and action-filled narratives, that Khusrau was able to exercise his own literary preferences in choosing the material. Nizāmī’s Haft paikar (Seven Beauties) is a collection of stories told to the Iranian king Bahrām Gūr by seven princesses associated with seven different colours, who represent the different climes of the world. In Khusrau’s Hasht bihisht (Eight Paradises), which has one more tale than Nizāmī’s work, the stories are longer, faster-paced than Nizāmī’s, full of witty wordplay and with complex plots that involve love, magic and adventure. Khusrau altered Nizāmī’s original story by having his female protagonist Dilārām become adept at all kinds of musical arts, instead of achieving physical prowess, to impress the king, Bahrām Gūr. The details in the tales show that the poet is certainly drawing on his Indian background by including stories that he would have heard orally. One of these stories seems to have its source in the Tūtīnāma and another, ‘The Tale of the Camphor Princess’, translated here as poem 80, has elements from the Sohnī–Mahīvāl legend of the Indus region, but is devoid of any mystical content. In his verse romances, Khusrau often sacrifices aesthetics for the sake of narrative, and our verse translation attempts to convey the rapid movement of the tale without forcing rhyme and metre on individual lines.
The lovers in these stories remain the epitome of romantic love in Persianate literature to this day. On a broader level, the romances of Nizāmī and Amīr Khusrau explore the nature of love that is a source for the wisdom that leads to justice and universal harmony. Subsequent poets in the Persianate traditions not only imitated the two poets in retelling the stories but also translated or used them as models for local love stories in other related literary cultures such as Turkish and Urdu. Khusrau’s versions vary in plot and stylistics from Nizāmī’s. There is less emphasis on the development of characters than on the pacing and elaboration of the plot. For instance, in the story of Khusrau and Shīrīn, Amīr Khusrau gives a bigger role to Farhād, portraying him much like Majnūn, a passionate and devoted lover, and his character overshadows the others. Farhād also plays a crucial role in the signature verse at the end of many of Khusrau’s ghazals, such as in poems 13 and 38. So though the poet’s pen-name is the same as the king who wins Shīrīn’s love, the poet identifies with the lovelorn artist Farhād, whose love for Shīrīn results in his death. Khusrau’s khamsa was read and imitated by later poets as assiduously as Nizāmī’s, and due to the rich content of its stories, was often illustrated. Poem 53 is in the munāzara (dialogue) form in which the two lovers—Khusrau the king and Farhād—vie for Shīrīn’s love.
Amīr Khusrau wrote his khamsa as a tribute to Nizāmī and in order to establish his standing as a poet. Once he had completed it, he returned to something he had tried earlier: writing narrative poetry using actual events of his time as the plot. His purpose here was to achieve something that would distinguish him in Persian literary history as an innovator rather than an imitator. At this time, the panegyric ode was losing ground not only to the ghazal but also to the narrative masnavī. Narrative poetry in Persian usually dealt with epic and romantic legends from the past that had relevance to concerns from the author’s own times. Khusrau’s personal engagement with the court and the political events of his times, by contrast, allowed him to present living history by casting current events as romantic or didactic fiction. He wrote five masnavīs, one in the reign of each sultan that he served, all dealing with courtly life. None of them included any events of his own personal life or the world around Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, although by dedicating each work to the latter he was bridging the gap between the royal court and the Sufi khānaqāh. Since they are neither purely historical nor wholly poetic, these romanticized historical narratives pose problems for both historians and literary critics. The truth is that each work stands on its own, and they are of uneven quality. But it is precisely the mixed nature of these works that make them a fascinating subject of study.
According to Khusrau, the third of these historical poems, ‘Ashīqa (Beloved)—also known by the titles ‘Ishqīya (Love Story) and Duval Rānī Khizr Khān—is the symbolic union of the two major Indian traditions that produced the rich culture whose history begins with the poet himself. The ‘Ishqīya was completed in 1315, more than a decade after Khusrau had written his khamsa. It is probably his best-known historical narrative poem and the one that has been most often illustrated. Since it would have been impossible to include a complete translation of this romance, we have included a mixed prose and verse rendition that conveys the essential story and suggests the style of its narration (poem 79). There was a popular tradition in pre-modern Persianate cultures of oral narrations that consisted of a prose summary, with choice original verses, of long epic tales. The recent translation of the Persian epic, Shāhnāma, by Dick Davis shows the appeal of such a prosimetrum style for modern readers and has been an inspiration behind poem 79. This long narrative tale describes the love of Sultan ‘Alāuddīn’s son, the young prince Khizr Khān for the Hindu princess Devaldei (or Duval Rānī), who was the daughter of Raja Karan of Gujarat. Khizr Khān was a well-liked and admired prince who was also a disciple of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā. For these reasons, Khusrau must have been personally close to him. After the conquest of Gujarat in 1297 by Ulugh Khān, Princess Devaldei was brought to Delhi and raised in the royal harem. In a fairy-tale-like turn of events, the young prince and princess fall in love, and despite the designs of the prince’s mother to keep them apart they are united in marriage. This is the point where Khusrau had ended his romance, but the lovers had a tragic end when Khizr Khān was imprisoned, blinded and finally killed in the Gwalior fortress by his brother Mubārak Shāh in his bid for the throne. After the four years of this sultan’s rule came to an end, Khusrau updated the narrative and concluded the tale on this sad note. Khusrau declares that he wanted to create an Indian love story to match the legendary tales of lovers such as Vis and Rāmīn, Vāmiq and Azrā, and Lailā and Majnūn. In laying out
the background for the story, the poet gives a short history of the Islamic civilization in India which culminates in the union of the two lovers, symbolically representing the synthesis of the two major cultures of the time. Along with the narrative the work is interspersed with dialogues between the two lovers and didactic stories.
In keeping with his literary versatility and creativity, Amīr Khusrau also wrote some prose works that have not been as popular as his poetry, nor had much of an impact on Indo-Persian writers after him. Not every poet wrote prose, and prose was ranked much lower than poetry in the hierarchy of literary genres. Accordingly, we have not included translations of Khusrau’s prose works in this collection.
But one of these works, the introduction to one of his collections of ghazals (Dībācha-yi dīvān-i ghurrat-i kamāl), not only provides a literary autobiography, our primary source of information on the poet’s life, but also a treatise on poetics. In it, Khusrau presents the two qualities that he most prized in poetry: ravānī (fluency) and īhām (double entendre or punning). Ravānī was prized by many medieval Persian poets who aimed at an easy yet elegant style. Khusrau says that the style of a great poet should be simple (not like that of preachers), free of errors and original. He describes the gradual development of his poetic temperament from the cold and dry formality of his early ghazals towards a water-like, gentle softness, ending in his later poems in a delicate, well-seasoned perfection that can even set fire to a heart that is cold and devoid of passion. We have aimed for similar fluency in our translations, presenting the flow of images and emotions in Khusrau’s poetry as accurately and clearly as possible, offering a plainer, though, we hope, no less substantive fare than the original texts. The second desirable quality in poetry, īhām, is Khusrau’s favourite rhetorical device. He says, ‘[My] talent has established īhām as clearer than a mirror, for in a mirror more than one image does not appear from an object. But this is a mirror that when you look into it, seven true and clear images will appear.’ Khusrau’s īhām is similar to Ezra Pound’s concept of logopoeia, the multiple usages, connotations, ironies, and associations that a word acquires over history. For Pound, this aspect of poetic language is untranslatable, but we hope that our diverse selection of Khusrau’s poetry—from various genres, in various languages—will help create in English a sense of how the poet manipulated the key terms and images in his poetic language.
Khusrau placed a high epistemological—as well as artistic—value on poetry. Comparing discursive learning with poetry, he writes, ‘Knowledge remains veiled by the minutiae of facts, while poetry becomes well known due to the manipulation of facts.’ He continues, ‘Poetry is higher than wisdom and wisdom lies at the bottom of poetry. A poet can be called a wise man but a wise man cannot be called a poet. Magic is considered part of rhetoric but rhetoric is not magic. Therefore, a poet can be called a magician but a magician cannot be called a poet.’ We are privileged to offer some tastes of this magical brew of wisdom and poetry to English readers, much of it for the first time.
Ghazals
1 Ghazal 1: abr mībārad u man mīshavam az yār judā
The clouds rain down,
and I am parted from my love.
On a day like today, how can I part
my heart from my heart’s love?
The clouds and the rain and
I and my love waiting to say farewell:
For my part, weeping,
and for the cloud’s part,
and for my love’s.
The new sprouts,
the joyous air,
the garden bright green,
and the black-faced nightingale
parted from the roses.
Ah me, shackled to your every strand of hair.
What are you doing, pulling me
apart limb from limb?
My eyes rain down tears
for you, the pupil of my eyes. Stand strong.
Don’t depart on this flood of tears.
I will no longer need the gift of sight
after my eyes are parted
from the gift of the sight of you.
Cracks breach my eyes weeping for you.
Quick, take clay from your path
and patch the parting cracks in the wall.
Don’t depart.
I will give you my soul.
If you don’t believe me,
if you want more,
take and keep it.
Your beauty won’t last long when you leave Khusrau.
The rose doesn’t last long parted from the thorn.
2 Ghazal 69: basī shab bā mahī būdam kujā shud ān hama shabhā
Many nights I was with a moon.
Where are all those nights gone?
It’s night again now, dark
with the smoke of my cries.
Happy nights I spent with her,
giddy at times or drunk.
When I recall those nights,
my world goes black.
I used to rehearse the tale
of her eyelashes and brows
over and again like children
reciting the Qur’ān at school.
What might happen one night
if she asks how a stranger
below her wall passes
the night these lonely nights?
You are the meaning behind every form.
Come, let lovers—
forms without meaning—
live again in your street.
Though you robbed me of heart
and soul, look at me and see
how finely that smile came
from those lips into these eyes.
Don’t grieve for your life
though the friend slays you, Khusrau.
The beautiful have many sects
that act this way.
3 Ghazal 74: dīvāna mīkunī dil-u jān-i kharāb-rā
You drive my ruined heart and soul insane.
Don’t twirl your hair in sport
and break those chains of pure musk.
Though it’s a sin to shed innocent
blood, come shed my blood
and earn holy blessings.
Don’t waste rose water on beggars’ robes:
this age does not deserve
the perfume of love’s union.
Love, how did you come to work
on a nobody like me? Is no one else
left in this ruined world?
Not having dreamt bitter dreams
a single night, how can they know
the taste of aching absence?
The times suffer a drought of faithfulness
and storms well up in the eyes:
When will the stars decree this omen of rain?
We are slaves to a glance always
ready to parry. As soon as I said, Kill!
he brandished his eyelash sword.
If he’s happy killing the helpless,
let straightforwardness,
Lord, speed his arrow’s flight.
In vain is the devastating
beauty of ephebe and sāqī.
As an intoxicant wine is falsely accused.
From heart’s fire my sobbing
lets fall tears of blood:
The roast sobs sweetly over the flame.
Khusrau cannot staunch his burning tears.
Yes, the hot kettle brings water to a boil.
4 Ghazal 129: tā bar sar-i bāzār bi-mastī qadamash raft
As he reeled drunkenly through the bazaar,
everything people had amassed got swept
away on the winds of his tyranny,
and whatever patience or composure
my burning heart once had was lost
in the spiralling curls of his swirling hair.
When Joseph passed through the market
of beauty, his entire capital
went for seventeen gold coins, but
the precious life I sqaundered suffering
for my love could not buy a single day
of joyous togetherness.
The skirts of his blandishment were never
stained by the blood of the dear ones
he trampled underfoot. Many have lost
their lives to the sword of punishment;
how happy the head
that goes under the blade of his largesse!
The writ of destiny went thus:
The soul will be lost in love.
And in short, it went as it was writ.
As my soul watched how his regal phantom
wreaked slaughter, it picked up its shroud
and marched under his banner with its sword.
Remembering him tonight Khusrau’s night
lingered long and grew no shorter
though a moon rose large and sank.
5 Ghazal 153: gul imshab ākhir-i shab mast bar khāst
Drunk tonight the rose arose near dawn
and bedecked the banquet with a goblet tulip-red.
Over here the grass sat rooted to the spot.
The cypress stood attentive there on the right.
The breeze was blowing,
and the drowsy narcissus
went stumbling up and down all over.
In the garden, I was lying with a friend,
by God, like a moon without wax or wane.
A cry rose from my heart without my wanting
when she wanted to get up from Khusrau’s side.
6 Ghazal 155: man u shab zindagānī-yi man in ast