Layli and Majnun

  154. the sevens skies: the seven heavens of the Ptolemaic system (elsewhere Nezami mentions six heavens; see note 100).

  155. the rust / Staining the mirror of their mutual trust: For the mirror and rust topos, see note 126.

  156. Blessed by these added years the heavens give: See note 30.

  157. When jewelry . . . as the Pleiades: Nezami uses “pearl” metaphorically in three ways within four lines: in line one it means “stars,” in line three “virgin,” and in line four “tears.” For more on Nezami’s use of metaphor, see the Introduction, this page.

  158. And if . . . the dawn has come: one of the poem’s few touches of humor; Layli is querying why she hasn’t yet heard any of the three usual sounds of morning—a rooster’s crowing, the local cleric’s (mu’ezzin’s) call to prayer, or the drum that was beaten to announce the dawn.

  159. that torch whose blazing fire: that is, Majnun.

  160. Beyond the seven heavens of the world: See note 154.

  161. As grass before a box tree: See note 51.

  162. One goblet held the wine that neither drank: The metaphor implies that they did not sleep with each other, and their “drunkenness” as mentioned in the next line is from their proximity to each other and the other-worldliness of their love.

  163. A single circle: a symbol of perfection.

  164. Eram’s garden: See note 54.

  165. burning rue: See note 19.

  166. That you should seal your jewel-case up like this: alluding to the metaphor that the mouth is a jewel-case containing pearls (teeth).

  167. cold and sallow . . . golden yellow: See note 12.

  168. As if Zahhak’s snakes writhed across the grass: see note 60.

  169. Magian wine: that is, Zoroastrian wine. Since Moslems were not supposed to be involved in wine-making, this was often undertaken by members of minorities, including Zoroastrians. The pre-Islamic religion of Iran had been Zoroastrianism, and its rituals involved wine-drinking, which reinforced the association of Zoroastrianism with wine once Islam became the dominant religion in Iran.

  170. The full moon was the new moon, hardly there, / The cypress like a mirage in the air: Nezami uses the traditional images for a beautiful face (the full moon) and a beautiful body (a cypress tree), but with a difference; the full moon has become as thin as a crescent moon, the cypress as insubstantial as a mirage, and both images indicate that Layli is physically wasting away.

  171. the pheasant had departed: that is, her beauty was gone. For the pheasant as a metaphor for beauty, see note 44.

  172. that poor yellow flower: For yellow as a color that indicates sickness (and here death), see note 12.

  173. To start her journey to another place: “Another place” is a relatively common locution for death in medieval Persian narrative poetry.

  174. the shadow that he’d brought: that is, the news of Layli’s death.

  175. And on the grave itself he was the snake / That writhed there for the hidden treasure’s sake: See note 115.

  176. the wizened king that rules the world: Fate, and here perhaps death.

  177. There’s sure to be a snake to guard and hide it: See note 115.

  178. this ruin . . . in the gardens of / Eram: “this ruin” is the world; for Eram, see note 54.

  179. “O friend . . .”: Majnun’s last words are ambiguous; the obvious meaning is that he is referring to Layli, but “the friend” is a common Sufi name for God, and the phrase could also be read as meaning “O God . . .”

  180. this flooded house: that is, the world.

  181. This seven-headed dragon: that is, the world.

  182. Cooing what seemed a Zoroastrian prayer: that is, the doves’ cooing was like a low murmur, as in Zoroastrian prayer (see note 31).

  183. Poured offerings on them intermittently: as was traditionally done for a king at his coronation, or to welcome him to a town; the offerings could be petals, coins, or jewels, or anything small and valuable.

  184. Eram’s garden: See note 54.

  185. And she belongs to night: See note 9.

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  * For more on this, see Dick Davis, Panthea’s Children: Hellenistic Novels and Medieval Persian Romances (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 2002).

  * See Tomas Hägg and Bo Utas, The Virgin and Her Lover: Fragments of an Ancient Greek Novel and a Persian Epic Poem (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

  * The famous opening sentence of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, first published in 1953.

  * The name Layli is better known in the West as Layla, which is how it is pronounced in Arabic, and is of course Arabic in origin. However, in Persian it looks as though it could be pronounced “Layli,” and we know that Nezami did in fact pronounce it in this way because he often rhymes on the name’s last syllable, always treating it as the “ee” sound, as in “sweet” or “free.” This pronunciation is now standard in Persian, which is why I have kept “Layli” in this translation. Names of course often change in pronunciation as they migrate from one language to another (as, for example, in the English pronunciation of the French place name Paris or of the Italian forename Beatrice).

  * Nezami and Khaqani’s intellectual closeness is also indicated by the fact that Khaqani too seems to have been fascinated by pre-Islamic Iran: his most famous poem uses the ruins of Iran’s pre-Islamic capital, Ctesiphon (outside Baghdad, and largely despoiled and dismantled so that its stones could be reused in the construction of Baghdad’s buildings), as the basis for a profound and moving meditation on the passing of empires and dynasties; it seems obvious in this poem that Khaqani is not merely going through the expected ritual requirements of the genre but is saying something of real import to himself.

  * E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, in 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 2:403.

  * Some Iranian commentators on the poem—for example, Abdol Hossein Zarrinkub, in Pir-e ganjeh dar jostoju-ye nakoja-abad (“The Sage of Ganjeh and His Search for the Unknown Region”) (Tehran: Maharat Publishing House, 1372/1993), 111–33—have gone so far as to depict Nezami’s Layli and Majnun as a covert condemnation of Arab customs and culture, implying that Nezami looks down on Layli’s people for living in tents rather than in cities, and characterizing Layli’s father as a “typical” cruel Arab patriarch, with the implication that the kinder father of Majnun is somehow “typical” of Persian values. But both fathers are presented as Arabs, so that one could just as easily say that Nezami sees Majnun’s father as the “typical” kind Arab patriarch. It is true that Nezami often “Persianizes” the story, but this would be expected of a Persian poet retelling a non-Persian narrative, and hence nothing pejorative or condemnatory of non-Persian customs need be read into it.

  * Layli o Majnun, ed. Behruz Sarvatiyan (Tehran: Tus Publishing House, 1363/1984), 49–50, lines 40–49.

  * Ibid., 52, line 91.

  * For this translation I have relied mainly on the version edited by Behruz Sarvatiyan and cited above. One great advantage of Sarvatiyan’s edition is his extensive commentary, which is extremely useful in elucidating many of the poem’s more obscure passages.

  * In Western terms we can say that they are written in accord with Cato’s injunction, “Rem tene, verba sequentur” (“Grasp [that is, concentrate on] your subject, the words will follow”). It seems significant in this respect that both wrote one major poem that was to have far-reaching effects on subsequent Persian poetry, and as far as we know, virtually nothing else, as if they saw the telling of this one story as the single central focus of their life’s artistic work.

  * A Sufi is a practitioner of Sufism, a mystical interpretation o
f Islam that has taken a number of different forms in different places at different times, but generally involves some kind of at least mental (and often physical) retirement from the secular world, as well as a codified system of spiritual growth whose ultimate aim is union with the divine. Much of Persian poetry is pervaded with Sufi ideas, and a great deal of medieval Persian verse that looks to the uninitiated like secular love poetry can be, and was often meant to be, interpreted allegorically as Sufi in orientation. Nezami’s romances are particularly important in this regard as they are major examples of a transition from wholly secular love stories in verse, to verse romances that can be interpreted in Sufi terms while still retaining enough narrative realism to be (more or less) plausible as secular narratives.

  * Zabihollah Safa lists some of Nezami’s imitators in the genre of romance: confining the list to major figures, it still includes a considerable number of poets—Amir Khosrow, Dehlavi, Khaju, Jami, Hatefi, Qasemi, Vahshi, Urfi, Maktabi, Fayzi-ye Fayazi, Ashraf Maraghi, and Azar Bikdeli. See Tarikh-e adabiyat dar iran (“The History of Literature in Iran”) vol. 2 (Tehran: Ferdows, 1336/1967), 809.

  * Although Nezami doesn’t mention Gorgani by name, in his Khosrow and Shirin he has his determinedly chaste heroine, Shirin, refer to Gorgani’s adulterous heroine, Vis, with opprobrium as having “an evil reputation,” one that she herself will be at pains to avoid. Nezami, Khosrow o Shirin, ed. Behruz Sarvatiyan (Tehran: Tus Publishing House, 1366/1987), 493, line 74. Later, the supposed immorality of Vis and Ramin became proverbial, and the fourteenth-century satirist Obayd-e Zakani wrote in his Resaleh-ye sad pand (“One Hundred Maxims”), “Don’t expect chastity from a man who smokes hashish and drinks wine, or from a lady who has read Vis and Ramin.” Kolliyat-e Obayd-e Zakani, ed. Parviz Atabaki (Tehran: 1343/1964), 207.

  * “How is it that you live, and what is it you do?” The speaker’s question to the old leech-gatherer in Wordsworth’s poem “Resolution and Independence” of 1802.

  * Certainly it displays many of the characteristics ascribed to Mannerism in John Shearman’s authoritative discussion of this Late Renaissance style in European art: Nezami’s poem unfolds as a “refinement of and abstraction from nature,” it is “conceived of in the spirit of virtuoso performance,” and its poet would clearly agree with the notion that “complexity, prolixity and . . . caprice are beautiful . . . that virtuosity is something to be cultivated and exhibited, that art should be demonstrably artificial.” See Mannerism (London: Penguin, 1967), 18, 81, 186.

  * Safa, Tarikh-e adabiyat dar iran, 2:808.

  * Italo Calvino, quoted from “Nezami’s Seven Princesses,” in Why Read the Classics?, trans. Martin McLaughlin (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 50–51, 52.

  * T. E. Lawrence, The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Galaxy/Oxford University Press, 1956), first page (unnumbered).

  * John Dryden, Preface to “Fables, Ancient and Modern,” in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), 2:279.

  * See Asghar Seyed-Ghorab, Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing (Leiden: Brill, 2003), passim.

  * Jan Rypka, in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods, ed. J. A. Boyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 581.

  * Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 816.

  * Shahrokh Meskoob, Armeghan-e Mur (“The Ant’s Gift”) (Tehran: Nashr-e ney Publishing House, 1384/2005), 238.

  * Farid ud-Din Attar, Manteq al-Tayr, ed. Seyed Sadeq Gowharin (Tehran: Bongah-e tarjomeh o nashr-e ketab, 1342/1963), 180, line 3232.

  * Ibid., 235, line 4244.

  * Layli o Majnun, ed. Sarvatiyan, 349, line 30.