The Shahnameh
Page 28
8. Despite (or perhaps because of) my deep admiration for Dick Davis’s translation of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, it is deeply disappointing to see he has left some of the most precious passages of the Persian epic untranslated. Unfortunately, his explanation of his choices in his learned introduction (xxxiii), that he has followed a naqqali tradition of popular performances through prosimetrum, is not only unconvincing but also in fact reveals a deeply flawed understanding of the highly courtly and decidedly imperial disposition of the entirely poetic Persian original.
9. Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
10. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
1. THE PERSIAN EPICS
1. This homage to the opening sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is my loving tribute to a magnificent modern epic brilliantly discussed by my distinguished colleague Franco Moretti in his seminal book Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996), to which you will see I have many occasions to refer.
2. For a thorough examination of the relationships between the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi and Khvatay-namak genre, see Mohammad Roshan, “Khoday-nameh-ha va Shahnameh-ye Ferdowsi” (Khvatay-namak and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh), Kelk, nos. 7, 9 (Mehr and Azar 1369/September and November 1990).
3. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Mo’arrefi va Arzyabi Barkhi az Dastneveshteh-ha-ye Shahnameh,” Iran Nameh 11 (spring 1364/1985): 377–406; 13 (fall 1364/1985): 16–47; 14 (winter 13641986): 225–55.
4. For a detailed account of the pre-Islamic sources of Iranian history, see “Historiography: Pre-Islamic Period,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/historiography-ii.
5. Hamid Dabashi, Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 148–59.
6. For an exquisite essay on the history of the word vatan in Persian poetry, see the eminent Iranian literary scholar Mohammad Reza Shafi’i-Kadkani’s “Talaqqi-ye Qodama az Vatan” (The conception of our predecessor from the idea of Vatan), Bukhara 75, no. 2 (Tir 1389/ June 23, 2010), http://bukharamag.com/1389.04.1241.html. While fully conscious of the European origin of ethnic nationalism, he compares the Iranian case of the idea of nation and nationalism to this colonial encounter, but he is also fully aware of the critical factor of collective memory. Yet many of my ideas of the nation and homeland I propose here, especially as the coded term for a postcolonial public sphere, differ significantly from Shafi’i-Kadkani’s articulation in this excellent essay. He completely disregards the transformative power of a bourgeois public sphere in an epistemic shift in the definition of Vatan.
7. For more on the origins of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in pre-Islamic sources, see the pioneering essays of Hasan Taghizadeh published in Berlin in the 1920s and subsequently collected and edited by Iraj Afshar, Maqalat-e Taghizadeh, vol. 6, Ferdowsi va Shahnameh-ye Ou (Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh) (Tehran: Heydari Publications, 1390/2011), particularly 71–122. For more recent critical observations on Taghizadeh’s pioneering scholarship, see Sajjad Aydenlou, “Yaddasht-ha-‘i bar Maqalat-e Shahnameh-Shenakhti Ostad Taghizadeh” (Commentaries on Taghizadeh’s essays on Shahnameh studies), Ketab-e Mah, no. 77 (Shahrivar 1392/August 2013): 14–27. For the more recent state of scholarship on these sources, see Mahmoud Omidsalar, Iran’s Epic and America’s Empire (Santa Monica, Calif.: Afshar Publishing, 2012), chapters 6 and 7.
8. For more on the gosan, “a Parthian word of unknown derivation for ‘poet-musician, minstrel,’ ” see the entry gōsān in Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gosan.
9. For details, see Mahmoud Omidsalar, Poetics and Politics of Iran’s National Epic, the Shahnameh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), chapters 2 and 3.
10. See the entry Ayādgār ī Zarērān in Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ayadgar-i-zareran.
11. See Kār-Nāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pābagān, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/karnamag-i-ardasir.
12. “Historiography,” Encyclopaedia Iranica.
13. “Historiography,” Encyclopaedia Iranica.
14. “Historiography,” Encyclopaedia Iranica.
15. “Historiography,” Encyclopaedia Iranica.
16. Zabihollah Safa, Hamaseh-sura’i dar Iran (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1942), 95–98.
17. Safa, Hamaseh-sura’i dar Iran, 98–99.
18. Safa, Hamaseh-sura’i dar Iran, 99–107.
19. Safa, Hamaseh-sura’i dar Iran, 283–94.
20. Safa, Hamaseh-sura’i dar Iran, 294–342. In an erudite essay on one of these texts, Shahryar-nameh, Mahmoud Omidsalar argues in detail that most of these epics are nowhere near in their eloquence to the master’s original, and most of them are of much later origin. With the exception of Faramarz-nameh, Borzu-nameh, Bahman-nameh, Kush-nameh, and of course Garshasp-nameh, which are all post-Ferdowsi, all other epics about the family of Rostam, Mahmoud Omidsalar believes are very late, mostly post-Safavid or even of Qajar provenance. See Mahmoud Omidsalar, “Shahryar-nameh,” in Jostar-ha-ye Shahnameh Shenasi va Mabaheth-e Adabi (Essays in Shahnameh studies and literary issues), 438–60 (Tehran: Bonyad-e Mawqufat-e Doctor Mahmoud-e Afshar, 1381/2002).
21. For a detailed study of the use of the Shahnameh as a mirror for princes, see Nasrin Askari, The Medieval Reception of the “Shāhnāma” as a Mirror for Princes (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
22. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
23. “Our appetite for moral sententiae,” Dick Davis believes, “is considerably smaller than that of a medieval audience, and I did not feel I could try the patience of the general reader—who I again emphasize is my intended audience—too high” (Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings [London: Penguin Books, 1997], xxxv). All such convenient categories (“medieval audience,” “general reader,” etc.) are deeply flawed, and so is the dismissal of these crucial, meditative, poetic pauses as “moral sententiae.”
24. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, 25.
25. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, 24.
26. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, 361.
27. For an excellent examination of the figure of Alexander in the Shahnameh, see Haila Manteghi, “Alexander the Great in the Shāhnāmeh of Ferdowsī,” http://www.academia.edu/3499443/Alexander_the_Great_in_the_Shahnameh_of_Ferdowsi.
28. In some manuscripts and critical editions of the Shahnameh this question occurs earlier during Rostam and Sohrab’s first encounter. These variations do alter the dramatic impact of such poetic implosions but do not compromise their traumatic endurance wherever they occur. Be that as it may, alternative readings can be offered if one were to use one critical edition of the Persian epic as opposed to another. For an exemplary comparison between two such critical editions, see Sajjad Aydenlou, “Moarefi va Bar-ressi do Tashih Tazeh-ye Shahnameh” (Introduction and comparison of two editions of the Shahnameh), Ayeneh-ye Miras, n.s., 13, suppl. no. 40 (1394/2015): 1–144.
2. FERDOWSI THE POET
1. For a discussion of this distinction between “Western” and “Iranian” readers, see Dick Davis, Epic and Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 2006), chapter 1. For a detailed and insightful review of an earlier edition of this book, see Mahmoud Omidsalar, “Epic and Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 20,
no. 2 (1993): 237–43.
2. Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, trans. Dick Davis (London: Penguin Books, 1997), xxxv.
3. Zabihollah Safa, Tarikh-e Adabiyat dar Iran (History of literature in Iran) (Tehran: Tehran University Press 1959), 1:371–93.
4. Safa, Tarikh-e Adabiyat dar Iran, 531–80.
5. Safa, Tarikh-e Adabiyat dar Iran, 580–97.
6. Safa, Tarikh-e Adabiyat dar Iran, 603–6.
7. For further details on how I offer a systematic periodization of Persian literary culture along these lines, see Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
8. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ed. E. E. Bertels et al., 9 vols. (Moscow: Oriental Institute, 1966–1971), 9:381–82.
9. There are two excellent biographies of Ferdowsi prepared by two eminent scholars. One is A. Shapur Shahbazi, Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1991), and the other is Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi, Abu’l-Qāsem i. Life,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ferdowsi-i). The latter is more recent and more complete, benefiting from Shahbazi’s scholarship and including more references to an extensive knowledge of manuscripts with biographical references to Ferdowsi. Most of my references to Ferdowsi’s biography are therefore from Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh’s account.
10. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
11. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
12. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
13. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, 9:138–39. My almost verbatim translation here sacrifices elegance for accuracy.
14. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
15. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
16. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
17. As he does in Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
18. For more details, see Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
19. For example, for an entirely spurious discussion of religion in the Shahnameh, ignoring its dramatic and literary disposition, falsely comparing it with historical narratives, and then speculating about why Ferdowsi does not start his epic with a Zoroastrian reference, and other such conjectures, see Dick Davis, “Religion in the Shahnameh,” in “The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi as World Literature,” ed. Frank Lewis, special issue, Iranian Studies 48, no. 3 (2015): 337–48. For another equally dubious attempt at speculating about “Ferdowsi’s religion,” see Shahbazi, Ferdowsi, 49–58.
20. For more details, see Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
21. As persuasively argued in Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
22. See the discussion under the section “Education” in Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.” See also Shahbazi, Ferdowsi, 39–48, for similar speculations about Ferdowsi’s education.
23. For details, see Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
24. As in fact even serious scholars like Khaleghi-Motlagh suggest; see Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.” See likewise Shahbazi, Ferdowsi, 123–25.
25. As Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh rightly notes in “Ferdowsi.”
26. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
27. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
28. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
29. For a general study of such opening and closing gambits in the stories of the Shahnameh stories, see Richard Gabri, “Framing the Unframable in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh,” in Lewis, “Shahnameh of Ferdowsi,” 423–41. I do not agree with the central thesis of this essay, that the narrator is “helpless” in foregrounding a reading of the stories that unfold, but the fact that Gabri actually takes these crucial passages seriously and worthy of critical attention is in and of itself laudatory.
30. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, trans. Davis, 332.
31. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ed. Bertels et al., 5:6–9.
32. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, trans. Davis, 332.
33. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, trans. Davis, 332.
34. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, trans. Davis, 332.
35. There have even been some entirely baseless and rather ludicrous speculations that this persona that Ferdowsi creates here poetically was not only a woman but also in fact his own wife, on the basis of which speculation an entirely fictitious biography is imagined for her too! See Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi.”
36. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, trans. Davis, 332. Though the verb “to tell” in Davis’s translation is misused here, for the original clearly says barkhanam, “to read.”
37. Needless to say, if we were to use a critical edition other than Mohl’s, say Khaleghi’s, such analysis might vary somewhat, but the multiple voices with which the poet speaks stay the same.
38. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Fontana/Collins, 1968), 256; emphasis added.
39. Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, Julius Mohl ed. (Tehran: Jibi Publications, 1965), 3:3–4. My translation.
40. Davis, Epic and Sedition, chapter 1.
41. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 25.
42. For an excellent collection of essays on the presence of the Alexander Romance in its Iranian and wider regional contexts, see Richard Stoneman, Kyle Erickson, and Ian Netton, eds., The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East (Groningen, Neth.: Barkhuis Publishing and Groningen University Library, 2012).
3. THE BOOK OF KINGS
1. I have categorically challenged this historiography and offered an alternative in Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
2. See, for example, Zabihollah Safa, Hamaseh-sura’i dar Iran (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1942), 151–54.
3. Other texts also suggest themselves for such a comparison, perhaps most immediately the History of Abu’l-Fadl Bayhaqi (d. 1077).
4. For further details on this division of the text of the Shahnameh, see Safa, Hamaseh-sura’i dar Iran, 206–15.
5. The way it is promoted through the idea of “oral poetic performance” by Olga M. Davidson, for example, in Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings, Bibliotheca Iranica, Intellectual Traditions 12 (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 2006).
6. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. from the 3rd ed. (1744) Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948), 281–347.
7. There is a recent excellent study of Ferdowsi’s “cinematic” techniques in Persian by Seyyed Mohsen Hashemi, Ferdowsi va Honar-e Sinema (Ferdowsi and the art of cinema) (Tehran: Elm, 1390/2011).
8. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ed. E. E. Bertels et al., 9 vols. (Moscow: Oriental Institute, 1966–1971), 3:35–36.
9. For more details, see Mahmoud Omidsalar’s introduction to Ali Nameh: An Ancient Story in Verse (Tehran: Miras-e Maktub et al., 2009).
10. Safa, Hamaseh sura’i dar Iran, 377–90.
11. Hadi Seyf, Naqqashi Qahveh-khaneh (Tehran: Sazeman e Miras e Farhangi ye Keshvar, 1369/1990), 80.
12. Leading Shahnameh scholar Mahmoud Omidsalar believed this story to be an old but interpolated tale. In all likelihood, he believes, Ferdowsi did not put this part into verse.
13. In some editions of the Shahnameh these two young princesses are Jamshid’s sisters or wives, not daughters.
14.
I have detailed this theory of Shi’ism as a religion of filicide in Hamid Dabashi, Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). In that book I worked my way through but beyond the Freudian notion of “deferred obedience” toward “deferred defiance.” Here I am proposing to work the same issue, albeit through the far more provocative theory of Deleuze.
15. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: “Coldness and Cruelty” and “Venus in Furs” (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 60–61.
16. Ahmad Shamlou, “Ebrahim dar Atash” (Abraham in fire), in Ahmad Shamlou: She’r-e Mo’aser; Bonbast-ha va Babr-ha-ye Ashegh (On Dead Ends and Tigers in Love), ed. A. Pasha’i (Tehran: Ketab-sara, 1377/1998), 253–58. My translation from the original Persian.
4. EPICS AND EMPIRES
1. Sheila R. Canby, The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp: The Persian Book of Kings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014).
2. For a short account of this atrocity, see Melik Kaylan, “Clandestine Trade,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204770404577082842506737230.
3. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996).
4. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm.
5. I have given a preliminary outline of this typology in Hamid Dabashi, “The American Empire: Triumph of Triumphalism,” Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left 4, no. 82 (2008).
6. I have dealt in detail with this decentered subject in Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
7. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ed. E. E. Bertels et al., 9 vols. (Moscow: Oriental Institute, 1966–1971), 2:224.
8. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 22.