The Book of Kings
Abolqasem Ferdowsi. Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. Translated by Dick Davis. Viking 2006. 885 pp. $45.00 $25.00 (paperback)
The Book of Kings, Shahnameh, is the national epic of Iran, and one of the loftiest summits of world literature. Completed in the early eleventh century, it is to Iranians and the Persianate world what the Iliad and the Odyssey are to Greeks and the West. Until recently, Persian classical poetry was largely unknown to the general public in the West, the purview of a few specialists and academics. Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), a free rendition of the poet’s quatrains, was an exception. So, to a lesser extent, was Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum (1853), based on one of the most tragic episodes of the Shahnameh. But in the last couple of decades, thanks to the efforts of gifted translators and dedicated scholars, the treasury of classical Persian poetry has been more fully discovered, and a few poets have become genuinely popular, notably Jalaluddin Rumi (1207–73), whose mystical poetry has struck a chord with readers on both sides of the Atlantic; when Madonna declared Rumi her favorite poet, one could say that after seven centuries of obscurity in the West, Mowlana (“Our Master,” as Rumi is called by Sufis) had finally arrived. Ferdowsi’s epic has not yet reached that degree of popularity, although its presence in the West goes back to the nineteenth century, when the scholar Jules Mohl published his French translation in seven volumes, between 1834 and 1878. Thereafter extracts appeared in various European languages, but the poem remained confined to the cognoscenti. One hopes that Dick Davis’s lively, delightful translation will reach a wider readership.
It is hard to imagine better timing for its publication—Iran is in the news. Most Westerners’ image of the country and its people is limited to women in black chadors, turbaned politicians, and fist-shaking, slogan-shouting crowds—not very flattering, I’m afraid. By contrast, Ferdowsi’s poem provides glimpses of an ancient civilization and insights into the collective psyche of the Iranian people, helping us to understand both their survival as a nation through centuries of tormented history and the reasons for their pride.
It is often said that what gets lost in translating poetry is the poetry. To which the Spanish poet José Bergamin (1895–1982) responded, “Yes, but if it is not translated all of it is lost.” As in all art, there is an element of chance—suddenly a translation miraculously works, while another, by the same translator, does not. The difficulties are compounded when the poetry in question is from a markedly different cultural tradition. But Dick Davis, widely acknowledged as one of the best translators of Persian, has all the assets: He is both a learned scholar and a fine poet, and he is married to a Persian, also a scholar and translator, which means that he lives in a Persian ambience and is familiar with the nuances of words and expressions. He came to prominence in 1984 with his admirable verse translation of The Conference of the Birds, by Farid ud-din Attar, a twelfth-century poet and precursor of Rumi, which tells the story of the birds’ perilous journey in search of their king, Simorgh, as an allegory of the soul’s longing for union with God. Davis’s rendition captures the charm, humor, and fluency of the original.
Davis’s translation of the Shahnameh was first published in three sumptuous volumes by Mage Publishers (of Washington, D.C.), the whole set lavishly illustrated with magnificent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century miniatures from rare manuscripts. This one-volume, reasonably priced edition makes it accessible to the general public. Although the double-page color plates of the Mage edition are gone, instead we have black-and-white lithographs from nineteenth-century popular editions. At once naive and heroic, familiar and fantastic, they indicate the grip of the poem on popular imagination, as well as the influence of Western illustration, which was then becoming fashionable in Iran.
The text is not complete: Davis has excised certain passages where the narrative sags, for example Ferdowsi’s accounts of the reigns of minor kings, during which nothing important happened; instead he provides italicized summaries. The book is mercifully free from endless footnotes and academese, but it does include a helpful glossary of names and an index of headings, and certain key words with no equivalent in English are given adequate explanations in the introduction. Thus nothing slackens the pace or breaks the spell of the poem. As for his formal approach, Davis has chosen to render most of the epic in prose, though he occasionally bursts into rhyming couplets—in which the original is entirely written—to mark a dramatic or significant moment in the narrative. In tackling the poem this way, he has taken his cue from the venerable tradition of the naqqal, a kind of professional itinerant storyteller who is one of the most enduringly popular figures in Iran. If one were to set down in writing a naqqal’s performance of the Shahnameh, suggests Davis, “one would finish up with a prosimetrum, a text that is largely prose but contains passages of verse.” (He goes on to say that the prosimetrum was common in medieval Persia and “not uncommon” in medieval Europe, two examples being Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae and Dante’s La Vita Nuova.)
Even today, despite the omnipresence of television, the naqqal is a favorite entertainer. Every community has its naqqal, going from village to village, performing in the central square or the chai-khaneh (tea house), often for no gain other than the pleasure of lifting the spirit of his audience. The Shahnameh is the naqqal’s major source of stories. Once, while travelling in southern Iran with a nomadic tribe on their migration from their winter quarters by the Persian Gulf to their summer pastures near Isfahan, I came across a naqqal, who appeared out of the blue, announced by the gleeful cries of the children: “The naqqal is here! The naqqal has come!” Presently a crowd gathered, everyone dropping whatever they were doing, while the storyteller found a rock to sit on, and began his story: the tale of Bijan and Manijeh, from the Shahnameh, a sort of happily-ending Romeo and Juliet that is one of the most popular stories in the whole epic. Here is Davis’s verse rendering of the scene in which Manijeh first glimpses Bijan, a young warrior, resting in the shade of a tree. It is Noruz, the spring equinox and the Persian New Year. Struck by Bijan’s glorious aspect, Manijeh sends one of her companions to find out who he is:
“Go quickly over there; find out for me
Who’s lying underneath that cypress tree:
I think it is Seyavash, or else he seems
More like the angels that we see in dreams.
Ask him, ’What brings you here? Won’t you at least
Join in our festival and share our feast?
Are you Prince Seyavash, then? Or are you
An angel’s child? Because whichever’s true,
You’ve lit in me a fire that makes me fear
The world will end and Judgement Day is near.
I’ve come here every year to celebrate
The spring’s arrival on this happy date,
But never saw a stranger here before:
Now I’ve seen you, and I shall see no more.’”
At this point the naqqal held his breath, to let the audience savor the excitement of love’s ignition in the heart of Manijeh. After finishing the tale, he was given food and drink for the road, and when he left the children followed him like the Pied Piper, all of them disappearing around the curve of a hill.
On another occasion I saw a naqqal perform in the teahouse of a grand hotel in Isfahan. Dressed in the traditional garb of a wandering dervish—tall felt hat, woolen cloak, staff in hand, a bowl hanging from his belt— to enhance his dignity and hieratic status, he held his audience spellbound with his superb evocation of all the characters, male and female, human and supernatural, displaying the skill of a virtuoso puppet-master. He told the tragic story of Rostam and Sohrab: Rostam, the Achilles of Persian mythology, kills Sohrab in battle, realizing too late that he is in fact his long-lost only son. Everyone was moved to tears, even the tourists who did not know the language, as the naqqal described the fatally-wounded Sohrab dying in the arms of his father; Rostam, the invulnerable hero and savior of his nation, crumbling in lamentation and despair; and then the final redemption as the armies of both sides lay down their arms to mourn. Here is Davis’s version:
Cold sighs on his lips, his face besmeared with blood and tears, Rostam mounted Rakhsh [his horse] and rode to the Persian camp, lamenting aloud, tormented by the thought of what he had done. When they caught sight of him, the Persian warriors fell to the ground, praising God that he was alive, but when they saw his ripped clothes and dust-besmeared head and face, they asked him what had happened and what distressed him. He told them of the strange deed he had done, of how he had slaughtered the person who was dearer to him than all others, and all who heard lamented aloud with him.
Rostam then enjoins the Persians to “go no further with this war against the Turks,” and, returning to where his son lies dying, takes out a dagger to cut his own throat. His companions stop him, one of them saying:
“What point is there in spreading fire and sword throughout the world by your death, and if you wound yourself a thousand times, how will that help this noble youth? If there is any time left to him on this earth, then stay with him and ease his hours here; and if he is to die, then look at all the world and say, ’Who is immortal?’ We are all Death’s prey, both he who wears a helmet and he who wears the crown.”
The Shahnameh tells the history of Iran and the Iranian people from their beginning in myth to the Arab conquest in AD 642, the cataclysmic watershed that ushered in the Islamic era. The bulk of the epic can be divided into three sections. After a sort of introduction (omitted by Davis) in which Ferdowsi praises God and recounts the creation of the world, the advent of civilization, and the establishment of the social order through laws and institutions, he goes on to chronicle the reigns of fifty kings—or rather monarchs, as three of the rulers were women.
The first part, ending with the Achaemenids and the foundation of the first Persian Empire, is legendary in nature, with rulers living as long as Old Testament patriarchs: Jamshid reigns for five hundred years and the evil Zahhak for a thousand. Eventually the hero Feraydun, endowed with farr-e-ezadi—literally “grace of God,” but indicating a kind of divine mandate to rule—and helped by Kaveh the Blacksmith, the leader of the popular rebellion, topples Zahhak and establishes Iran’s first dynasty, the Kayanids. (At school we were taught that Kaveh the Blacksmith’s leather apron was the original Iranian flag. Similarly, the Kayanid Crown became the symbol of Persian sovereignty, although different dynasties devised their own versions—Nasir al-Din Shah [r. 1848–96] actually called his the Kayanid Crown, while, after the fall of the Qajars, Reza Shah [r. 1925–41] named his own the Pahlavi Crown. Both are in the National Museum of Iran.) In time, Feraydun, like King Lear, divides his kingdom into three parts, giving the West to one son, Turan (Transoxiana) to another, and Iran to the youngest, Iraj, a male Cordelia—noble, loyal, magnanimous. But greed (to Ferdowsi the gravest of sins) and jealousy infect the souls of Iraj’s brothers, who plot to kill him. There follows hundreds of years of tribal war between Turan and Iran, whose greatest pahlavan (champion), Rostam, emerges not from among the Kayanids but from the Narimans, lords of the province of Sistan.
In the end, the Iranians triumph over the Turks, and the epic smoothly moves from mythical to historical times, though its second part, covering Alexander’s conquest of Persia and the Parthians, takes considerable liberties: Alexander himself, for instance, is made an honorary half-Iranian, sired by King Darab. But the third part more or less tallies with historical records. It tells of the rise of the Sassanians, whose empire, at its apogee, stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indus. Ferdowsi conjures the splendor both of the Sassanian court, with its bards and musicians and high priests, and of their victorious armies, with their jewel-encrusted shields and caparisoned horses and elephants. The Sassanians made Zoroastrianism (by that point already an ancient faith) the official religion of the empire, and its tenets and imagery—the eternal contest between Good and Evil, angelic spheres, and much else—imbue the tales in this part of the epic. Ferdowsi also vividly recounts Sassanian romances and love affairs, some of his stories serving to inspire later writers, as for example that of King Khosrow Parviz and Queen Shirin, whose suicide at the end recalls Cleopatra’s; the story was retold around 1280 by the great poet Nezami. Khosrow is killed by his son Shirui, who usurps his crown and then proposes to his queen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Shirin rejects him, but he persists, so she begs him to grant her a final wish:
The King was told of what this innocent woman had said, and he asked her again what she desired. Shirin sent a messenger to him saying that she had only one more wish, that the entrance to Khosrow’s tomb be opened for her and that she be allowed to look at him once more. Shirui responded that it was fitting for her to look at the king again. The guards opened the tomb and Shirin began a mourning lament. She laid her face against Khosrow’s face and spoke to him the words they had spoken to one another in times past; then she drank the mortal poison she carried, which began to cloud her soul. Her clothes scented with camphor, she sat beside the king and leaned her back against the tomb’s walls. So she died, and her death was praised by the world.
When Shirui heard of this, he fell sick, and the sight of Shirin’s body filled him with grief. He ordered that another tomb be constructed, and there she was laid, her head crowned with musk and camphor. Then Shirui sealed Khosrow’s tomb, and not many days passed before he too was given poison… He was born shamefully and died shamefully… So a man may reign for seven months, and in the eighth he finds that his crown is made of the camphor with which the dead are anointed.
To a modern historian, the main cause of the downfall of the Sassanians might seem to be their ruinous wars with Rum (Byzantium), which so exhausted both their armies and resources that they finally capitulated to the invading Arabs. But Ferdowsi understood their decline in terms of farr-e-ezadi, the idea of divinely sanctioned kingship that, according to Herodotus, the ancient Persians first conceived, and that distinguished them from other peoples, in particular the Greeks. A special grace bestowed on kings by the Almighty, farr manifests itself as a light emanating from the countenance. (The Christian halo may well be its descendant.) The ideal king endowed with farr is God’s representative on earth, and his court should be a mirror of Paradise, with justice and pleasure joined in harmony. Without farr there is no true sovereignty, only power, which all too easily degenerates into tyranny. Over the centuries, farr declined into something closer to the Western “divine right of kings” as exercised and abused by, for example, Charles I of England. When the Sassanians invoked the “sacred right of the king” to buttress their increasingly despotic and unpopular power, they were stripped of their farr, and as a result succumbed to the invading Arab armies, who put an end to thirteen centuries of empire. It was this “catastrophe” that Ferdowsi mourned, and set out to remedy somewhat with his epic.
If farr is a distinctly Persian concept, many of the stories and characters of the Shahnameh echo those of Greco-Roman and Indian mythology—a reminder of their common Indo-European ancestry. For example, Rostam is virtually invulnerable like Achilles, only his weak spot is not his heel but his eyes. Jamshid, credited with the invention of wine, has been identified with both the Indian god of the underworld, Yama, and the Greek god of wine, Bacchus.Or consider Zahhak, whose fate recalls both Faustus and Prometheus.Zahhak is seduced by the Devil, who causes two insatiable snakes to grow from his shoulders. To satisfy the serpents’ hunger for fresh brains, two young men have to be killed each day, and eventually the populace, fed up with this daily sacrifice, breaks into rebellion. (During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein was sometimes referred to as “the new Zahhak”—though the Shahnameh makes no mention of it, Zahhak is often thought to have been an Arab from Mesopotamia.) The story of Queen Sudabeh and Prince Seyavash, meanwhile, is similar to that of Phaedra and Hippolytus. Queen Sudabeh falls in love with her handsome stepson Seyavash, and tries to seduce him. The scene where she declares her passion for the prince recalls Phaedra’s declaration of love to Hippolytus in Racine’s Phèdre:
“The moon’s of no account beside the sun,
And now you see the sun. Come now, choose one
Of these young virgins, and I’ll have her stand
Before you as your servant to command.
But first, swear me an oath you’ll never try
To wriggle out of: King Kavus will die,
And when that happens, I will turn to you:
Value me then as he was wont to do.
I stand here now, your servant girl, I give
My flesh to you, the soul by which I live;
Take anything you want from me, I swear
I won’t attempt to slip free from your snare.”
She clutched his head and ripped her dress, as though
All fear and shame had left her long ago.
But Seyavash’s cheeks blushed rosy red,
Tears filled his eyes, and to himself he said:
“May God who rules the planets succour me,
And save me from this witch’s sorcery…”
When she is rebuffed, Sudabeh, again like Phèdre, takes her revenge on the young prince by accusing him of making advances, though where Sudabeh’s desire is based on plain human appetite, Phèdre’s fatal passion is decreed by the capricious goddess of love: “Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée, / C’est Venus toute entière à sa proie attachée” (“It is no longer an ardor hidden in my veins/It is Venus herself gripping her prey.”) As a result of Sudabeh’s false accusation, Seyavash is killed. It is said that three drops of his blood fell on the ground and from them grew the red anemone—to this day the flower is popularly called “the blood of Seyavash.” Furthermore, that phrase, “the blood of Seyavash,” has taken on a proverbial life of its own, standing for innocence and virtue betrayed.
After the advent of Islam, the slaying of Seyavash and the redeeming power of his blood blended with the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, killed in Karbala in 680, whose death Shiites commemorate with mourning ceremonies every year. In Lebanon it ties in with the killing and resurrection of Adonis—as with Seyavash, scarlet anemones grow on the banks of the river where Adonis’s blood flowed—and with the death and resurrection of Christ: Even today mountain villagers commemorate the death and resurrection of Christ by planting “Adonis gardens” on their window sills at Christmas and Easter.
The conjunction of circumstances that led to the creation of the Shahnameh was unique: “A little earlier or later one cannot imagine this poem coming into existence,” Davis points out. Although the Arab conquerors did not enforce conversion to Islam, they did impose the Arabic language wherever they went. The Iranians resisted the imposition but adopted the Arabic script and some vocabulary. A new Persian evolved, rooted in Pahlavi—the language of the Sassanians, and a sort of second cousin to German—but enriched by the encounter with Arabic. At the same time, rebellion spread throughout the country, and by the tenth century central and eastern Persia were ruled by Persian kings, the Samanids and the Buyids, who revived Zoroastrian festivals and customs, used Persian as their court language, and encouraged poetry, which soon flourished.
It was into such a propitious climate that Ferdowsi was born in 940, in Tus, near present-day Meshed. His family belonged to the landed aristocracy known as the dehqans, who, although they had converted to Islam, saw themselves, as Davis puts it, “as the repository of Persian/Iranian tradition.” Just so, Ferdowsi set out to restore to Iranians their history and sense of selfhood, while reviving, purifying, and establishing their language. He honed the new Persian into a strong, malleable poetic tool, used by poets ever since; his vocabulary, metaphors, and similes have been employed by subsequent generations of poets, who have enriched them with their own contributions.
It took Ferdowsi thirty years to complete his magnum opus. Meanwhile his fortunes declined until he became poor—clearly he was no astute farm manager. His unhappiness was compounded by the loss of his son, for whom he wrote a heartbreaking elegy, incorporated into the Shahnameh. He put himself under the patronage of Sultan Mahmud, a Turkish tribal chief from Ghazna, in present-day Afghanistan, who had conquered eastern Iran, declared himself sultan, and established a magnificent court that became a magnet for poets and scholars—it is said that he had no less than four hundred poets on his payroll. Ferdowsi, too, paid him allegiance, and in exchange Mahmud promised him thirty thousand gold sovereigns on the completion of his book. Presented with the manuscript volumes of the Shahnameh, Mahmud sent the poet thirty thousand silver coins instead of the pledged gold. The poet was so indignant that, despite his dire poverty, he sent the money back, renouncing the hope of living out his last years in relative ease.
It has never been established why Mahmud short-changed Ferdowsi. Some blame the jealousy of other court poets, mediocre versifiers who wrote panegyrics to their patron, lived in comfort, and sank without a trace; if so, the irony would not have been lost on Ferdowsi, who time and again warns against jealousy, which corrodes the soul, narrows the mind, and engenders strife and misery. Others believe that Mahmud, a devout Sunni, withdrew his patronage when he learned that Ferdowsi was a Shiite. (Shiism became the official religion of Iran only in the sixteenth century, under the Safavids, and in Ferdowsi’s day was a minority faith.)
Whatever the reason, Ferdowsi was by then old, weak, and very poor. Legend has it that someone intervened with Mahmud and made him realize how wrong he had been in breaking his pledge, that this was “not the way of kings.” In contrition, Mahmud sent the poet the promised fortune. As his envoys were entering the town where Ferdowsi lived, their mules and camels laden with gold for the poet, they saw a donkey carrying a modest coffin in the opposite direction, toward the cemetery. They enquired who was being buried. “Ferdowsi, the poet,” came the reply.
Before dying (in 1020 or thereabouts), Ferdowsi wrote a hajv (satire) against Mahmud, a long and bitter attack only part of which has survived. In it he castigates Mahmud for his meanness and bad manners, blaming his low birth and uncivilized background for his failure to live up to the ideals of kingship; Mahmud is no true monarch, only a base upstart without spiritual grandeur, generosity, or honor. I remember my teacher of Persian literature telling his students the story with many flourishes. I learnt some verses from Ferdowsi’s hajv by heart, one of which I still recall:
If the King’s mother had been a lady,
By now I would be knee-deep in silver and gold.
“Beware the poet’s scorn!” Persians say. Flattery and sycophancy fade away, but satire lasts forever.
Ferdowsi’s fortunes with the rulers of Iran have fluctuated over the years. The Pahlavis (1925–1979), who named their dynasty after the language of the Sassanian era and wished to celebrate the glories of the pre-Islamic Persian Empire, encouraged the cult of the poet and his Shahnameh. By contrast, after the revolution of 1979 the new Islamic Republic was not so keen on promoting a book in which the Arab conquest is treated as a calamity and the Arabs described in unflattering terms. But the Shahnameh is too deeply rooted in the soil of Iran and in the soul of its people ever to be dislodged, for it has become the symbol as well as the custodian of national identity through Iran’s long history. Dynasties come and go, invasions and revolutions and wars take the country to the brink of disintegration, but with the Shahnameh the idea of Iran and the Iranian people endures. In times of turmoil and uncertainty, it is to Ferdowsi and his poem that Iranians turn for solace and hope, telling his stories of love and chivalry, of divine justice and human folly, to bolster their fortitude.
Reading Dick Davis’s wonderful translation, I wished everyone would read it, especially Western rulers, who could learn from it certain things about Iran that might make their dealings with the country at least a little easier.
—SHUSHA GUPPY
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