TEHRAN -- Prominent Dutch Iranologist Hans de Bruijn who held the chair of New Persian ‎Language and Culture at Leiden University has died at the age of ‎‎91.‎
In a press release, Tehran’s Book City institute announced the news and expressed condolences over the demise.
The scholar studied Semitic, Persian and Turkish languages at Leiden University in the 1950s. Among his teachers was Karl Jahn (1906-1985), a specialist in the history of Central Asia, Persian historiography and Turcology.
De Bruijn then took up a position as the curator of the Middle East section at the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (Museum for Ethnography) in Leiden, where he worked from 1960-1964 on the material culture of the Islamic world.
In the years that followed, de Bruijn continued his research on interaction between religion and Persian poetry. His book ‘Persian Sufi Poetry – An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Poems’ was published in 1997 with Curzon Press. Like many other works of de Bruijn, the book was translated into Persian and became available to a large audience in Iran.
‘Persian Sufi Poetry’ contains many translations of Persian mystical poets. De Bruijn was a talented and precise translator of Persian poetry both in English and in Dutch.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, de Bruijn taught at the Faculty of Arts at Leiden University, in the Department of Arabic, Persian, Turkish and South Semitic Studies. Besides Persian, he knew Turkish and Arabic, and he used to share this broad knowledge and erudition with small groups of students in inspiring and well-prepared classes.
In his classes, a few verses of the fourteenth-century poet Hafez could lead to an enthusiastic excursus into the history of Iran, the Persian language, the art of poetry, Islam and Sufism: he was able to explain the various connections in a crystal-clear manner.
In his teachings, he not only focused on classical Persian literature, but he also gave classes on the modern history of Iran, modern Persian literature, Islamic art, Iranology, manuscript culture, Kurdish, Middle Persian and Tajik. In meetings with students at the beginning of the year he would propose a number of possible topics for classes, which were then discussed with his students, and tailored according to their interests and specializations.
It is with this quatrain that in the latter days of January 2023 the final farewell of Hans de Bruijn was announced. His legacy is a comfort to all who cherish and love Persian and Persian literature. As the motto of de Bruijn’s Een karavaan uit Perzië goes (by Nezami Ganjavi):
What is left of mankind are words, all else is wind.