A Brief History of Metaphor in Persian Poetry (Part II)

Date: 01 May 2024 - 22:32

News ID: ۱۲۶۸۸۰

To indicate something of the density and complexity of this artifice in pre-modern Persian poetry, here is a translation of a very early poem that is made up almost entirely of motifs that belonged to a common stock widely utilized by other poets for centuries to come. The poem is by the tenth-century poet Rabe’eh, who, as is appropriate for this volume, is the earliest-known woman poet to write in Persian:

The garden shows so many flowers, as though
Mani had painted their resplendent glow

Dawn’s breezes never bore Tibetan musk,
How is the world so musky when they blow?

Are Majnun’s eyes within the clouds, that they
Shed Layli’s cheeks’ hue on each rose below?

Like wine within an agate glass, his tears
Have filled each tulip with their crimson glow

Raise up the wine bowl, raise it generously
Since bad luck dogs deniers who say “No”

Narcissi glow with silver and with gold
It’s Kasra’s crown their shining petals show

Like nuns in purple cowls the violets bloom
Do they turn into Christians as they grow?

The poem is a baharieh—that is, a poem welcoming the spring, a form that is still, a thousand years later, a recognized category of Persian poetry—and it is set in the archetypal beautiful place for Persian culture, the locus amoenus to end them all, a garden. But what is “Mani,” the third-century founder of the religion of Manicheism, doing in the poem? In Persian lore he was also a painter whose beautiful paintings looked so true to life that they deceived both people and animals, and this accounts for “painted” in the second line. Because the flowers are compared to Mani’s paintings, this means they must be very beautiful, and Persian poetry takes it for granted that beauty is a major concern of every civilized person. And something else is also going on here: Mani was the founder of a pre-Islamic religion seen as a heresy by Muslims, and yet he is mentioned, apparently favorably, in a poem written by someone we presume to be a Muslim.
The Persian language, especially its literary form, has remained far more stable over the past millennium than is true of most European languages.
Persian poetry often mentions religions other than Islam, and in short lyric poems, like this one, the reference is almost always either favorable or neutral; it virtually never implies condemnation (this is less true of long didactic poems, in which religions other than Islam are sometimes implicitly or explicitly condemned). This suggests that Persian lyric poetry at least as not prepared to denigrate other religions, and this is indeed the case.
Persian lyric poetry is in general welcomingly receptive to both the pre-Islamic past and non-Islamic faiths. The implication is that there is not one sole Truth applicable at all times to all people; that other ways of being, from the past or as an adherent of another faith, can be considered to be equally valid. Later on, such references were read as allegorical (the mention of a figure from another religion, for example, was seen as a metaphor for one who transmits mystical knowledge—that is, a knowledge outside of the mainstream of Islam), and in later poems they are often allegorical, but they were meant quite literally, for themselves, in Rabe’eh’s poems, as they were in the poems of her contemporaries and of many subsequent poets.
Courtesy: Literary Hub