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>> This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you
from the Stanford campus.
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>> All of you out there who are dialed into KZSU, students,
and non-students alike, you're going to want to stay tuned
for this one.
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In titled opinions, brings you the independent music of ideas,
literature, and high-spirited intellectual exchange.
The theme of our music today is one of the great civilizations
of world history, Persia.
How much do you know about Persia?
About Persian culture, Persian history, Persian poetry.
Well, you're going to know a lot more than you did if you stick
with us for the next hour.
Oh, and by the way, we're going to be talking about love too.
How much do you really know about love?
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In this preface to love in the Western world, one of the most remarkable
books of the 20th century in your host's opinion, the Swiss scholar
Danidahoujmall writes, "Metaphorically speaking, the human heart is
strangely sensitive to variations in time and place.
What we call passionate love is unknown in India and China.
They have no words to render this concept.
When I am asked, does the word love express the same realities now as it did before?
I answer, what love?
What realities?
What before?
The European languages alone have included all these realities in one single
word, love."
I don't know enough about Indian and Chinese cultures to know whether
Duhoujmall is on firm ground when he claims that they have no words for passionate love.
Ever since it came out in 1940, love in the Western world,
La Muirre looksy-dawin French, has been attacked by philologists and historians
for promoting claims that have scant empirical evidence to back them up.
Be that as it may, Duhoujmall goes on to claim,
the West is distinct from other cultures not only by its invention of passionate love in the
twelfth century and the secular elaboration of conjugal love,
but by its confusion of the notions of Eros, agape, sexuality, passion.
Whether it's true as Duhoujmall maintains that classical Greek used at least sixteen
different terms to designate love in all its forms, Eros for physical love, agape for altruistic love,
philia for tender or erotic feelings, etc.
There is little doubt that our single word love,
connotes, or refers to a plurality of distinct heterogeneous,
though interrelated phenomena.
In fact, one could say that it is precisely the intrinsic confusion and
promiscuity of Eros, agape, sexuality, and passion that make love, or Amu,
or Amu, or one of the most charismatic and indeterminate words in western culture.
One of the most problematic and counterintuitive claims of love in the western world
is that passionate love was invented in Europe in the twelfth century.
Certainly some of the most beautiful love poetry in the world
was written in Persia, well before William of what Kia composed the first
courtly love poems in the south of France.
During the next hour, we are going to put Duhoujmall's claim to the test
with a highly distinguished scholar of Persian culture and of Persian love poetry in particular.
Professor Dick Davis, who joins me today is the most preeminent translator of Persian poetry into English.
Currently a visiting professor at Stanford, he was educated at the universities of Cambridge,
where he received a BA in MA in English literature, and Manchester,
where he earned a PhD in medieval Persian literature.
He lived in Iran for eight years between 1970 and '78,
and also for some time in both Italy and Greece.
Dick Davis' professor of Persian and chair of the Department of Near Eastern languages and cultures at
Ohio State University, as author, translator, or editorie has produced over 20 books,
as well as academic works, these include translations from Italian and Persian,
and eight books of his own poetry, the most recent of which is called a trick of sunlight,
which appeared in 2006. His translations from Persian include, among others,
"Atars the Conference of the Birds," a book of medieval epigrams called "borrowedware,"
and "Fardaoziz Shana May."
He has recently completed a verse translation of the 11th century poet Gorgani's viss and
Ramin, one of the most beautiful of Persian love stories, which we'll be talking about today in some depth,
I hope. Dick, welcome to the program.
Thank you very much for asking me, Robert. I'm very pleased to be here.
The first question is one of curiosity, how someone with your background growing up in England,
educated at Cambridge, Manchester, so how did you end up getting interested in Persian literature
and spending eight years in Iran?
Well, my education at Cambridge was in English, my first degrees are in English.
Whilst I was going through the English tripos there, I got particularly interested in the medieval period,
and from that I kind of... and I realized that if you're going to study medieval literature in England,
you have to study it elsewhere too.
So I spent some time in Italy, and I learned Italian, though,
sadly it's largely gone now, but I'm talking about a long time ago.
And then I wanted to work somewhere else outside of Europe.
I decided I wanted to go beyond Europe as it were.
And I had a friend who was working as an archaeologist in Iran,
and he wrote me ecstatic letters about how happy he was there and what a great place it was
and what a wonderful time he was having.
And how terrific the culture was and how interesting it was.
And of course, I had heard of medieval Persian culture.
So partly because I just wanted to go to a new place,
and partly because it seemed that it might be culturally interesting for me,
given my medieval interests, I went to Iran.
And I went for two years, and I would have stayed for two years, had it not been for the fact that
when I had been there for about six months, I fell very ill.
I finished up in a hospital.
I was nursed by somebody I fell in love with, and I stayed there for eight years.
We got married, we're still married, 30 odd years later.
And that's how I stayed in Iran for eight years.
I learnt Persian.
The Islamic Revolution happened.
I was like an epic poem to me.
The Persian culture is a long and ancient one.
And when you speak about medieval Persian literature,
the first question I have is whether the concept of medieval is specific to Western
Western chronology, or is it something that applies
and demically to the broad sort of unfolding of Persian culture?
Well, we use the wet medieval.
We are using really Western chronology, and it doesn't quite fit Persian culture,
though it's not wholly inappropriate, because Persia does like most literatures.
It has this period, which it thinks, it has a period, which it thinks of as its great period.
And the great period in Persian literature corresponds more or less what is for us the higher in essence,
and the, sorry, the higher Middle Ages and the earlier in essence.
So to talk about medieval Persian literature is not wholly a misnomer.
You're talking about literature written at the same time as medieval European literature,
an earlier in essence literature.
Persian medieval literature is Islamic literature.
It's literature written after Islam comes to Iran, which happened in the seventh century.
It was one of the first countries conquered by the victorious armies of Islam
when they spread out of Saudi Arabia.
What's now Saudi Arabia out of the out of Central Arabia?
And of course, Iran has an enormous history before that period.
There's as much history before the Islamic conquest as since.
I mean, by coincidence, there's almost exactly 1300 years on either side of that watershed.
All that literature or virtually all that literature from before the conquest is lost to us.
We don't have the texts.
We have about 40 lines of pre-Islamic Persian poetry, and they're very fragmentary.
And they're so fragmentary that people don't even agree on the meters that they're in, that kind of thing.
But there was an enormous interest in pre-Islamic Iran in the early Islamic period.
And many of the stories of the narratives of the great medieval Persian poems are, in fact, pre-Islamic narratives.
Their narratives, which had survived the conquest.
And so their narratives, the poems in which these narratives are contained, they are peculiarly palimpsest narratives.
And that they are written by a person living in the world of Islam and who's almost certainly a Muslim, but they're about a world before Islam came to the country.
And you can see both perspectives and the poems, and which is one of the things that makes them so fascinating.
These poems would have been known to the post-Islamic poets who wrote them down in oral versions, or were there written forms that have since been lost to us?
There's great argument about this. My own feeling is that they were mostly oral.
Many scholars feel that at least for some of the poems they were probably written.
The arguments are very technical on both sides.
One of the things that I feel does support the oral theory is partly that they're so little, that's survived.
That's one thing.
And other kinds of texts did survive.
It's not that nothing survived.
Religious texts, for example, and various other things did survive, to some degree.
There's so little, that's one bit of evidence.
Another bit of evidence is that all the references we have to pre-Islamic Persian poetry are references to recitals, not to texts.
They're references to performances.
My own feeling is that these stories reach the Islamic period largely orally, though I emphasize that scholars really disagree about this.
What we can agree on is that there are no texts which we can point to and say there's a pre-Islamic text from which an Islamic poem comes.
Those texts, if they ever existed, and I myself, as I say, rather doubt it, if they ever existed, they've disappeared.
That's quite astonishing when you think of the great civilization of ancient Persia, with Darius the Great and Cyrus, and what an extraordinary and far-reaching civilization,
and a very beautiful one in some respects, that it has not left any literary customers.
It is. It's heartbreaking in a way for a scholar, particularly if you read these poems from the relatively early Islamic period, which are about pre-Islamic Iran.
But as I say, they're all through this Islamic lens.
And you can't actually reach past it or through it or beyond it, or to do so is a work of literary detective work.
You're not just given the pre-Islamic Iran. You have to sort of search it out as it were.
So we are going to talk about Bisan Ramin, which is this beautiful love story that has appeared in your translation just this year, February 2008.
But before we move to that, the Shana Me, which you also translated by Farid Daozi, that is the national epic of Iran in many ways.
Is it not? What is that epic all about for those of our listeners who may be very much in the dark about this other tradition?
This epic tradition, the poem, the Shana Me, was written at the end of the 10th beginning of the 11th century.
The poet, Fadosi, he at the end of the poem, he actually gives a date on which he ends the poem.
And assuming the date is accurate, there's no reason not to believe it. That places it by the Western calendar in 1010.
The poem is immensely long. If you took the Iliad and the Odyssey and you put them together and you multiply by two,
it's still not quite as long as Fadosi is Shana Me. In many ways, it's more similar to Indian epic, like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana than it is, say, the Homeric epic.
It covers many generations and it has an enormous cast of characters. It covers 50 generations of Shana Me does.
And it begins with the creation of the world and the creation of the first man.
And it goes up to the Arab conquest and it traces the history at the beginning. It's the history of the world supposedly, but of course as in all epic, one's own ethnicity is the center of the universe.
So it's the history of the world as seen from Iran and then gradually after quite a short while in fact it becomes the history of Iran.
The early part of the poem is mythology and legendary material. The later part of the poem, after the conquest of Alexander, the Great.
The later part of the poem is quasi-historical. We say quasi because it's very romanticised history, but the kings who appear in the poem are actually kings known to the historical record.
Before Alexander, the kings are almost all legendary and mythological and what's extraordinary for a Westerner who knows anything about Iranian history is the Achaemenids, the people who fought against the ancient Greeks, Cyrus and Darius and Xerxes and so forth.
They are completely absent from the poem, which is a great mystery. The reason seems to be that the poem in fact hails from Northeastern Iran or the legendary parts of the poem, hail from Northeastern Iran, which was relatively untouched by that Greek expedition.
It was also not really incorporated into the Achaemenid Empire. Those legends become the legendary history of Iran and the actual historical kings of the Achaemenids are not there, which is very strange.
The photosis poem is one of those poems which many scholars are absolutely insistent had written sources. We know that for the later part of the poem it did have written sources because some of those sources exist either in translation or very small parts of them actually in the original.
But the early part of the poem, the legendary part of the poem, there's disagreement and I tend to come down on the side of those who think that probably those stories reach fed Oceorally rather than in a written form.
Another question of curiosity when you get to the Islamic part of the history, is it triumphalistic or did is there some evidence that the Persians experienced the conquests of the Arabs as something of a tragedy in their history?
It's quite unequivocal, it's a total tragedy. There's no, which is very strange because the poem is written in the Islamic era, there's no doubt whatsoever that Fredo C was sent to see on Muslim.
But he's what he's doing is he's bringing over the pre-Islamic traditions and myths and legends of his country and he puts them sent to stage and throughout the whole poem he sees Iran and its own destiny as the center of what he is talking about.
The destruction of the ancient Persian Empire or the tradition of empire because there had been three or four of them by the time the Arabs came to Iran is seen as an unequivocal tragedy at the end of the Shonomai.
There are moments in the poem which can be seen as prophesying Islam's coming as a good thing, but they are very minor compared with the actual trajectory of what happens at the end of the poem.
And one of the most famous parts of the poem actually is a long lament which is given by the commander of the Persian armies who is also an astrologer who foresees his armies and his defeat and his own death.
And he sends an enormously long letter to his brother in which he describes the terrible things that will happen to Iran once the Arabs have conquered the country.
So there's no question that the Arab conquest is seen as an unmitigated disaster at the end of Fredo's his poem.
Well this brings me to two questions. First what was the religion if we know the answer to such a question?
Prior to Islam in Iran.
Well and then last my second question.
Okay.
The ancient Persian religion is Zoroastrianism. It's a dualist religion which has a good principle of the universe, a hooram master, and an evil principle of the universe, a hareman.
When the Persians became Zoroastrians and when the prophets are asked to actually live, our subjects have scholarly dispute.
Zoroastrians usually put around 700 before Christ but he's been put as early as 1200 and he's been put as late as 400.
So but 700 what seems to be what most scholars home in on.
The Zoroastrian religion was seen as a specifically Iranian religion though it was also in a way a universalist religion.
There's a kind of, there's an analogy with Judaism there which is also a kind of religion that belongs to a specific people in a specific place but is also thought of us kind of the truth about the universe which is saying that other versions of what the universe is are not true as it were.
There's not a kind of similar to nayity of lots of different gods as you get in Greece and Rome and that's the same as Zoroastrians. It's exclusive in that way.
By the time we get to the Arab conquest there were pockets of many other religions in Iran too. There were a lot of Christians, there was a large Jewish community, there were many Buddhists and so forth.
And the Zoroastrians themselves had split into various groups, most famously the mannequees and the mannequees were kind of destroyed and then reappeared and then destroyed and reappeared and so forth.
It religiously it was quite complicated by the time the Muslims came to Iran.
The second question takes us really into our own times where in America one has popular conceptions of the Islamic world as a kind of blur between the Arab nations and of course Iran being much in the news these days.
What kind of there are tensions there clearly but these are I take it that these are more ethnic tensions than religious tensions because it would seem that Iran is one of the bastions of Islamic theocracy.
Although there is a Shiite Sunni divide is there something underneath that or underlying it which goes back to these historical events?
Well I think the answer is it depends who you talk to. Many Iranians themselves will say yes there is a divide.
Particularly Iranians who live outside Iran and see their countries sort of from the perspective of the outside and they will say yes there is a divide.
There is an ethnic feeling between Arabs and Persians or Iranians which is regrettable but it's certainly true.
It's not true sort of across the board but it does exist and it does go back to the ancient conquest.
There is that. There is as you mentioned as the Sunni Shia divide.
There is also the fact that Iranian civilization as I said earlier it's very old. It had been around for 1300 years before the Arabs came and the consciousness, the memory of all that, never disappeared.
So there was always an alternative version of the past for Iranians to which they turned very often when the Islamic version of things didn't seem to be helping or to fit what they expected of the world and so on.
There is this alternative version always there in many Islamic countries say in North Africa or excluding Egypt of course where there's also very obviously an alternative version but in many other Islamic countries in the Middle East and North Africa, the alternative version is only there in a very, very attenuated form.
Whereas in Iran and in Egypt it's there very visibly strongly and consciously and I would say even more in Iran than in Egypt.
So there is a sense among Iranians even very, very religious Iranians that they are in a way different from the rest of Islam.
And of course the fact that Iranians are almost all Shia and most Muslims are Sunni's accentuates that feeling of difference.
Well if we can move to the literary tradition of Iran and you talked about the Golden Age which was post Islam but it was shortly enough after the conquest that these poets in particular Gorgani and look back with nostalgia to a pre-Islamic past.
And in this poem, Veeson Ramin, we have plenty of evidence of that I suppose.
We do indeed. Veeson Ramin, the story of Veeson Ramin comes from around the time of Christ when the Parthians ruled Iran.
They were the people from the northeast who I mentioned before whose legends finished up as the early part of photos is Shonami.
And so the story is from Gorgani wrote his poem in about 1050.
So the story was about a thousand years old when Gorgani wrote it and I have now translated it into English a thousand years after that as it were.
So the story has sort of been reinvented again.
The story is utterly pre-Islamic in its feeling.
Feder said in his Shonami he deals with pre-Islamic stories but he often gives them, he doesn't make the Muslim and as I said at the end of his poem, the Arab Muslim conquest is a disaster.
But he often sees them through a kind of Islamic morality as it were.
He gets embarrassed by things in his sources which are not right according to Islam.
And you can feel his sort of awkwardness when he puts them down.
Gorgani and his Veeson Ramin, he just doesn't care about that at all.
And in that way he's a quite extraordinary poet.
His kind of lack of interest, you feel this as you're reading the poem,
in kind of accommodating his story to Islamic sensibilities is quite extraordinary.
And a very obvious example is the marriage customs at the beginning of the poem which reflected the ancient Zoroastrian royal marriage customs which were highly incestuous.
It's not unknown in the ancient world for royal families to practice in the pharaohs.
But the pharaohs did in Egypt too, the pharaohs were often usually I think married to his brother and sister marriage and the children would become pharaoh.
The children of brother and sister marriages would be pharaohs.
It's a similar kind of...
But there's also Mother's son and Father Daughter.
There is Mother's son and there is Father.
What does that do to Dr. Freud?
I don't know.
Dr. Freud, I think was probably quite unaware of Veeson Ramin but if he ever read it he would have had a fit.
It would have been very difficult for him to accommodate.
Danthon knew something about it, Semiramis.
That's true.
Libby de Veev, Lechito in Swalej.
That is true.
The reputation did get to the west and the Greeks were aware that Persian royal families were what they considered highly incestuous.
Anyway, my point was that Gorgon doesn't care about this.
He just puts it down and he doesn't apologize.
He doesn't explain.
He just says this is the story.
There's this young woman who is married to her brother.
That's how we start things.
It's not quite at the beginning but it's sort of the second episode in the poem.
Whereas pharaoh sees face with similar things in the Shana,
he gets very apologetic and he says, well that's what they did then and I know it's wrong but there we are.
So it's quite different feeling towards the past.
Gorgon is very unashamed about the pre-Islamic past.
Gorgon is much more open about him.
It's not just sexual mores too.
For example, all early medieval Persian poems celebrate wine drinking,
which of course is forbidden in Islam.
But Gorgon he does to a quite incredible extent.
Many of the characters are drunk from much of the poem
and there's no suggestion at all that this is a bad thing to be.
In fact Gorgon he seems to think it's a wonderful idea.
It's an extremely hedonistic poem.
Hardly a man goes to bed at night without being drunk and the poet drawing attention to his state of an abreation.
It's true and there's no suggestion that it's bad.
It's fine.
They all went to bed drunk and a great evening had been had by all.
Well if we can talk about some of the issues that I raised in my lead in about the phenomenon of love
and as I promised our listeners to put to the test,
one of Duhujmals claims about the distinctive character of love in the Western world.
If I can remind you what he says there that passionate love,
which is a concept that's more defined than we might associate with those,
which in term passionate love,
in the West was invented in the 12th century with the Troubadour poets.
And although he does in that book intimate to Persian origins,
Mannequi and Origins to the phenomenon of Western passionate love,
romantic love, who we call it so far as there is a kind of dualism that he traces in his theory between principles of not only good and evil,
but a complete incommenceability between love and marriage,
such that passionate love can never be conjugated with conjugal love on a pun.
And it's always in some sense outside of the law,
and that the kind of stories that have come down to us love stories,
the classical love stories of the Western world are all stories about adultery.
And if not, he says nine out of ten of them are about adultery.
And if it's not adultery, it's some kind of obstacle love, it's another term he uses for passionate love.
And that, well, I can read you the very first sentences of his first chapter,
where he quotes the beginning of a late version of the Tristan in an old story,
where he says, "The author says, 'My Lord, if you would hear a high tale of love and death.'"
And he says, "We know we could listen to nothing more delightful,
and this opening of Bediers Tristan should serve accordingly as a model for the beginning of a novel."
Why?
It's because the one thing, the tremendous vogue of the romantic novel,
makes immediately clear, is that the chord that awakens in us the most sonerous echoes,
has for its tonic and dominant, so to speak, the words love and death.
There are other and more occult grounds for thinking that this is one clue to the European mind.
So love and death, it's a fatal love, and he says,
"These phrases is summed up if not the whole of poetry,
at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature."
And as you know, he goes on to discuss the love poetry of the true Boudors,
but in particular, he takes the story of Tristan and his old as a paradigm for Western Passionate love,
which is doomed, and not only to a consummation in death, but he claims there's a drive within this passionate love towards death.
It desires death because it is mannequian in the sense that a certain kind of love cannot be of this world,
if it's really going to fulfill its ambition, it has to somehow end in this sort of self-enylation in the grand heroic mode.
Now, there are a number of issues here on the table.
Huge number.
But maybe I could reduce them to two.
One is the question of whether this necessary conjunction of love and death is something that we find precedence for,
or antecedents for in the kind of Persian love poetry that you have dealt with and have translated in particular in this story.
But perhaps by way of getting there, we could discuss your strong hypothesis that the Tristan and his old story has as its source this very poem,
"Vese and Ramim" that you have just translated into English.
So maybe we could talk about differences and similarities by you first telling us in what way or what kind of evidence would you like to point to in order to substantiate this claim that this poem is indeed the source for Tristan and his old.
Well, that's a huge set of issues. Talking about this poem and Tristan is older, I'm not the first person to suggest this by any means, though it's been suggested on and off for about 100 years by various scholars.
Most people who have looked at the evidence have decided the evidence is not strong enough.
I feel if you put all the evidence together, it's pretty overwhelming. There are so many similarities between the two stories that the idea that they were generated separately seems to me extraordinarily unlikely.
Can you give us some of those similarities?
Oh, you kind of enumerate them there in your introduction.
I could read that bit if you're not.
Okay, well it goes on for a couple of pages. I'll read the beginning of it and then you can sort of take the rest as just...
Okay, well here are some of the similarities.
The hero falling in love with the heroine while escorting her as a bride to the home of his king and close relative.
The hero being renowned as a minstrel. The crucial role of the heroine servant or confidant as the go-between.
The substitution of this servant or confidant for the heroine in the king's bed.
The episode of the hero's false love is older of the white hands who's loved by Tristan and Goll who is loved by Ramen in Vison Ramen.
The characterization of his older of the white hands and Goll is very similar.
A threatened but averted punishment of the lovers by fire.
The lovers escape together to an uncivilized area in both cases it's a forest.
The hero is disguising himself in an enveloping cloak or veil. Tristan disguises himself as a leper and a cloak.
Ramen disguises himself as a woman and a woman's veil in order to gain access to the beloved.
The king in Vison Ramen is killed by a boar while in Tristan as older there is a dream in which the king's palace is disboiled by a boar.
Both poems contain spectacular leaps.
Tristan is older and the versions of Tristan is older.
The lovers are equal but it is Tristan and his older.
Tristan is central and Tristan has the leap in the west.
In Vison Ramen, the poem is really about her and Ramen is secondary.
It's she who has the leap in the Persian poem.
There are lots of other parallels too. There are many.
There are other parallels.
There are other areas of evidence.
How would it have been transmitted to the west?
This is one of the great problems.
I think this is one of the reasons people were very quick to dismiss the idea.
It was the first put around in the late 19th century and it was repeatedly put forward every 20 years or so throughout the early part of the 20th century.
People just didn't believe that there was any sort of seepage or influence from Islamic culture to Western culture, particularly poetry or artistic culture.
There are lots of material culture.
Certainly the great vote for Islamic investments and the admiration that the Crusaders had for the barting of the Saracence horses and all that.
They wanted to take all this stuff back to Europe.
There clearly was a strong cultural seepage.
There have been many suggestions of literary strong parallels which suggest some kind of knowledge of Islamic models in Western literature.
So also there used to be a notion I think that if there was transmission it had to be textual.
We now sort of accept much more easily that transmission, particularly of a story and this is a story.
Particularly of a story can easily happen orally. It doesn't have to be textual.
People tell each other stories. That's what stories are for and that's what people did in the evenings. There's nothing else to do.
And stories spread very quickly.
So that problem of transmission is not so much there anymore.
People did think that if it had been transmitted, it was transmitted to Europe.
It was probably through Islamic Spain.
My own feeling is that it was probably through the court of Syria, which was a kind of go-between between the Crusaders in the Holy Land in Utramer and the Islamic World.
And the Syrian court was in fact the kings of the Syrian court were related to the king who commissioned Gogany's poem.
And they were Persian speakers as well as Arabic speakers and Persian literature was sort of savoured and enjoyed at this court.
So it's a probably good possibility that the poem could have been at the Syrian court at the time the Crusaders were there.
The poem is dated 1050. The first appearance of the Tristan-Nizola story in Europe is the earliest is about 1150.
But it's sometime between 1150 and 1200. So there's 100 years for the poem to get to the West.
The easiest way would be via Crusaders coming home.
And it seems to me that that is almost certainly what happened.
So let me play Duneer-Roushma, or let's say not the devil's advocate because I'm not presenting a case.
But let me say that fine, even if it's shown beyond any reasonable doubt that the Bisan-Rameen story is the source for the
So it's not what the West wants of its love stories.
I would agree and disagree. I would take issue first of all with the notion that passionate love is entirely a Western construct.
The things that Duneer-Roushma suggests are characteristic of passionate love apart from death, which you might think, well, that's absolutely crucial.
And even aside death for the moment, they're all there in the Persian poem we're talking about and in other Persian poems too.
Obstacles to love adultery, the impossibility of passionate love within marriage, it has to be extramarital.
All that is there. And the passionate love, it's really all-out passion. It's kind of crazily intense, and it goes on for a whole life, and it sort of destroys the life.
There are many Persian poems in which the lovers die. This poem, in fact, is exceptional in Persian in that the lovers end happily. It's the earliest romance, and it's really the only unequivocally happy romance in its ending.
Other romances are they either have ambiguous endings, or they end as Western romances tend to with death, though it tends to be a less kind of transcendent, full filmant of everything kind of death than one gets in Western romances.
So the passionate love thing, I just think derugimo is not right about that. All the signs of what he calls passionate love and the circumstances of passionate love are present in v.
S. and Romain. To a quite extraordinary extent, I mean, if somebody comes to the poem from medieval European literature, from reading St. Critian to Twat, or somebody like that, all the Tristan versions as they spread throughout Europe in the 13th century and so on.
You feel you're in the same world. It's exactly the same kind of world. It's courtiers and backbiting and secret twists and go-betweens and magic potions and the whole lot. It's all there. Everything, all those circumstances are there.
There is the difference of the deaths. The end of Tristan is older, and as you said, v. Sain Romain ends happily. The two are finally, after many, many, many tribulations. They are finally united. The husband of Vise, who is the king who is killed by a boar,
is got out of the ways it were and they are able to be to live happily ever after and they become king and queen and have children and their children and reign and so forth. So the end is very different. There is a very interesting footnote to that, though.
Critian to Twat, who I just mentioned as a writer of romances in Europe, is thought to have written a Tristan, which has disappeared, but he did write a story called "Klejs". And in "Klejs", we have almost exactly the same thing. It ends happily. The husband has got rid of.
Interestingly enough too, in both Tristan and his older and Vise and Romain, the go-between is a practitioner of magic. Now in the Tristan story, she gives the magic potion to the lovers so that they fall in love.
In Vise and Romain, the lovers just fall in love without any magical help, but her magic is used in order to render the husband of the female beloved, impotent.
And this is exactly the same in "Klejs". So we do have a real parallel in "Klejs" to Vise and Romain in that "Klejs" ends happily as Vise and Romain does. And the go-between uses her magic to render the husband impotent rather than to make the lovers fall in love.
Now this is almost the Tristan story, but with this twist. But the twist takes us back to, in fact, the Persian story. That's how the Persian story is.
The interesting thing is that Tristan spread everywhere throughout Europe and Klejs was a dead end. So in that way it's clear that Jerusalem was right. The European imagination responded to the lovers dying. That's what it felt was right.
And the Klejs version which follows the Persian more closely, as I say it didn't go anywhere. There were no limitations.
Well this is a remarkable narrative. It's full of episodes. It's almost very different in its stylistic signature, but like the Orlando Furiosa where you have multiple narratives embedded one within the other.
And all these digressionaries by ways in the storytelling. And the point is not to get to some grand finale.
And if you're waiting to find out how it ends and you're right in your introduction you're going to be quite disappointed if it's all in the punchline. It's the telling of the joke or telling of the story or whatever.
And that way it's a shaggy-doke story.
Now can we speak a little bit about the poetics of the poem, the aesthetics of it and how you rendered that in English because the Persian original, I believe is in couplets.
It is in couplets. And in what would be the closest thing from what I understand again from your introduction would be the pentameter in English.
And so you've decided to render it also in couplets. And at first I thought that's a very risky thing to do because you can give a certain kind of sing song quality to the poem in English.
You bring it off masterfully well and it struck me in reading the translation that one would lose a whole lot in a prose translation somehow.
Well that was my feeling too and that's why I did it in couplets. I'm in my 60s. I've been writing formal verse for a very long time. So it's not that difficult for me to write couplets. It's still not that easy either.
But it's not like sort of never having written any couplets before deciding you're going to do it. I've been doing it since I was a teenager as it were.
And I've been translating Persian for a long time and when I read this poem and I decided I wanted to translate it, the English form is so close to the Persian form. I mean the Persian couplet has 22 syllables, the English couplet has 20 syllables.
And it's the same two lines with one rhyme and then the next two lines have another rhyme and so on. It really feels very similar, though the meter of course is different.
But it does feel very similar. Also because of the similarity, whether we see it as influence or whether we see it as extraordinary coincidence or however we see it, because of the similarity of the situations and rhetoric of a great deal of medieval European verse, two, the situations and rhetoric of vise and romine.
A rhetoric kind of later hand for this, a lot of the images that Gorgani uses are very similar to images in similar kinds of poetry in European languages. In fact some of them are exactly the same, like calling the beloved arose, for example.
That's a very obvious example, but there are many others as well. And the sensibility is different from the European. It's much more extravagant, it's much more hyperbolic.
It's much more kind of whipped up as it were in the intensity of emotion. It is more sensuous. It is more sensuous. It's very sensuous. And it's unashamedly sensuous too, which is the poem is thrilling to read or I found it so when I was...
Oh it is. It is.
In a way that it's... I'm not putting down European romances at all, I love them and they were I started out as it were as an undergraduate many years ago.
But it's much less pedestrian than European romances often are. European romances often spend a lot of time could have kind of filling in the daily details.
It's also full of psychology in a way that seems so much more developed in, for example, the character of Vise is a full-blown psychological person in a way that you have to wait, I think a long time in European literature.
I have a couple of years.
A couple of hundred years.
Dick, could I ask you to read a little bit of the Persian, not too much just so that we can get a sense of what that sounds like and then maybe we could read a few passages from your translation?
Well, the bit of person that I have to hand is a description of Vise she's being brought up away from the court as was usual for young. She's a princess for young princesses then.
And she grows into a young adolescent and there is a very stylized, very conventional description of her beauty and I'll read a little bit of that.
Okay.
"mate, barkashid, un-serve, Uzzard, qybudoshtanze, sim, or delse pulad, khrad darrui u, qyrayyybemandi'.
Namasti, kiron, butra, chikhuandi.
'Gahigofdi, ke'in bhagahavahoras, kidairvai, l'all, hari, aupdoras, banafshizov, unargostshaskymaconist,
shunasrin arez, l'allay, rakonist.
'Gahigofdi, ke'in bhagasanist, kidairvai, mihihoyah, mihrikonist,
siyazov fienash, ingangur, bebarast, zanokseb, or doppistanas, donarast.
'Gahigofdi, ke'in, gangishahonist, kidairvai, or azu haiyajahonist,
rakash, debaw, or undarmish harirest,
drosofish, jalay, gisu, abearest.
'Tamash, simast, or lab, yur, guten, nawast.
'Haman, dandhan, u, dorakosh, arbast.'
Well, that was quite extraordinary.
Can we hear what your English translation of the poem sounds like?
We don't have to read necessarily the same passage.
Maybe we could read, for example, this beautiful moment where
vesenramin make vows to each other.
Yeah, it is a very beautiful moment in person.
Here, vesenramin have met, finally.
Ramin has been in love with ves for a long time,
and he has been trying to persuade vesenarst to get ves to allow him to see her.
And finally, the nurse is on his side, the nurse then has to spend a long time
persuading ves, vesegrees, and they finally meet.
They meet. And by this time, ves has also seen Ramin from afar.
She's looked down on him from a balcony while he's playing an instrument of the court.
And she too has fallen in love with him.
She agrees to the nurse, to their meeting.
They meet, and they swear eternal love to one another.
These are the oaths.
In the middle of the oath, Ramin gives his oath first.
In the middle of the oath, Ramin mentions Venus and Jupiter.
This is not the gods, it's the planets we're talking about.
And I'm sorry about that confusion, but I couldn't see any other way to indicate
that it was the planets rather than the gods, but it is the planets.
vesenramin and sworn of force could sever the love that bound the two of them forever.
Ramin spoke first.
I swear by god, and by his sovereignty that rules the earth and sky.
I swear now by the sun, and by the light the shining moon bestows on us at night.
I swear by Venus, and by noble Jupiter.
I swear by bread and salt and flickering fire.
I swear by faith and God's omnipotence, and by the soul and all its eloquence.
That while winds scour the wastelands and the mountains, while waters flow in rivers and
in fountains, while night has darkness and while streams have fishes, while stars have
courses and while souls have wishes, Ramin will not regret his love, or break the binding
oath that he and vesen thou make.
He will never take another love, or cease to give his heart exclusively to vesen.
Vesen promised love when prince Ramin had spoken, and swore her promises would not be broken.
She gave him violets then, and murmured, "Take this pretty posy, keep it for my sake,
keep it forever, so that when you see fresh violets blooming you'll remember me, and may
the soul that breaks this solemn vow, darken, and droop as these poor flowers do now.
Each time I see the springs new flowers appear, I will recall the oaths we swore to hear.
May anyone that breaks this oath decay and wither as fresh flowers do in a day."
That's their oath.
That's very hard to say that there was not passionate love in--
Yes, take that, Dene.
Beautiful translation.
The beautiful passage moment and translation.
Thanks, I love doing it.
I've never had such pleasure translating something, translating this text.
I can understand also with your facility, why Auden was your favorite poet of the 20th century,
as you told me before we came on the air.
That's true.
Auden is an absolutely wonderful poet.
He was quite contemptuous for the just tat news older story, because he didn't really
believe that passion was very good for one.
Not talking about the passion as much as the fine sort of prosody that he could shawong
about.
Auden was really a technical master.
He could write in any meter on pretty well any subject.
His technical master, I've always been in awe of it, and it's impossible to-- I mean,
I can't imitate Auden, and there's no point in doing it.
In fact, I've tried to do the opposite.
I've tried to stay out, get out from under his shadow.
He's a technical master.
He's one of the things that made me see that technical master is one of the most beautiful
things in poetry.
It's one of the things that I've tried to cultivate.
Also, medieval Persian verse is very technically complicated.
I think that's one of the things that drew me to it.
The technical complexity is part of its beauty.
It's not a kind of add-on.
It's intrinsic to its beauty.
I would like my own poetry to partake of that kind of feeling.
And that's also the case with Auden.
His poems are splendid partly because they're technically so well done.
I take it.
There's also some thematic content that draws you to the poet--
To these?
Or to Auden.
To Auden.
Just before we're talking about it, we're closing the parentheses now on Auden, but nevertheless,
it's--
Oh, Auden's a poet.
As I say, Auden's a poet who can write about anything.
I'm not a poet who can write about anything.
There's that famous distinction as I have been learned about made about some poets.
There are foxes and they have lots of tricks.
And in some poets are hedgehogs.
And they have one trick, a good one.
I'm very much a hedgehog.
I really only have one.
I can't write lots of different kinds of poems.
Auden can.
And it's something I admire from afar.
Auden's tremendous honesty before his subject matter is, I think, what really moves me.
And that honesty combined with great technical facility is very rare.
People who really value honesty before their subject matter, they're often impatient
of technique.
And people who care about technique are great deal.
Honesty doesn't rank very high because it can get in the way of technique.
Auden had both.
And I think that's one of the things that makes him a really great poet.
Well, you may be a hedgehog when it comes to your own poetry, but clearly when it comes
to the translations that you've done and the multiple kinds of works that you've translated,
there's a lot of fox in that.
And I think our listeners have gotten a very good sample from just the passage that you
read.
Perhaps we can conclude our show with the end of a letter that V. Swrites to Ramen, which
we can only read a portion of it because it's, first thing, it's a very long letter.
Like a pages and pages and pages.
But even the ending is a very long ending.
We can't even read all that.
And you contextualize it a little bit and then we'll end with the reading and with encouragement
to all our listeners to go and maybe avail themselves of this new translation of V. Swrites
and Ramen translated by Dick Davis with whom we've been discussing Persian poetry over
the last hour on entitled opinions.
This letter is written by V. Swrites.
And after he has gone off despite the oath that I just read, he's gone off and he's married
somebody else.
They love seems to have been impossible and they both say, oh well, let's, okay, we
can't do it.
There's so many obstacles.
And he goes off and he married somebody else and then V. Swrites and him this enormously
long letter, it goes on for 30 pages in which basically says, she says, I hate you, I
loathe you, I never want to see you again, please, please come back to me.
And the very end of this letter is an extraordinary rhetorical put toward a force in Persian.
It was the most difficult part of the poem to translate into English.
And it's built on repetitions which sort of increase accelerators one gets to the end.
I'm going to read the very end of the very end when she's signing off, she's been signing
off for two pages and I'll read the end of that sign off.
The Lord of victory, etc. that she's talking about is Ramen.
Greetings to that great Lord of victory, greetings to that bright moon of tyranny, greetings
to that brave night to that noble king, greetings to one who's envied by the spring, greetings
to one who is my world, my truth, greetings to one who loved me in my youth, greetings
to one I wish success forever without whom both my eyes flow like a river, greetings beyond
or count and numbering, more than the endless bounty of the spring, more than the desert's
countless grains of sand, more than the raindrops drenching sea and land, more than the plants
that spring up constantly, more than the beings of the land and sea, more than the days
the two worlds have been given, more than the stars that fill the vault of heaven, more
than the seeds in every last location, more than mankind in every generation, more than
birds feathers hairs on every pelt, more than all words that scribes have ever spelt, more
than your thoughts and my anxieties, more than all faiths and creeds and pieties, I wish
you joy for all eternity and wish myself your love and loyalty. May you find happiness
and may the light that shines from you illuminate my sight, a thousand times I wish and
wish again that great good fortune may be yours, amen.
Well, I think those verses speak for themselves, Dick. We've been speaking with Professor
Dick Davis, who is visiting Stanford from Ohio State University, where he is a professor of
Persian, literature and culture. He's also the chair of the Department of Near Eastern
Languages and Culture there at Ohio State. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. If
you would like to listen to any of our past shows, feel free to log on to our web page
by going to the homepage of the French and Italian department at Stanford and they are
just click on the link for entitled opinions and you have over 70 hours of shows in our archives.
You can also listen to our podcasts on iTunes, either the Stanford iTunes or the regular
iTunes store and we hope you'll tune in next week with a new installment of entitled
opinions. Thank you very much, Dick. It was a pleasure.
Thank you, Robert. I loved it.
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