29 NOVEMBER 1924, Page 24

PERSIAN LITERATURE

Persian Literature in Modern Times, A.D. 1500-1924. By E. G. Browne. (Cambridge University Press. 35s. net.) Th ERF. are many reasons why Englishmen should not like Persian literature, but it is a little absurd that they should

still imagine that it is " all about roses and nightingales." Edward Fitzgerald is chiefly to blame for this misconception, since it was he who surfeited our palates with his bogus trans- lation of Omar Khayyam, unknown to fame as a poet in his native country, though much admired as a brilliant mathe- matician and astronomer. Apart from Khayyam, it is vaguely believed that there were three other great Persian poets, Firdawsi, Ilaiiz and Sa'adi (rather as it is known by French schoolchildren that there are three great but uncouth English poets--Shakespeare, Milton and Byron), and were it not for the devotion of one man, Professor Browne of Cam- bridge, that might easily have remained for ever the sum of our knowledge.-

Years ago Professor Browne began preparations for writing his monumental Literary History of Persia. His task ends with the subject of the present review, a fourth large volume of the History, covering the period from A.D. 1500 to the present day, and there is now available not only a conscien- tious survey of the whole history of Persian letters, with texts, translations, biographical sketches, and surveys of the various periods and schools, but also a parallel history of Persia, fas- cinating alike to the student of middle-eastern politics and to

those more philosophically-minded who care to see when and how letters decay.

The best days were over by 1500, so that although the historical section of this fourth volume of the Literary History is invaluable, it will be fairer to its author, and more useful to the general reader, to consider not it alone but the whole

work.

The Persian language has remained practically unchanged for a thousand years, and :

" alike in form and matter the classical poetry of Persia has been stereotyped for at least five or six centuries, so that . . . it is hardly possible after reading an elegy, an ode or a quatrain to guess whether it was composed by a contemporary of Jami or by some quite recent poet."

But while the bul-bul and the rose are absent from all but an infinitesimal number of the translations which the Literary History gives, it is not only this sameness which is displeasing to Europeans, but first of all the seeming triviality of most of the work, and that peculiarly lifeless spirit which infuses the whole of Mohammedan literature. Firdawsi, author of the national epic, the Shah-Nana, who wrote at the end of the tenth century, though utterly familiar to every educated Persian, has never infused any of his vigour into his successors, and is as unlike thous as the.authors of the Icelandic sagas are _ -

unlike George Herbert and Andre Chenier. It almost seems as though since Firdawsi's day the only exercises permissible to a poet were the panegyric, the neat and pretty turn of phrase, and the " metaphysical " ingenuity. As an example of the poet's function even in early times, there is the story of Rudagi. The king had a favourite horse, which he prized so high that he had vowed to behead whoever advised him of its death. It died in time, and the courtiers were terrified ;, they entreated Rudagi, the ballad-maker, to help them: He went before his royal master, and chanted a poem so moving: and so mournful that the king suddenly cried, " My horse is: dead." And all the Court, greatly relieved, murmured, " The, king himself has said it." It has always been a bad business when writers must live by flattery and time-serving. Verbal felicity, richness of metaphor, wit and eloquence, of necessity the stock in trade of such men, do not of themselves make great poetry. And then in any case it seems as though every Persian writer must have accepted Ibn Khaldun's doctrine :

" that the Art of composing in verse or prose is concerned only with words, not with ideas."

Such ideas as there are seem very remote somehow to current European thought, very far-fetched ; the Persians remind us of our own minor metaphysical poets. Listen to this oblique description of a lover wasting away for grief :-

" One hair I stole from out thy raven locks When thou, 0 sweetheart, didst thy tresses comb,• With anxious toil I bore it to my house

As bears the ant the wheat-grain to its home.

My father when he saw me cried amain, ' Which is my son, I pray thee, of the twain 1 ' "

Obviously the public for which such poetry was composed was itself steeped in poetical allusions. Even to-day every educated person in the country finds an apt quotation either, in Arabic or Persian to suit every occasion, and I remember a great orientalist once telling me how when he was riding

near Teheran his hat blew off. lie showed some annoyance, and was about to gallop off to recover it ; but his Persian companion, riding on unmoved, quoted to him (I give a bald translation) :-

"What, grief from unhatness ? The heavens are my hat, and the earth my carpet . . . "

And then among all this poet's poetry, one finds a little gem, written by the sixteenth-century Faydi on the death of his child :-

" 0 brightness of my bright eyes, how art thou ? Without thee my days are dark ; without me how art thou ?

My house is a house of mourning in thine absence ; thou halt made thine abode beneath the dust : how art thou ?

The couch and pillow of thy sleep is on thorns and brambles : thou whose cheeks and body were as jasmine, how art thou ? "

There is something universal, too, about the following, poem, though probably it can be interpreted in half a dozen' ways :—

" Lion or leopard fierce thou surely art

Ever at war with us; 0 heart, 0 heart !

If I can catch thee I will spill thy blood And see of what strange hue thou art, 0 heart."

Even here, though, where there is definite emotion, one perceives through the translation that intoxication: with words rather than with ideas which makes nearly all Persian poetry seem more like an exercise in agility than an expression of the spirit.

Religious poetry naturally bulks large in the national literature, and naturally enough the heretical poets are the most interesting, for in the Mohammedan doctrines there is little that is likely to inspire the imagination ; God is God, Mohammed is His Prophet, and the individual can only relapse into a sort of conceited fatalism. The numerous Sufi poets have rather a different attitude, for they (influenced perhaps by Buddhism) say not that God is God, but that God is everything, regarding the universe as a multiple though rather inexact reflection of the deity. Most of their diction is so overloaded with tresses and roses and hearts that it is difficult for us to take it all anything but highly sentimental love-poetry, just as we take the more renowned work of Hafiz and' Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, in spite of the fact that Hafiz has affinities with Byron.

It seems rather ungracious to Professor Browne to say how

relieved we are to find in his survey of contemporary Persian literature that the adventures of one Sherlock " Khurns " have reached Persia by way of Russia, and are enjoying. an immense vogue. There is something infinitely depressing in the realization that in ten centuries, while empires rose and fell, all that concourse of Persian writers, all so culti- vated, with such metrical ability, so much industry, should have gone on, unchangingly, composing imitations of imita- tions and enouncing platitude after platitude. For after all a poet should be less easily satisfied ; there is little in giving birth to such a reflection as :- " To quit this troubled world is better than to enter it : the c:.ebud enters the garden with straitened heart and departs smiling"; or to the after-dinner bitterness of :— " Tho only thing which troubles me about the Resurrection Day is this, That one will have to look once again on the faces of mankind."

Though the contemplative perception of an Oriental may be able to break through the truism and see Truth, we see nothing but an amusing fancy : and literature based on amusement ends in boredom.

IRIS BARRY.