MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THERE are moments when even the most vivacious man becomes exhausted by the reiterated disappointments of our angry age and yearns to exchange the mud and thorns of present politics for the ivory tower on the hill. I find it salutary, in such fleeting hours of discouragement, to absent myself a while from contemporary quarrels and to read about men who in a distant but not dissimilar past have also tried to run away. Ovid, after all, acquired among the Goths all the leisure which a man of letters might desire ; but as he watched the thunder-clouds drift slowly across the Black Sea his sole ambition was to get away from Tomi and to return to the smoke and rattle of Rome. Dante as we know did not in the very least enjoy his sojourn at Verona ; and Madame de Stall, amid the lavish luxury of her own castle at Coppet, longed day and night for the gutter of the Rue du Bac. I have been reading this week the Makhzanul Asrar, or "Treasury of Mysteries," of the Persian poet, Nizami of Ganja. It has been translated with scholarship and felicity by Gholam Hosein Darab, of the London School of Oriental Studies, and was published some three years ago by Arthur Probsthain. The rhythm and asson- ances of Nizami—which were, it seems, so compelling that men would rise and dance as he read them—are, of course, lost in the translation. I have heard Mr. Darab recite some verses of the Treasury in their original cadence, with that strange hierophantic intonation which Persians adopt when they repeat their classics, and
I quite see that, were one at all given to gambolling, one might wish to trip a measure to the rhythm of Nizami's anapaests. Yet although the lilt of the verse is lost to us in English, Mr. Darab has managed to convey to us the intricate imagery with which Nizami concealed his thoughts. Although Nizami was glad to withdraw from local or national politics, although it was only rarely that he would obey the summonses of the kings and atabegs by whom he was surrounded, he did not in fact feel happy in his ivory tower. He was bored by what he calls "the fetters of Ganja."
* * * * He lived in a disordered age. The authority of the Abbasids was no longer operative ; the Seljuk dominance had fallen into decay ; the Khwarizm Shahs ruled at Rei and Isphahan, but they provided a diminishing security. When Nizami, in his sparse adobe house at Ganja, was writing the "Treasury of Mysteries," there were wars and rumours of wars all around him. In what had been the Persian Empire some forty autonomous dynasties struggled for preponder- ance. The Arabs were besieging the Franks in Jerusalem. In the valley of Alamut the Sheikh-ul-Gebel, the Old Man of the Moun- tains, was training his assassins. And continually upon the frontiers, impending and imponderable, hung the menace of a Mongol in- vasion: that incessant anxiety which, but a few years later, culmin- ated in Jenghiz Khan and Hulagu. In England, the reign of Henry II was drawing to its close ; the reign of Richard Coeur de Lion was about to begin. Whereas we at the time possessed no literature and even no literary language, Nizami had behind him a long tradition of culture and all the inherited formulas of prosody and style. He had been born in the vicinity of Qum. The distant view of that small sacred city remained in his memory ; the picture of a golden dome glinting through poplars ; the memory of a dark patch upon a dun-coloured desert, as an emerald upon a sack-cloth sheet. The family moved from Qum to Ganja in northern Azerbaijan. The place has now been renamed Elizavetpol and is a station upon the line from Tiflis to Baku. The Russians, who are an acquisitive race, now claim Nizami as one of their own poets ; they might as well claim Kant as a light in Soviet philosophy, or Goethe as a poet of the U.S.S.R.
* * * * Nizami essentially was an epic and romantic poet. His story of the loves of Chrosroes and Shirin, his Laila and Majnun, his Iskandarnama, inspired generations of Persian poets and miniaturists. His romance of the Seven Beauties contains the original theme of Turandot. Yet his treasury, or storehouse, of mysteries is neither epic nor romantic ; it is a series of mystical aphorisms in which he
seeks to comfort himself for the apprehensions of this earthly life by achieving transcendental unity with God. "Stretch out thy hand," he writes, "and help us against the calamities of this tran- sitory house." His preoccupation with astronomy and numerology, his concern regarding "the seven spheres, the four quarters and the six dimensions in the secret chamber of creation," are admittedly out of tune and date. Yet it was the intensity of his religious experience which fortified him against the isolation and poverty of Elizavetpol and the very disturbing dangers by which his world was
threatened. "Tear the fourth curtain," he writes, "so that the wings of Jesus may grow from thy feet. He who, like Jesus, gave up his life, truly conquered the world." He preached the virtues of austerity, generosity, fidelity and discretion. He had a very Christian soul. One of the most striking passages in his Treasury is that in which he tells the apocryphal story of Jesus and the carcass of a dog lying in the market place. Those who passed by exclaimed against the squalor and stench of this rotting corpse. "When the turn of Jesus came to speak, he discarded faults and found virtue. He said, 'The picture remaining of its body shows that pearls are not as white as its teeth." Strange, indeed, it is to discover how strong an impact had been made by Christian doctrine upon this gentle poet living alone and frightened in Azerbaijan.
• The whole purport of these aphorisms is the lesson that only the eternal verities can compensate unhappy man for the vicissitudes of earthly life. "Know," writes Nizami, "that the garden of the world, whose springtime thou art, is a house of grief, in which thou art but a picture." Only by confidence in God can we face with courage the essential enigma of life and death. In what is perhaps the finest of all his mystical passages Nizami evokes the creation of the universe : "Until He had untied this knot which transcends the power of thought, the tresses of the night were not freed from the grasp of day. When He scattered the pearls of the necklace of heaven, He combed the dust of night from the tresses of non- ex:stence." I do not contend that Nizami is an easy poet to under- stand ; it is difficult for us occidentals to assess the background of his thought and knowledge. His imagery, even his vocabulary, dis- concert. "Until thou art well versed in Mohammedan law," he writes, "beware, be not betrothed to poetry." Those of us—and they are many—who are not well versed in Mohammedan law may find difficulty in identifying his allusions and associations. He advises us "to accept words slowly," and from the frequent recur- rences in his poems of the same token words (such as necklace, ruby, dust, polo-sticks, oyster-shells, dawn, collyrium and ambergris) one derives the impression that their symbolism is something which we cannot fully comprehend. His excessive imagery, moreover, is dis- cordant to the modern ear ; no Englishman can really relish such elaborate associations as "Her black mole which burnt the heart was the ambergris pounded in the oyster-shell of the dawn." At moments his imagery achieves a surrealist fantasy : "The rose, like the jasmine, contained ambergris ; the moon, like heaven, carried a saddle-cloth on its shoulders." Yet, as one reads further, these small obstacles disappear, and one is left with the impression of a man of forty, living in a Caucasian village, and seeking to solace his own adversity and alarm. * * * *
A great difference exists between the climate and scenery of Elizavetpol and that of Qum. Yet it was the landscape of his Persian childhood which lived in Nizarni's memory and illustrates his verse. We have the tawny deserts, above which the sudden wind from the mountains will raise high swirls of dust, which for the lonely traveller assume the shape of djinns and demons. We have villages "ruined like the heart of an enemy." And we have a dome of turquoise tiles and below it "a fresh tangerine tree from the garden of Paradise." Nizami assuredly can take one away, for a moment, from the com- plications of this disordered world to a world which was equally disordered and about to be doomed. He confirms my impression that the ivory tower should be no more than a week-end resort.
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