Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Lyric Poetry

Orient Pearls

Julie Meisami

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135790103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria mediorientale

This is the first comprehensive and comparative study of compositional and stylistic techniques in medieval Arabic and Persian lyric poetry. Ranging over some seven countries, it deals with works by over thirty poets in the Islamic world from Spain to present-day Afghanistan, and examines how this rich poetic traditions exhibits both continuity and development in the use of a wide variety of compositional strategies. Discussing such topics as principles of structural organisation, the use of rhetorical figures, metaphor and images, and providing detailed analyses of a large number of poetic texts, it shows how structural and semantic features interacted to bring coherence and meaning to the individual poem. It also examines works by the indigenous critics of poetry in both Arabic and Persian, and demonstrates the critics' awareness of, and interest in, the techniques which poets employed to construct poems which were both eloquent and meaningful. Comparisons are also made with classical and medieval poetics in the west. The book will be of interest not merely to specialists in the relevant fields, but also to all those interested in pre-modern poetry and poetics.

1

INTRODUCTION

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,

Whose accents flow with artless ease,

Like orient pearls at random strung:

Thy notes are sweet, the damsels say;

But O! far sweeter, if they please

The nymphs for whom these notes are sung.

Sir William Jones, “Persian Song”

Brief encounters

Sir William Jones’s rendering of the final line of a ghazal by the eighth/fourteenth-century Persian poet Ḥāfiẓ stands Janus-like at the gateway of the modern West’s encounter with Arabic and Persian poetry. Jones’ own encounter with that poetry was that of an enthusiast: he found in it a potential source for the revitalization of European poetry, which he felt to be encumbered with tired, stale imagery and in need of something new, fresh, and vital. “A Persian Song”, his poetic treatment of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazal first published in his Persian Grammar (1771), was less a translation than a poetic homage to the qualities he found in the Persian poet, the “wildness and sweetness” of whose poem so pleased him that he felt obliged to attempt an English version in verse, which might recapture its music as well as its content and imagery (1771: 137–40). The “Persian Song” had a marked impact upon Jones’s contemporaries, and on the English Romantic movement in general (see de Sola Pinto 1946), not least because it embodied his conviction that lyric might be raised from its status as a minor genre to become the highest expression of the poet’s art.

Jones’s own literal translation of Ḥāfiẓ’s line shows a somewhat different understanding of it, closer perhaps to the original:

O Hafiz! when thou composest verses, thou seemest to make a string of pearls: come, sing them sweetly; for heaven seems to have shed on thy poetry the sweetness and beauty of the Pleiads. (1771: 136)

Sweetness, beauty, sublimity, intrinsic worth: these are the qualities with which Ḥāfiẓ’s poem is, for Jones, endowed. And when Jones turned Ḥāfiẓ’s string of pearls into “orient pearls at random strung”, he meant no literary judgement; rather, he sought an image which would convey those qualities of freshness and brilliance. But his search for a fresh and striking image resulted in a statementno less than prophetic for the subsequent course of Western encounters with the Arabic (or Persian, or Ottoman) poem – encounters in which the poem itself became lost, as the romance with the Orient gave way to the philological method on the one hand, and to Western cultural narcissism, to the conviction that the progressive West had nothing to learn from the backward East which it was increasingly in the process of subjugating both politically and culturally, on the other.

Jones’s image resurfaces, in many transformations, as the unspoken background to Orientalist assumptions of the “molecular” or “atomistic” nature of the Arabic or Persian poem, now described not only as a random stringing of “orient pearls”, but as a “piece of filigree work” (Rypka 1968a: 102), a “mosaic of sounds and symbols” (Arberry 1964: 350), an Oriental carpet. It is not my intent to retrace the history, or to dwell on the excesses, of this particular (and still widely upheld) theory, though I shall return shortly to consider the shaky foundations of the analogies used to support it.¹ What should be noted, however, is that both such flights of fancy and more sober assertions of formal incoherence as a real rule of composition have often been supported by contrasting the incoherence of Arabo-Persian poetry with “our conception” (i.e., “our” superior knowledge) of what true poetry is. The molecular theory is less an aesthetic than a value judgement behind which lies the assumption of the innate superiority of Western culture and literature, defined through a process of selecting certain features as primary or fundamental, hence normative, and applying these as criteria for all literature. The result is the creation of two mutually opposed literary entities, one “Western”, one “Oriental”, an opposition which constitutes an important part of the paradigm of cultural identity produced by Orientalist scholarship.²

This supposed opposition is expressed in terms of irreconcilable polarities geared to demonstrating the superiority of Western literature. For example: where Western poetry is spontaneous, Oriental (Arabic, Persian, Ottoman) is constrained by strict formal rules. Where Western poetry is infused with emotion, Oriental subordinates emotion to intellect, to compliance with prescribed conventions and approved patterns, and to that hyperactive imagination which characterizes the Oriental mind. Where “the occidental poet is able to transport his reader by a simple metaphor or a single simile,” the Oriental poet has recourse to rhetorical embellishment. Where the Western poem stands in a direct relation to experience, to Reality, the “reality” of the Oriental poem is a construct of the imagination, a fantasy in which experience yields to artisanship, or is “disguised in allegory or metaphor.” Where the imagery of Western poetry is dynamic and immediate, that of Oriental poetry is static, visual, and decorative. Where the Western poem is an “organic” whole governed by “a strictly logical sequence of verses,” in the Oriental poem “each verse is in itself a completely worked out and independent miniature,” and its overall structure is governed “more by the imagination than by logic.” Finally, whereas Western poetry reflects the progressive nature of Western society,

Oriental poetry reflects “the general medieval view of the world and its material elements as something immutable, static,” and the “feudal basis [of society] with its accompanying conservatism which affects literary themes almost to the point of petrifaction” with respect to both selection of subjects and their treatment. One is tempted to conclude (as one scholar did) “that this poetry is unaware of the correct relationship between the poetical ego and the world, mankind and itself, which is what constitutes the true character of great poetry.”³

The internal illogicality of such statements (how can “emotion” be subordinated at one and the same time to intellect and to the “hyperactive imagination of the Oriental mind”?) is self-evident; their purpose is not aesthetic but polemic. Oriental literature, refracted through a distorting lens, becomes the mirror image of “our” literature, of “true” literature. But the image of Western literature itself is as notable for what it omits as for what it includes: Greek and Hellenistic literature on the one hand, and the Renaissance and its heirs on the other, frame an enormous gap, an abyss constituted by the European Middle Ages, of which nearly nothing is said, although it is precisely the literature of this period with which that of the Islamic Middle Ages may most profitably be compared. Thus not only is a Western model established as normative for all “true” literature, but that “norm” is itself both limited and anachronistic, taking as fundamental such forms as the drama, and such modes as mimesis, the absence of which defines those other literatures (or literatures of the Other) as non-progressive or non-humanistic.⁴

That the medieval portion of the Western tradition has been ignored or discarded as a critical referent when discussing Arabo-Persian literature may well be because it contrasts with the self-view of Orientalist scholarship as emanating from a progressive culture in terms of which “medieval” is the equivalent of backward and benighted.⁵ Moreover, to admit the existence of obvious resemblances between medieval Islamic and Western literatures would be to open up questions of contacts and affinities between two cultures viewed as ineradicably opposed and in incessant conflict, and would set at nought the enormous investment – academic, political, personal – which resides in the paradigm of cultural opposition (see Menocal 1987, 1994).

The banishing of medieval European literature from comparative studies of Arabo-Persian poetry on the one hand, and the absence of that poetry from academic curricula (in medieval studies, for example, or comparative literature) on the other, combined with the paucity of reliable and readable translations – the three phenomena are closely related –— causes that poetry to cease to exist in a practical sense, as we are denied real access to it (see Menocal 1987: 12, 151). But there is another, more important reason why it ceases to exist as poetry: because it fails to conform to what we in the West know (or believe) that true poetry is. True poetry describes reality, to which it relates in a direct way (in other words, it is mimetic); it expresses the poet’s personal experience. We know that poetry is mimetic because Aristotle tells us so, and of course we read that ancient writer correctly – unlike the Arabs and the Persians, whose readings, or misreadings, of the Poetics demonstrate their imperfect understanding not only of Greek but of the true nature of poetry (see e.g. Hardison 1970). We know that poetry is personal because the Romantics told us so, even though later poets sometimes disagreed with them. We also know, however, that as Goethe said – and it is far truer now than in his time – we live in an age of prose, an age in which poetry is no longer central, but peripheral, and often trivial.

Pre-modern poetry (and that includes European poetry, arguably up to the beginnings of the Romantic revolution, in which Jones played a major part, perhaps ironically, by invoking the emotional intensity of Arabic and Persian poetry as opposed to the fusty coldness of neo-Classicism) rests on other assumptions about the relationship between poet and world. Arabic and Persian literature share with the literatures of medieval Europe that “alterity”, that otherness, which arises from their remoteness in time (see Jauss 1977a, 1979), but which is also part of our shared past; hence they are not Other in an Orientalist-colonialist sense.

There is another difficulty in our encounter with Arabo-Persian literature; for not only is it pre-modern, positively medieval, but it stands on the other side of the mimetic divide which separates the literatures of the Western tradition (and only parts of that tradition at that) from those of the rest of the world. For Western literature is an anomaly, a minority of one, in being the only literature whose founding narrative is based on mimetic assumptions because Aristotle based his discussion of poetry upon the drama, the most prestigious poetic genre of his day. “No account of the nature of literature,” Earl Miner warns, “can be anything other than parochial if it fails to observe that mimesis is one of the least frequent systematic ideas about literature” (1979: 349). All other known literary systems –— including the Arabo-Persian – are founded upon lyric.

But surely (one might ask) we have gone beyond the mimetic assumption, in our post-modernist age? Have we? Miner identifies the “telltale signs” that indicate, despite denials, that many critics’ views are still “shaped by mimetic assumptions”.

On hearing “representation,” “fiction,” “origin” or “originality,” “literariness,” “unity,” “plot,” or “character,” one knows the talk is mimetic…. Someone might object that these … are simply terms everybody uses. Nothing could be more Eurocentric. Those are precisely terms that everybody does not use, but only users whose assumptions continue to be mimetic. (1990: 26–7)⁶

Eurocentric as they are, however, these are indeed terms that “everybody uses”; but perhaps they can be used in fresh ways, divorced from their underlying mimetic assumptions, when we talk about the unity of Arabic and Persian poems and of what those poems are meant to “represent”. Many scholars object categorically to the use of Western critical categories or terminology (including, for example, “medieval”) in discussing the literature of another culture (see e.g. Rehder 1974; see also Meisami 1985b; Meisami 1983: 98–9; compare Minnis 1984: 3–8; Allen and Moritz 1981, especially Chapter 1; Steadman 1974: 147–8). To criticize the lack of scholarly rigour in applying Western terms to Islamic literatures is one thing; to consider them totally invalid is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater – particularly if one of the goals of comparative studies is to test and modify our own methods. While many scholars dream of objective, “culture-free” methodologies which can be applied to any and all literatures regardless of the cultural circumstances under which they were produced, and while many are aware of the unwisdom of applying anachronistic criteria to medieval poetry, there is another issue which they fail to take into account: that we must, somehow, talk about the poetry we study in a language which can be understood by others, while at the same time we may perhaps alter or reject aspects of that language as it is customarily employed, to arrive at a more broadly-based poetics of literature.

Grounds for comparison

In Comparative Poetics Earl Miner ponders the question of why comparative literature lacks “an eastern and a southern hemisphere” (1990: 20). The answer, he suggests, lies in the discipline’s “canons of comparability”, “the assurance of sufficient resemblance between or among the things compared.” Because of this, comparisons tend to be intra-cultural rather than inter-cultural. We compare, for example, novelists in the Western tradition – English with German, German with French, European with North or Latin American – and base our notions of narrativity, of fictionality, on such comparisons. We compare dramatists – say, Italian with Spanish with French with English – and derive our notions of the tragic, or the comic, or of mixed genres from such comparisons (generally with reference to Aristotle along the way). We compare, say, Homer and Virgil and Milton, Ariosto and Spenser, and talk about the various types of epic. Less often (and with grave consequences for the study of non-Western literatures) do we compare lyric poets; but here we come up against the question of prestige (and I have, of course, put the novel first, on a descending scale which ends with lyric, to suggest where current preoccupations lie). And when we do venture into non-Western literatures, we have, of course, all the norms and values derived from these inter-cultural comparisons at our beck and call, ready to “apply” to them. Small wonder that they prove unobliging, unwilling to fit our moulds, unliterary.

But once we have understood that what sets Arabo-Persian poetry apart from modern critical conceptions is not its “Oriental” character, but its remoteness in time (its medievalness) and its lyric nature, we may be better equipped to undertake its study in a more meaningful comparative context, without basing our study on assumptions that point it in the wrong direction, so to speak. Indeed, there have long been calls for comparative studies of Middle Eastern literatures, or which take those literatures into account; but these have been somewhat limited in their approach. In 1966, for example, Alessandro Bausani called for a comparative history of Islamic literatures (1966: 145; see also Pagliaro and Bausani 1960: 509) on the basis that “Islamic literature, from its origins up to its most violent contact with European culture … is in reality one great literature subdivided into various literary dialects and into many literary type...