The influence of Classical Persian literature on Western thinkers and literary figures.
The aesthetic and intellectual delight of mankind has been greatly enhanced by Persian literature, the poetry especially.
Today’s discussion is about the discovery of Persian literature by Western thinkers and literary figures and its influence on them. Europeans discovered the rich treasury of Persian literature in the seventeenth century. They approached Persian literature differently in different eras and the difference lay in the circumstances of each era.
Let’s begin with the time and manner in which Persian literary masterpieces appealed to Europeans.
As you mentioned, the European discovery of Persian literature came about in the seventeenth century, during the Age of Enlightenment, but its serious study began a century later in the Age of Reason, and its chief exploitation was conducted in the nineteenth century during the Romantic Age. The interest in Persian literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which may be termed as the Age of Anti-Reason, increased along both familiar and novel lines. It would be better to bear in mind that the Western reader’s knowledge of Persian literature has never been wholly disengaged from the European auspices under which it was perceived. Each age was concerned with certain Persian writers and has left a stamp on the images of those writers.
Could you elaborate a little bit further on each Age’s concerns?
Yes, for instance, Sa’di’s moral didacticism or instructional quality appealed to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, both the choice of selections from his works and the manner in which they were translated reflect the tendencies prevalent at those times. Similarly, Hafez in the Age of Reason could only be perceived as a sort of pseudo-classical lyrist. In the later Romantic Age, he was permitted to show his close connection with mystics. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, his “intellectual nihilism,” as Arberry puts it, lines him up with those who show contempt for reason and conventions and openly disobey or defy them. The neo-classical era not only regarded Ferdowsi as the “Persian Homer,” but it specifically viewed him in the reflected light of Alexander Pope’s popular version of the Greek poet. A later time finds in the mythology of the Shah-name, a Frazerian and Jungian unconscious lying beneath the national epic level.
Do you think that mere accretion of historical and linguistic knowledge necessarily brings us closer to a “true” perception of Persian literature?
Well, I think it is naïve to believe in such thing. Whatever Westerners have learned in the past three hundred years about Persian literature, though the Islamic phase of it came to full flowering from about A.D. 1000 to 1500, has been learned in the context of their own varying cultural prejudices. The “truth” about it has always been tentative and always relative to a certain time and place.
What do you think of the epistemological consideration concerning this issue?
Well, this epistemological consideration may lead to fewer limitations if we see that it applies equally to the developing reputations of writers in their own countries and in their own languages. Shakespeare, even in his English career, has been subject to the same unpredictable changes which surround writers translated from a foreign language. It would take a bold critic to maintain that the present age has a better understanding of the “essential” Shakespeare than any earlier age, merely because it has more information about him. If knowledge can deliver us from the prejudices of other times, it should be able to liberate us from the bonds of our own arrogance. As translation merely adds one more cultural variable to those of time and circumstance, a similar modesty is supposed to prevail in the view of the career of a translated writer. But we are supposed to trace the morphology of Western and especially English perceptions of Persian writers during the three centuries that they have been known in the West.
You mentioned that Persian literature was discovered in the Enlightenment Age. Is there any specific reason for such discovery?
The great contribution of the Enlightenment Age to cultural history was the discovery that even the non-Christian religions were legitimate efforts to regulate ethical life, and that the art of letters was not the exclusive right or privilege of Christian Europe or ancient Greece and Rome. Even before Andre du Ryer made his French translation of the Qur’an in the middle of the seventeenth century, he had French translations of selections of Sa’di’s Rose Garden. In England, George Sale’s influential translation of the Qur’an in the first half of the eighteenth century was preceded by Thomas Hyde’s study of the Zoroastrian religion and his Latin translations of poems by Hafiz and Khayyam. A French translation of Anvar-e Soheyli (The Lights of Canopus), a Persian version of the Fables of Bidpay appeared in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Which Persian writer could most captivate the imagination of the enlightenment?
I assume that it was Sa’di whose Rose Garden or Golestan was translated into Latin by George Gentius, the Dutch Orientalits, in the middle of the seventeenth century, under the title of Rosarium. Adam Olearius translated it into German a few years later under the title of Der Persianischer Rosenthal and later appended Der Baumgarten, The Bustan in a translation made from a Dutch version. The earliest history of European translations from Persian is covered by Gibb in his famous study entitled “Literature” which was published in The Legacy of Islam. A.F.J. Remy also dealt with the issue in The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany, but this work needs to be updated as it was published in 1901.
These works, and a book of travels by Jean Chardin, were the main sources for the popularity of Sa’di in the next century. Voltaire was to present his Zadig as a translation from Sa’di, and both Johann Herder in Germany and Joseph Addison in England were to adapt, in their own languages, fables from the Bustan and the Golestan. Benjamin Franklin was also persuaded by the neoclassical precept that literature should both delight and instruct, and used a Bustan parable on toleration and tried to pass it off as a missing chapter of Genesis.
What factors did work hand in hand to shift the center of Oriental studies from the continent to England?
Well, the shift was, in part, due to the philological labors of Sir William Jones, who translated selections from various Persian authors into Greek, Latin, French, and English. His excited correspondence with the Polish ambassador Baron Revicsky, who had made Latin versions of Hafez, was to contribute to further popularity of Hafez. But a more important factor which sparked interest in Hafez and other Persian poets was a fairly unexpected geopolitical development. In late 18th century, Pitt’s India Act was passed and it brought the commercial activities of the East India Company under closer supervision of the crown. Persian language was the court language of India, and Persian literature informed the entire Islamic civilization of that land and their cultivation was then considered as a patriotic necessity. As a result, linguistic and literary activity in the field of Persian language and literature was encouraged. Persian grammars, Persian-English dictionaries, various handbooks, and a number of translations from Persian writers were produced as working tools. The purpose of these books was utilitarian, but as their content was often literary, the names of Ferdowsi, Sa’di, and Hafez soon became familiar names in England.
What did determine the range of translations from Persian writers?
Since the translations were done in India, it was natural that Indian taste largely determined which writers were to be translated. For instance, Jami, a favorite in India, was rated more highly than Rumi or Nezami, who were relatively neglected. ‘Attar’s Pand-name, a compendium of ethics and admonitions, was translated, but his more characteristic mystical writings remained untranslated. The Indian taste did not doubt Ferdowsi’s high position, so he had his fair share of editions and partial translations. Sa’di, because his fame extended over the entire Islamic world, was perhaps the most popular. His works, except for his mystical writings, were regarded as the best means of acquiring a proper understanding of Muslim manners and morals. Throughout the following century, even after 1830s, when Persian was replaced by English as the official language of India, the Golestan continued to be required reading for all who went to India. New translations of it came out in every generation. Sa’di’s social realism, as put by some as Machiavellianism, was often used to experience and understand the psychology of his coreligionists in India. When Napoleonic politics brought Persian itself into the English area of interest in the early nineteenth century, Sa’di was used to interpret the character of Persians. Sa’di retained this political usefulness into the twentieth century.
There was reason enough for the popularity of Hafez. One of the sources of this popularity was the traditional use of his Divan as a book of auguries or divinations. However, his popularity among English translators have had more to do with literary than with socioeconomic history. I assume we’ll have the chance to discuss it further later on.
Now, let’s turn to the enthusiasm shown for Persian literature in the Romantic Age. When and how did the literary figures of the Romantic Age show interest in Persian literature?
By the late eighteenth century, which coincided with the increased importance of India in Britain’s commercial life, the philosophy of Romanticism began to impress European writers and it displaced the neoclassical aesthetics which had dictated taste for a century or more. The old devotion to reason and aversion to religious enthusiasm led to the celebration of emotion and intuition. In England, Pope’s didactic and satiric modes gave way to the imaginative lyricism of Burn and Blake. The heroic couplet was replaced by blank verse, the sonnet, and stanzaic forms. In subsequent generations, as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, then Byron, Shelley, and Keats further reacted against the restraints of neoclassicism, the Persian lyric poets, especially Hafez, found a hospitable reception. One of reasons for this reception was, perhaps, the fact that most of the Romantic poets had been brought up on the works of Sir William Jones.
Edward Gibbon well expressed the neoclassical bias. In his epic history The rise and fall of the Roman empire, he expressed grief and disappointment for the decline of the classical world. He was acquainted with the scholarship on Islamic civilization, but with regard to literary matters, he had no doubt that the classics have much to teach and the oriental have much to learn. With such preconceptions, it is no wonder that eighteenth-century translators regarded Persian poets as a species of Greeks or felt constrained to apologize for the excess of ornament and inflation of style, which were considered to be characteristics of Persian poetry.
In contrast, Jones believed that the dying life of English poetry could be infused with the very materials of Asian verse which could bring to light a number of excellent compositions to be explained by future scholars and to be imitated by future poets. (works, X, 359) In the next generation, Alfred Tennyson, who was influenced by Jones, deliberately used Persian imagery even in poems that were not Oriental in theme.
