TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF PERSIAN LITERATURE (RESEARCHES ON PERSIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE)
Year:2015 | Volume:51 (NEW VOL. 7) | Issue:2 (26)|Papers Count:7

The most mysterious and wonderful story of Mehr is the fight with the primitive bull. Mithrahelps the earth to flourish and fertilize by killing the eternal bull and shedding its blood. This basic idea in Mehr religion influenced many cultures and cults. Belief in different forms of sacrifice as a way to evade evil forces and achieve blessing has been an integral part of the lives of peoplein the Iranian Plateau throughout history. For this reason, some sacred man or animal became the scapegoat for a tribe so that their sacrifice would diminish the sins, pains and sufferings of people. By these actions and using dramatic-ritual methods, people aimed toreconstruct the time and place of cosmic creation sothat they could find happiness and blessing once again by killing the primitive bull. Thus, in a public feast, they all ate a piece of the beef to transfer its power, fertility and blessing to themselves, andreached a sort of unity. This happy sacrificing became one of the themes in Persian literature and was recreated in the works of many poets and writers. Among these, NezamiGanjavi has paid especial attention to the ritual of sacrifice in the storyof "Haft Peykar". By the language of tales, he points to a number of sacrifice-related rituals including regeneration, creation, rain prayer, eclipse, and war. He uses literary devices such as allegory, allusion and ambiguity to draw a new and interesting image of these beliefs and ritual traditions.

Roudaki Samarqandi is one of the great figures of Persian poetry in the third and fourth centuries (A.H) amongst whose many poems just almost one thousand verses have remained dispersedly and extracted from other works. Lack of old and original version, time distance, changes of Persian, different recordings of secondary sources, etc have caused the reading and understanding of some of these few verses difficult. This paper studies different readings and meanings proposed by correctors of a verse in the famous wine poem of Roudaki via comparative-analytic method. The results of this study imply that, according to stylistic criteria, the rules of historical grammar of Persian and intratextual as well as extra-textual evidence, the conventional reading of this line does not seem to be true. Finally, this paper suggests the correct recording of this verse and provides its meaning and interpretation in line with such a reading.

Attar Neishaburi’s Manteq-ol-Teir is of much significance regarding form and structure as well as content and conceptual value. Having a broad cultural background in the history of mankind as well as a coherent and strong plot, this book of verses has survived throughout time and has been influential in the minds of many readers. It is among the rare Persian literary works which has been well received by both Iranian and foreign dramatists in recent decades and performed many times on Iranian and foreign stages. While exploring the historical and cultural background of this work, this paper investigates and explains the differences between Jean- Claude Carriere’s adaptation and Iranian adaptations according to the difference in dramatic structures and the kind of adaptation via descriptive-analytic method.

In old Persian literature, there are works which due to oldness and existence of several versions, it is necessary to specify their original version. Since these works are a means of transferring knowledge and culture, designation of their original version is of special significance. In usual methods, decisions about original version are made through the comparison of several versions (codicology) and also the study of the style of the work (stylistics).In these generally qualitative methods, historical, cultural, social and even political factors of the time are taken into consideration. In recent decades, new quantitative methods which concentrate just on linguistic factors have been created. Undoubtedly, the use of these methods will make decision making free from personal views and interpretations. This study employs a quantitative method for author’s identification of appendices of Tadhkirat al-Awliya, for which there are doubts concerning their attribution to Attar. In this study, syntactic structures of two parts, the original one and the doubtful one (Molhaghat), were extracted; then their frequencies were compared and analyzed through Chi-square statistics. Based on the results of this study, the attribution of these parts to Attar is not confirmed.

Literature is a mirror of views, thoughts, beliefs and, in a word, the dominant ideology of many generations which is reflected in the works of each era consciously or unconsciously. Beihaqi’s account of Hasanak’s hanging is not empty of such reflections, too. This paper aims to study and evaluate the reflection of Beihaqi’s emotional and mental attitudes in this story. Accordingly, the main questions of this study are as following: Has the text been influenced by the author’s ideology? What are the quality and quantity of such influence and how is its reflection evaluated in the words of the author? In this regard, the ideological underpinnings of the writer are investigated in lexical, syntactic and rhetorical levels based on the principles of layered stylistics. Finally, it is concluded that though Beihaqi insists on his impartiality, he extends his beliefs and views to the text unconsciously and, in some cases, completely consciously and explicitly. The frequency of such reflection is seen in lexical, syntactic and rhetorical levels of the story respectively.

Using myths and folk tales for solving the problems of text correction and finding the correct older form of a word or hemistich is a useful method in the correction of classic texts. This method has been employed especially for the correction of Shahnameh’s verses. One of the challenging verses of Shahnameh which has been recorded differently in various manuscripts and published versions is a line in the tale of Rostam and Sohrab that Tahmineh uses when introducing herself to Rostam: یکی دخت شاه سمنگان منم                                 بزشک هزبر و پلنگان منم In an article about this verse, Khaleqi Motlaq enumerates it as one of the dark verses of Shahnameh that, in the second hemistich, the correct form of words and meaning of the hemistich is ambiguous. The ambiguity of this line led different researchers to accept a form of this line and discuss it on the basis of their own reasons. While accepting the idea of a researcher, Khaleqi Motlaq insists on the fact that the older record of this line is the same as what has been mentioned here and maybe there is a ritual behind it that we do not know. Accordingly, with the aim of comparative mythology, this paper aims to show that the character of Tahmineh is a vestige of mother goddess or one of the ancient goddesses and, as she herself emphasizes, she was in reality the physician of lion and leopards and, thus, the older record of this line is the correct record.

Having texts purified from mistakes is one of the serious requirements of literary researches because, without having correct texts, we cannot create authentic and accurate works in other fields of literary research such as lexicography, text criticism etc. Accordingly, the correction of older texts is of much more significance because these texts, due to having old and unknown words as well as special language, grammar and imagery which are not known to present readers, have changed and been distorted more and, on the other hand, the investigation and correction of newer texts is not practically possible without sufficient knowledge of older texts. Athir al-Din Akhsikati is one of the ode-composers of sixth century (A.H) whose divan has been corrected scientifically just one time by Roknodin Homayoun Farrokh in 1377. Unfortunately, due to carelessness of the corrector and not using the old available version of the divan, this correction is full of mistakes and errors and, thus, reference to it would not be without any problem. This paper aims to identify some of these mistakes and offer their correct form relying on evidence and reasons.