Journal of Literary Studies
Year:2012 | Volume:45 | Issue:3 (178)|Papers Count:7

Manuscripts of Manuchehri’s divan are relatively new. Only one manuscript dates back to 1051 A.H. Scribes have systematically “modernized” the older records. To have access to the poet’s language, one must either refer to the old manuscripts which are still unknown or else resort to literary miscellanies containing the poet’s poems. The author has presented here a number of different and rather older records of the poet’s six odes from three old sources.

Kimia-ye Sa'adat is the most important work of Abu Hamed Mohammad Ghazzali in Persian which has been edited and published twice in Iran: the first time in 1940/1319 S by Ahmad Aram, and the second time in 1982/1361 S By Hossein Khadiv Jam who had already published the first half of the book in 1976/1355 S. This article seeks to study these two editions, especially the one by Khadiv Jam, and compare them with the old manuscripts of the book. The study further indicates the shortcomings of the two editions and suggests the necessity for re-editing the work. Besides the original manuscripts used by Khadiv Jam, the study uses the manuscript in Malek Museum (dated 605 A.H.), two manuscripts from British Museum (dated 644 A.H. and 672 A.H.), and the newly found manuscript of Uppsala (dated 619 A.H.). The article refers to some of the most significant problems in the two existing editions especially the one by Khadiv Jam. Among the most noticeable shortcomings are the following: insufficiently introducing the manuscripts, careless selection of the original manuscript(s), adopting vague and uncritical methods for editing, deletions, unsupported additions, and some obvious mistakes in editing strange and rare vocabulary. These problems are so fundamental that in certain parts they cause serious semantic changes which depart drastically from the writer’s supposed intention.

This article deals with two main issues: firstly, it investigates the status of Sanai''s poetry in the development of Dehkhoda Dictionary. To achieve this end, examples cited from Sanai''s poems by the authors of Dehkhoda Dictionary have been examined. The study reveals that in quite a good number of cases, Sanai's poems have been the exclusive source for the borrowed examples and the dictionary has heavily relied on them. This includes formal lexical items as well as the words belonging to the poet’s “imaginary geography” which seem to have been uniquely coined. Furthermore, some of Sanai's poems in Dehkhoda Dictionary were among the first established and documented evidential examples. Since the authors of Dehkhoda Dictionary observed a chronological order in recording the examples, it further delineates the status of Sanai''s poetry in the development of the dictionary. The rest of the examples from Sanai have the same importance in terms of quantity and quality. The second focus of this article is a comparison between the original version of evidential examples in Dehkhoda Dictionary and a newly discovered manuscript of Hadiqa which was not available to the previous revisers of Sanai’s work or the authors of Dehkhoda Dictionary. This comparison has revealed how essential it is to revise the evidential examples in Dehkhoda Dictionary based on the newly published versions.

Culture and folk beliefs are noticeably reflected in Persian literature in general and in its poetry in particular. Paying attention to such beliefs is sometimes useful while correcting a text and identifying a preferred record. On this basis, the present article examines two verses of Sanai’s Hadiqa al-Haqiqa and offers the proposed correction. Verses from other poets have been presented to further substantiate the claim. The findings of this study can subsequently be addressed in the future commentaries and critical editions of the work.

Asadi’s Shahnameh is a great epic consisting of twenty-four thousand distiches and is attributed to Asadi or another poet of the same nickname. This work was created in the same line of development as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The main theme is the old campaign of Soleyman to Iran to confront with Rostam and Keykhosrow and to repeat the pattern of Rostam’s battles with his children in a state of anonymity. The text structure is episodic with numerous central characters. The narratives are for the most part derived from oral literature. Textual evidence demonstrates that the poet is Shiite. The narrative content, chronogram as well as the literary and linguistic style of one of the manuscripts reveal that the text was written in the ninth century (probably 809 A.H.). The article first introduces the text and the origin of its narratives in oral literature; it then proceeds with the study of the narrative structure of the epic using three available manuscripts dating back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (A.H.). Textology and Textual Criticism have been employed as the research methodology. The literary and linguistic features of the text have also been examined at three levels: lexical, syntactic and rhetorical.

Kortnameh is an epic composed in Masnavi format. Modeled on Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the work was composed by Rabiee Pushangi (671-702A.H.) at the behest of Fakhruddin-e Kort (697-706 A.H.) about the history of Kort dynasty. The work has disappeared and little is known about it. Tarikhname-ye Herat (721 A.H.) is the only source that has preserved a little more than 250 verses of Kortnameh, providing us with some information about the author and his style. To identify the structure and format of Kortnameh, the present study has tried to explore and analyze the surviving verses of the work in Tarikhname-ye Herat.