PERSIAN LITERATURE QUARTERLY
Year:2008 | Volume:5 | Issue:18|Papers Count:11

The mount, which is an important phenomenon in nature, will be examined from two perspectives. One view is that although it seems to be static, silent and dumb, it is the best place for imagination and wisdom to thrive. An intelligent journey into its depth shows that it is dynamic and moving; it is a good company, listening and talking; the artist is melted in its character and it is melted in the artist’s.The second view is the study, analysis, comparison and criticism of the outcome of this imaginative and intelligent journey in a conscientious description of the mount by two high-ranking poets.

Ferdowsi, with his great knowledge, intelligence and art, studied ancient stories from different viewpoints. He selected the epic stories and left the non-epic or anti-epic ones. Some thought that Ferdowsi did not have the time to versify these stories. They thus tries to versify them. One such story, an anti-epic one, is Bahman-nameh by Iran Shah ibn Abi al-Khayr.

Out of the long list of past Persian-speaking poets, we can rarely see a poet who is ready to give his life to speak the truth before the kings and the powerful and not to be enslaved by their gifts and presents. Yet, there are some mystics who depend on the everlasting power of that one unbegun and eternal beloved and criticize the power whether in their own words or in the words of lower-class people or the wise insane.One such poet is Attar Neishaburi, who does not see a sultan other than the real sultan and does not know a king other than the unbegun and eternal king. On the one hand, Attar speaks of the character and the manners of a just king; on the other hand, he censures them, advises them, opposes them and tells the truth in the words of the common people.This article is a research about the power-defying nature of Attar.

Shahnameh is certain to be an invaluable work in Persian literature and one of the great epics in the world. A thousand years ago, Ferdowsi’s great poetic and artistic talent gave life to this great work. Nothing is known about the manuscripts from the time of his death to 200 or 250 years later. The oldest manuscript belongs to the library of Florence in Italy and dates back to 1235 AD, almost 200 years after his death. It includes only half of the Sahnameh. The oldest and the most complete manuscript, dating back to 1296 AD, is kept in British Museum in London. There are many other manuscripts, but when the two oldest ones have been juxtaposed with about twenty other manuscripts, many differences are observed in different lines and it is not clear which ones are original.Inasmuch as the musical study of a poem on the basis of the rhymes in the doublet (mathnavi) format is very vital and determining and imperfect and slant rhymes can be easily detected, this can be a good measure to assess the poet’s poetic art. This article tries to study Ferdowsi’s poetic art in this way to recognize the original lines from the non-original ones.

The Shahnameh is the scene of the battle between the good and the evil, and man is the inactive spectator of this battle. Existentialism challenges this view of humanity and by breaking up the two forces replaces a third and superior power i.e. the human being. Existentialism therefore is a kind of humanism.According to Shahnameh, man’s effort has no effect on his destiny and man is powerless in the hands of destiny. Existentialism repudiates this view and considers man as the only builder of his destiny. In existentialism, no person is born a hero or an anti-hero, while in Shahnameh, all the heroes were born heroes and all the non-heroes were born as such. The keywords in existentialism are choice and anguish. Sartre’s heroes always find themselves in a situation charged with choice and anguish, a situation which many heroes of the Shahnameh, in most stories like Rostam and Sohrab, Rostam and Esfandiyar, Siavash, etc., also find themselves in many times. The purpose of the present article is to study parts of the Shahnameh from an existentialistic point of view and to show that in principles existentialism is in agreement with the Shahnameh but in certain minor points it agrees with it.

The love story of Leili and Majnoon is a famous lyric work in Persian literature that has attracted many Persian and non-Persian writers and poets in such a way that seventy mathnavis have been composed like it, following the same line. Nezami exploited the Arabic sources of this story in composing his mathnavi. What preoccupied many researchers later was the historical identity of the story. Many researchers consider the events and the characters of the story to be the outcome of his imagination, while some researchers have insisted on the historical identity of the story. This article tries to do a comprehensive investigation of this duality and to study the historic origins of this story.

This article is going to have a stylistic look at the music of Foroogh Farrokhzad’s Poetry. Given the fact that naturalness is an essential component of all the elements of her poetry, music is also presented in a natural and emotional context. This article focuses on the prominence and the difference of the personal rhythm (external music) of her poetry and also the role of rhymes as peripheral musical bases and the prominence of the specific internal music, especially repetition at all levels.

Paying attention to wise and sagacious words and exploitingethicla points in individual and social behaviour is a safe means to guide an individual to perfection. This fact, seen as a mission by many writers and poets in Persian literature, has made them focus on the issue of ethics and practical wisdom.Abd al-Rahman Jami is a poet who has dealt with this topic with a special approach. Apart from its many other features, his mathnavi of Haft Owrang is adorned with many ethical and sagacious ideas and meanings, which will be briefly dealt with in this article.

The studies of mystic and religious experience seem to be entangled in the discussions of content. However, a major way of achieving the theme and essence of such experiences is through precise and accurate attention to the language. Now that language has turned into a focal issue for world thinkers, it is necessary to take this issue into account.Religious and mystic experience, unfamiliar and strange, is a huge change in the attitudes to God, universe and man. It inevitably moves language into a new and strange area and creates an essential difference between the mystic language and other languages.Mysticologists like Stace, William James, and Otto have enumerated some characteristics of mystic experience. The following are considered to be important in relation to language: non-expressibility, paradoxicality, and the artistic nature of language in mystic experience. Exploiting Persian mystic literature, this article tries to study such features.

The elegant and pleasant story of Sheikh San’an is one of the mysterious and symbolic stories of Manteq al-Tayr, the great work of Attar Neishaburi. In many respects, it is very similar to the meeting of Mowlana and Shams.Love is the central similarity. In both adventures, love is the most important approach to comportment, in which the lover risks losing everything in order to achieve it. Another similarity can be the unpredicted meeting of Mowlana and Shams on the one hand and Sheikh and the Christian girl on the other, which starts a new life for both of them. The privacy of the first meeting rids them of the friendships that prevented them from getting to God. In this way, they enter a new world that is very distant from that of their followers and disciples. They practice love in this world and suddenly forget whatever they had gained through piety and devotion. The emergence of love in Mowlana and Sheikh was an enormous and irresistible rebellion of the spirit against wisdom and wise expediencies.This article tries to study such similarities in their life stories.