[MUSIC PLAYING]
Born In 1927 in Hamadan, Iran, and passed away earlier
this year in June of 2018.
He taught at the University of Chicago from 1966 to 2010,
and was therefore responsible for the training
of many generations of students, and in particular,
for conveying and inspiring them with his love
of Iranian culture, and particularly
of Persian literature.
A number of those direct students in Persian literature
include Michael [INAUDIBLE],, Michael Hillmann, Paul
Sprachman, Paul Losensky, myself, Sunil Sharma,
and Alyssa Gabay, but he was responsible for a slew
of other individuals who came through the University
of Chicago and were not necessarily working directly
on Persian.
And the list is quite long, so I'm not
going to read all of their names.
But before he came to the United States,
he also began his career teaching in Germany
with Johann Christoph Burgel, and then Italy
with Angelo Piemontese and Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti.
So the lectureship in his honor is, in part,
to celebrate the legacy of Persian studies
that he contributed to in the United States
as well as around the world.
So the Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Civilizations, which is the home for the lectureship,
is very pleased and proud to welcome you
to this inaugural lecture.
The choice of the speaker tonight
would have been very much in Professor Moayyad's
good graces.
He has come before.
I met him because Professor Moayyad invited him
in the early 1990s for a talk here,
and we all, at that point in time,
benefited from the expertise and the good humor
of Professor Dick Davis, who is our inaugural lecturer.
Professor Davis was born at the end of the Second World War
in England, and he did his BA and his MA
at the Universities of Cambridge in English literature,
and his PhD in Manchester in medieval Persian.
And the story is that he went first to Iran
after finishing his degrees in English literature,
where he spent some time teaching at the University
of Tehran and met with the decision to come back to the UK
and to do a huge deal in Persian literature.
He also met with his wife, and has collaborated with her
in some of his translations.
After coming back to the UK, he taught at Durham and Newcastle,
and then came to the United States,
where he taught at UCSB, and finally,
at Ohio State University, where he was professor of Persian
and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Cultures.
He retired in 2012 but has remained extremely active,
both as an author and translator and editor,
but also as a teacher visiting various universities where
he has shared his knowledge and his love of Persian poetry
and culture with students around the United States.
He's also a fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature since 1981.
Most of the Persian students will know him
as the leading translator of Persian literature in our time.
Certainly into English, but I think
into any world literature.
But he is not limited in his scholarly output
and/or his cultural output to translations
from Persian literature.
He has published quite a number of books.
I think the total is 12 books of original poems.
And very recently, his collected poetry has come out.
So he's now [? sahib ?] diwan.
And that's quite an accomplishment.
His first book was published in 1975, many of them
with Anvil Press in London.
And I won't read you all of the names
because we'll be here quite some time.
But in addition to his translations of Persian,
he has edited the selected writings of Thomas Traherne,
the 17th century English poet.
It's not on his CV here-- he has modestly omitted it--
he's done translations from Italian.
And his translations from Persian
include works that many of you know,
including The Conference of the Birds, the Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam, the Shahnameh, My Uncle Napoleon.
Borrowed Ware, which is a collection of medieval Persian
epigrams.
Vis & Ramin, Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz,
including Jahan Malek Khatun and Ubayd-i Zakani,
and When They Broke Down the Door, which
is a collection of translations by the contemporary poet
Fatemeh Shams.
In addition to these works of translation,
he has contributed two really seminal works of scholarship
for Persian literary studies, and those
are his Epic and Sedition: the Case of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh,
which is an astounding piece of scholarship,
but it's also a extremely beautifully-written piece
of academic writing that one wishes to but never quite
seems to be able to emulate.
And also, Panthea's Children: Hellenistic Novels
and Medieval Persian Romances, which
is an extremely important contribution
to the history of Persian romances
and their connection to the late antique Greek novel.
So before I call him up here, I want
to do something that may surprise him a little bit,
and that is to say that I am very pleased on behalf
of Asghar Seyed-Gohrab of the University of Leiden
to present Professor Davis with a festschrift of articles
that I think he doesn't know about from 22 scholars at 13
different universities.
And the book is here.
It's just arrived.
So I am pleased to be able to show it
to him for the first time, and to congratulate him.
This is called The Layered Heart:
Essays on Persian Poetry, edited by Asghar
Seyed-Gohrab, a celebration in honor of Dick Davis.
So Professor Davis.
[APPLAUSE]
And he is going to talk to us about "She
Can't Be Kept Locked Up: Forgotten Medieval Persian
Women Poets."
OK.
Thank you, Frank.
I'll put this in my pocket.
Can you hear me?
Is my voice coming through all right?
OK.
Well, I'm rather overwhelmed by all that.
Thank you very much, Professor Lewis.
It's extremely-- I had in fact heard rumors of that, but.
[CHUCKLES]
About six different people said to me,
you're not supposed to know about this, but.
But I didn't know it was out now.
I thought it was some time next year, or something.
It arrived last week.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
I know that you contributed an article.
Thank you very much.
It's a great honor.
Really, I mean it very, very sincerely.
It's a great honor to be chosen as the first person
to speak in this series of lectures
in honor of Professor Moayyad.
It is also a very great honor for me
to give this talk in the presence of Mrs. Moayyad,
and thank you very much for being here.
I've retired from teaching now.
I retired in 2012.
But when I was teaching Persian literature,
it occurred to me at one point that I was probably
the only non-Iranian in the United States
who was teaching Persian literature who was not
taught by Professor Moayyad.
All the others seem to have been taught by him.
I might have missed one or two, but I
think that's generally true.
He wasn't my teacher, but he was an inspiration to me.
As people who knew him, he was a marvelous person, just as
a person.
But he was also-- that is, he was kind, he was generous.
He was a noble person.
He had great nobility in his character.
And also, he was a great scholar.
He took scholarship very seriously.
And he didn't compromise his scholarship.
But he was very generous to young people like myself
when I started out.
He was extremely kind to me.
I was a little nothing, and he was a very big deal,
and he was very good to me, and I was very grateful.
So as I say, it's a great honor for me
to give this first talk in the series of lectures
to remember him in his honor.
The title of my talk today refers
to a poem which is ascribed to the 12th century poet
Mahsati, who--
I have an awful lot to say, and I hate it
when I go to talks and people go on and on and on.
I think, why don't you shut up?
So I'll try not to go on too long.
As a friend of mine once said, if Dante
came around and talked for an hour,
I would leave at some point.
So I'll try not to talk too much.
But I might refer to Mahsati later, only if there's time.
But at the moment, I'll just mention her in passing.
The title of my talk today refers
to a poem ascribed to the 12th century poet
Mahsati, who is one of the few pre-modern women
poets whose name has not in fact been forgotten.
And here's the poem from which I've
taken my title in translation.
"An old man says we must remain here.
We can't be kept locked up.
In this sad chamber, wracked with pain here,
we can't be kept locked up.
That woman whose tempestuous hair
is like a wild beast's mane, stuck in the house,
held by a chain here.
We can't be kept locked up."
Now, the phrase "we can't be kept locked up,"
it implies that some people are locked up.
But it also implies that they're not going to stand for it.
And a lot of Persian-- there's a great deal
of poetry by Persian women, although they hardly
figure at all in the standard anthologies.
Between those two extremes, they are being locked up--
or some of them, of course, not all--
and they can't stand for it.
The poetry tends to go between those two extremes,
or tends to hover between those two possibilities.
I'm going to talk about four poets.
Rabe'e, Jahan Malek Khatun, Mehri, and Makhfi.
Now, it might be objected that Rabe'e-- those of you
in Persian studies will know that Rabe'e, like Mahsati, has
not been forgotten, in fact.
So she's not a forgotten poet, but I
think her importance has been radically underestimated.
In fact, Rabe'e is always thought of as one
of the first Persian poets in the revival
of Persian poetry, which happens in the late [? ninth, ?]
early 10th century.
And she's a contemporary of Rudaki, probably.
It's always said that Rudaki mentions her,
but I have never found a mention of her in Rudaki's work,
and I've been through it fairly thoroughly looking for it.
But it is said here and there that she's mentioned by Rudaki,
but as I say, I haven't found it.
But she's thought of as a contemporary of Rudaki
who is thought of as the first great poet in Persian.
I think her importance is more than that.
More than just being at the beginning.
As I said, Rabe'e is one of the very first Persian poets, which
might suggest that her poems would have a certain simplicity
and directness.
And superficially, this is true.
They are not particularly elaborate in their rhetoric,
and they are, in the main, easily paraphrasable.
But Rabe'e's poems, they have a simplicity
that hides a great deal of learning and sophistication.
For example, she is, as far as we know, the first Persian poet
who wrote macaronic verse.
That is, verse that is written in two languages.
The most famous medieval macaronic poems
are probably the Spanish poems which have Arabic refrains.
There are also medieval macaronic poems in English
where you get alternate lines in English and Latin.
They're quite common.
But Rabe'e seems to be the first person who
writes these poems in Persian.
And in her case, the alternating lines
are in Arabic and Persian.
Now, if you look at the English poems that are macaronic poems,
the Latin in them is usually taken from the liturgy
of the Catholic Church.
That is, it is Latin which would be in everybody's head.
That is, the poet hasn't actually composed the lines.
He's taken the lines.
Rabe'e's Arabic poems, she has composed the lines.
They're not lines she's taken from somewhere else.
Or if she has, we don't know where they're taken from.
They seem to be her lines.
That is, she's not just repeating
something parrot-fashion.
She is writing in Arabic.
This implies fluency in Arabic, and what
we know of her biography seems relevant here.
Her name, Rabe'e, indicates an Arab origin
at a time when the court language of most
Persian princedoms-- and her father
was a local prince in Balkh, in northern Afghanistan,
was in the process of changing from Arabic to Persian,
which means that she was almost certainly bilingual.
Her father's name was Ka'ab, and her own name,
as it appears in early sources, is Rabe'e bin Ka'ab.
Her brother's name is Harith.
All three names are clearly Arabic,
and the family claimed descent from Arab immigrants who
had established a petty kingdom centered on Balkh, which
later became subservient to the Samanids,
for whom Rudaki wrote.
As we said, Rabe'e appears at the beginning
of the revival of Persian poetry after the two centuries
of silence--
the phrases are [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] that
followed on from the Arab Islamic conquest of the 7th
century.
As long ago as the 18th century, the literary historian Thomas
Warton--
he's writing about Europe, but it's applicable, I think,
to the situation.
The literary historian Thomas Warton
pointed out that "after a dark age in which learning
is largely lost, at least in its native linguistic form,
the revival of learning appears to have first
owed its rise to translation.
The writers are chiefly employed in imparting
the ideas of other languages into their own."
In the case of Rabe'e's generation,
the other language in question was obviously Arabic.
The great Italian Persianist Alessandro Bausani
wrote of this earliest period in the revival of Persian poetry,
"we are in the presence of a linguistic Iranization
of Arabic conceptual traditions and lyric conventions."
The language still used to describe Persian poetry
confirms its early debt to Arabic.
Every single word descriptive of the rhetoric
of Persian poetry--
the words for rhyme, meter, metaphor, et cetera,
et cetera--
every single word is Arabic.
And also, the names of the forms of the poetry
in Persian, they're all Arabic.
[ARABIC SPEECH], et cetera.
Let's consider Rabe'e's position.
She grows up at a provincial court
where we can presume she had access
to whatever literary learning was available
in her time and place, as is attested by her surviving
poems.
She is bilingual in Arabic and Persian,
as her macaronic poems attest.
She lives at a moment when Persian poetry is effecting
a rebirth by, as Bausani says, "a linguistic Iranization
of Arabic conceptual traditions and lyric conventions."
And given the fact that she uses them,
her familiarity with the rules and tropes
of Arabic versification can be taken for granted.
These circumstances place her as almost uniquely
able to effect the transfer of Arabic
poetic conventions and tropes to Persian verse
to which Bausani refers.
This suggests, I think, that Rabe'e was not merely
a woman who happened to write verse at the moment
when Persian poetry was being reborn,
but that her role in this revival
was crucial and perhaps decisive.
Her circumstances and achievement
indicate that she was someone whose example made possible
the revival of Persian poetry, at least in terms
of its major non-Persian model, which was Arabic poetry.
Of course, I am not at all suggesting
that she was the only person who did this,
or that she did this single-handedly.
But she was certainly in a privileged and qualified
position to contribute to this process.
And remember, she was a princess at a court.
Princesses have a lot of clout.
More clout than ordinary poets.
So if this was something she was going to do,
other people would be likely to imitate it.
And she deserves, I think, much greater credit
than she is usually given for her role in the development
of early Persian poetry.
She was, I believe, an instigator.
Someone who pointed the way that Persian verse was to develop,
rather than simply one of the small number of Persian
poets who happened to be writing at this time,
and who happened to be a woman, which is how she has generally
been perceived.
So much, perhaps, for her role in the development
of early Persian poetry.
But before leaving Rabe'e, I'd like
to draw attention to the ways in which her life became
a kind of paradigm of the roles that Persian women poets
who came after her often found themselves playing.
To begin with, she was a court poet.
Well, we may say, so are virtually all medieval
Persian poets.
But there is a crucial difference between her
and almost all of her male counterparts.
The men were professional poets, dependent on the largesse
of the prince or of the courtiers at the court
at which they worked.
Rabe'e was a princess, not a court employee.
And as such, I would suggest that it's unlikely
she was paid for her poetry, or if she did receive
some kind of emolument or reward for her poems,
this was a kind of compliment.
It wasn't something she depended on for her livelihood.
So she is, in the strict sense of the word, an amateur poet.
She's somebody who writes poetry because she really
wants to write poetry, not because she
needs to write it to put bread on the table, as it were.
Many of the women poets who followed in Rabe'e's footsteps
were also princesses or aristocrats who were
"amateur"-- quotation marks-- poets in the sense that they
were members of the ruling family,
and not employees of the ruling family.
When we do find women poets later
on who are employed by noble families,
they were virtually never employed as poets.
They were employed as other things.
They were usually entertainers of some kind.
Sometimes courtesans, employed not for their poetry
but for other skills and charms.
Even Mahsati-- the poet I quoted at the very beginning.
Even Mahsati, one of whose poems I've just
quoted, a shadowy figure whose biography seems
to be largely apocryphal.
One scholar of Persian poetry actually suggested to me
that he believed that Mahsati never, in fact, existed,
but we'll leave that aside.
Many of whose poems may not be by her,
and who seems to be an exception to the rule
that woman poets were virtually always amateurs.
Even Mahsati was employed at the court of the soldier monarch
King Sanjar--
if she existed-- not as a poet, but as a scribe.
There is another way in which Rabe'e
seems to stand as a kind of model,
or rather, a dreadful warning to the women
poets who came after her.
The lurid story of her death is well known to people
interested in Persian poetry, but not
perhaps to beyond that group, so I will tell it briefly here.
It is very grisly.
It may not be true, of course, but nothing suggests it isn't.
While Rabe'e's father was alive, she
seems to have been able to live more or less as she
wished with at least a modicum of independence.
This changed when her father died
and her brother, Harith, became king.
Rabe'e was said to have been carrying
on a secret love affair with a servant at the court.
Harith found out about this, and in a fit
of brotherly outrage at his besmirched honor,
he cut his sister's throat and locked her in a bathhouse
where she bled to death.
Her servant lover then killed Harith and committed suicide.
It's very grisly indeed.
Now, obviously, I'm not saying that a lot of later women poets
were killed by their brothers.
But it's certainly true that a great deal of poetry written
by women in Persian is, as it were,
shadowed by a male presence that is both resented and feared.
This is very apparent.
And at the moment, I'm putting together
an anthology of poems written by women poets.
And this feeling of resentment and fear of the male
is constant.
It comes up in every generation, virtually.
As a kind of grisly coincidental footnote--
and this is completely off-subject,
but it seems so strange that I just thought I'd throw it in.
As a kind of grisly coincidental footnote,
we can mention that the story of Rabe'e's death
found an almost identical echo in 16th century Italy.
The poet Isabella di Morra was said
to be her father's favorite child,
and she was able to live more or less as she
wished while he was alive.
After her father died, she fell in love
with someone of whom her brothers disapproved,
and she carried on a secret correspondence with him
which her brothers intercepted.
They killed her lover and they beat her to death.
So we can say that the menacing, potentially murderous
male presence behind a great deal of poetry written by women
was not something restricted to Iran.
That's Rabe'e.
The second of the poets I want to talk about this evening
is Jahan Malek Khatun.
And in fact, it was Jahan Malek Khatun
that started me off on this anthology
which I'm trying to finish at the moment.
Having written an essay some time ago explaining
how it's quite impossible to translate Hafez's poems,
I decided I would try and translate Hafez's poems.
And the publisher was very keen that we do this.
But then, by that time, in 1995, the diwan
of this woman poet, Jahan Malek Khatun, was published.
She was a contemporary of Hafez, and she lived in the same town
as Hafez.
And in fact, her uncle was Hafez's chief patron.
I can't go on about this too much,
but the court was the Inju court.
The Injus were partly descended from the Mongols.
The Mongol courts were much more open
than most Islamic courts of the period about the presence
of women in the court.
The women were often not veiled in the court.
And they took part in court proceedings,
and they even took part in discussions of politics
and things like that.
So I think it's quite likely that Jahan Malek Khatun knew
Hafez.
Hafez was the most famous poet of his period.
Hafez was a poet who was patronized by her uncle who
also encouraged her poetry too.
It's very unlikely, I think, that they didn't meet.
There's also Ubayd-i Zakani, who is a poet of the same period,
and who also almost certainly knew Hafez.
And he's the most famous obscene poet in Persian.
I don't think that Jahan Khatun and he would get on very well.
He wrote two poems about her which are extremely unpleasant.
It's very surprising he kept his head, actually, after that,
but he did.
Now, because of Jahan Khatun, I thought, how many
other women poets are there?
Because really, if one looks in the anthologies,
there are very few.
If you go from the beginning up to--
really, up to the middle of the 19th century,
there's very few indeed.
So I started to look.
And I asked around, including Professor Lewis,
and I asked lots of other people too.
Do you know of any women poets?
Do you know of any books I should look at?
Do you know of any manuscripts I should try and get
microfiche of?
And so on and so forth.
And within a couple of months, I had 800 pages of poems
by women poets.
Most of them pre-modern, which I think is extraordinary,
considering that virtually none of these poets or poems
are mentioned in the standard anthologies.
So it's Jahan Khatun who started me off on this quest
that I'm on at the moment.
She lived in the 14th century.
She's a contemporary of Hafez.
And she lives in Shiraz.
When Jahan Khatun was about 30, her uncle's reign
came to an abrupt end.
His army was defeated on the battlefield
by a warlord who then executed Jahan Khatun's uncle, Hafez's
patron.
And he also executed all of her male relatives
whom he could get his hands on.
Some of her poems seem to indicate
that she was imprisoned for a while and then exiled.
Though we have to be very careful when
treating lyric poetry as literal autobiography,
as it usually owes much more to poetic conventions
than to personal experience.
However, some of Jahan Khatun's poems
do seem to refer to particular personal experiences.
Again, there's something technical one can say here.
There is a particular form in Persian
called the fragment, the [PERSIAN SPEECH],, which
was often used for autobiographical experiences.
The ghazal, which is often read by Westerners
as autobiographical, I think it virtually never is.
It's a form, and it's a completely conventional form.
But the fragment form does often seem
to contain autobiographical material.
And a number of Jahan Khatun's fragments
do indicate what probably happened to her
after this warlord killed her uncle
and took over the rule of Shiraz.
Five years after her uncle's defeat,
the son of the new ruler deposed his father
and welcomed back to Shiraz the poets
who had been exiled or fled.
And it seems that Jahan Khatun came back to Shiraz
and lived out the rest of her life there.
We have two other pieces of information about her.
One is that she married her uncle's nadeem.
That is, his bosom buddy, his best friend, his drinking
companion, et cetera.
And again, she has many love poems.
Most of her poems, in fact, are love poems.
But there is a distinctive note in some of her love poems
which is not a convention of the genre, which
is, in the ghazal genre, wine is always praised,
particularly at this time.
Wine is a good thing.
It brings happiness and so on and so forth.
Jahan Khatun is very iffy about wine,
and she more than once says in her poems she doesn't
like a lover who is drunk.
I think there's probably something autobiographical
there, particularly as the man she married
was her uncle's drinking buddy.
She thinks, oh my god.
He's come home drunk again.
Oh, boy.
OK.
So she married her uncle's nadeem,
and if we can believe any of her love poems,
that wasn't a happy marriage.
It might be convention.
Unhappy love poems are completely
conventional to this period.
But sometimes, they do sound very personal.
The other thing we know about her
is that she had a daughter who died at a very young age.
We can tell-- she wrote 23 eulogies to this daughter.
23 eulogies.
It clearly got to her.
It's clearly a very important moment in her life,
event in her life, the loss of her daughter.
And I think the personal feeling in those poems is undeniable.
It's not conventional.
It's very strong.
And very moving, I feel.
And I'll read a couple of them later.
I'm going to read a few of her poems in translation.
Now, her diwan is quite extensive.
It's three times as long as that of Hafez,
for example, her Shirazi contemporary.
And it's mostly ghazals, but also
a couple of praise poems, a number of rubaiyats,
the eulogies on her daughter that I mentioned,
and the fragments I mentioned.
She is, in many ways-- and I think
this is really because we have so many of her poems.
We've got her complete diwan.
We've got 1,500 poems by her.
She is, I think, the most accomplished, significant,
and to my mind, interesting pre-19th century woman
poet who wrote in Persian.
Perhaps after Rabe'e.
But we have far fewer points by Rabe'e
than we do by Jahan Khatun.
I'm going to read a few of her poems in translation.
And most of what I'm going to do from now on
is read translations towards this anthology
which I'm working on.
Now, some of her poems are very playful,
particularly when she--
she has playful poems about love,
and she has very sad poems about love.
The short ones tend to be playful.
The longer ones are sad.
I'll read some of the shorter ones.
"I swore I'd never look at him again.
I'd be a Sufi, deaf to sin's temptations.
I saw my nature wouldn't stand for it.
From now on, I renounce renunciations."
"Last night, my love, my life, you lay with me.
I grasp your pretty chin.
I fondled it.
And then I bit and bit your sweet lips till I woke.
It was my fingertip I bit."
And a slightly sadder one.
I think a lot of people can identify with this poem,
especially when you're young.
Of course, I'm immensely old and don't identify at all.
"Always, whatever else you do, my heart, try to be kind.
Try to be true, my heart.
And if he's faithless, all may yet be well.
Who knows what he might do?
Not you, my heart."
I'm going to read one of the poems which is almost
certainly autobiographical.
And it's the kind of poem that one could almost
imagine it written in this century,
or the previous century, in the 20th century,
after some terrible civil upheaval, or war, or something
like that.
It's a poem which seems to describe her
after the warlord conquered Shiraz and her family
were killed.
She was captured.
And she's in a school.
She's obviously been put in a school.
She says the school is in ruins that the town has
been fought over.
She's in this ruined school, and her captors
are in the next room discussing what to do with her.
It's a quite extraordinary poem, and it's really
not a conventional poem in that sense.
You feel a very strong individual situation.
And you feel her resignation and fear together.
"Here in the corner of a ruined school,
more ruined even than my heart, I
wait while men declare that there's no goodness in me.
I sit alone and brood upon my fate,
and hear their words like salt rubbed in my wounds,
and tell myself I must accept my state.
I don't want wealth, and I don't envy
them, the ostentatious splendor of the great.
What do they want from me, though,
since I have nothing now that I'm destitute and desolate?"
Another poem that almost certainly
comes out of the violent and political events
that happened when she was around 30 years old.
It's a kind of lament to heaven.
In the middle of the poem, it mentions a cut-down cypress
tree.
I'm virtually certain the cut-down cypress
tree refers to her uncle who has been executed.
"How long will heaven's heartless tyranny, which
keeps both rich and poor in agony, go on?
The dreadful happenings of these times
have torn up by the roots hope's noble tree,
and in the garden of the world, you'd
say they've stripped the leaves as far as one can see.
That cypress, which was once the cynosure of souls,
they've toppled ignominiously.
I cry to heaven above.
Again, I cry.
How long will this injustice fall on me?
What can I tell my grieving heart
that won't let dearest friends assuage its misery?
You'd say heaven stuffed its ears with scraps of cotton
simply to show that it's ignoring me."
That image at the end of the poem,
"you'd say heaven stuffed its ears with scraps of cotton."
Most images in medieval Persian poems
are-- they come from a stock which all poets use.
Originality of imagery is not something
that's especially prized.
I haven't come across that image elsewhere.
I might be wrong, but as far as I know,
it's original to Jahan Khatun.
"You'd say heaven had stuffed its ears
with scraps of cotton."
Another poem that also seems to come out
of this political turmoil in the middle of her life.
This is a poem which does something
that a lot of contemporary poets which
Jahan Khatun did, especially Hafez,
but which she rarely does.
But in this poem, she does do it.
Which is, as you're getting towards the end of the poem,
she suddenly seems to change the subject completely.
She sort of swerves off to something else.
And she suddenly talks about a "you."
Having been talking about people in general,
she suddenly refers the poem to a "you.
And the "you" is clearly God.
"Most people in the world want power and money, and just
these two.
That's all they're looking for.
They're faithless, callous, and unkind.
The times are filled with squabbles, insurrection, war.
And everyone puts caution first, since now, few friends
exist of whom one can be sure.
Men flee from one another like scared deer.
And for a bit of bread, the rabble
roar as though they'd tear each other's guts apart.
Why are men determined to ignore the turning
of the heavens, which must mean the world will change,
as it has done before?
But in their souls, they are your slaves,
and search the meadows for the cypress they adore.
My heart's an untamed doe who haunts your hills,
and whom no noose has ever snared before."
That last line-- the two lines in the English--
that last line is extremely beautiful in Persian.
"My heart's an untamed doe who haunts your hills
and whom no noose has ever snared before."
Well, I won't comment further on it.
I'll read you one of her love poems.
She has an awful lot of love poems.
This is a fairly typical one.
It's complaining to her lover.
Maybe her husband, maybe an imaginary lover.
I have a feeling it was her husband.
One thing that is very common in Persian love poems--
or in Persian poems generally, but particularly
in love poems--
is a contradistinction with what you might
expect in an English poem.
If you have an English poem in which somebody is referred
to as "you," and somebody is referred to as "he,"
you would assume, I think, that they're two different people.
In a Persian poem, they're almost always the same person.
And that's the case here.
They're not always the same person, but usually they are.
Here, we have a--
first, the person is referred to in the third person as a "he,"
and then later on in the poem, he's referred to as "you."
But they're both the same person.
This is fairly typical of her love poems, of which there
are an awful lot.
"My friend, who was so kind and faithful once,
has changed his mind now, and I don't know why.
I think it must be in my wretched stars.
He feels no pity for me when I cry.
Oh, I complain of your cruel absence,
but your coming here is like dawn's breeze in the sky.
That oath you swore to and then broke, thank God it's you
who swore and is forsworn, not I.
I didn't snatch one jot of joy before you
snatched your clothes from me and said goodbye.
I didn't thank you, since I wasn't sure you'd really
been with me or just passed by.
How envious our clothes were when we lay without them, close
together, you and I."
That's nice, isn't it?
"Your curls have chained my heart up."
This is right.
"Madmen are chained up as they rage and sigh.
They say the world's Lord cherishes his slaves.
So why is he harsh to me?
I don't know why."
"The world's Lord," there's a pun there.
Her name, Jahan Khatun.
As those of you who know Persian will know, jahan means world.
So she's talking about herself.
The world's Lord, Jahan's Lord, my Lord.
Of course, the world's Lord is God,
so she's implying that this man she feels all this about
is like God to her.
I'm going to read a couple of her eulogies to her daughter,
and then I'll pass on to another poet.
These eulogies are really very moving in Persian.
I'll read a longish one, and then I'll read just a short--
it's about a page, and then I'll read
one that's just four lines in English, two lines in Persian.
Usually, when I translate Persian poetry,
I try to keep the same form as far as possible.
Sometimes it's not possible.
You might have noticed that a lot of these poems
have monorhyme.
That is, the same rhyme sounds through the whole poem.
Sometimes, this just comes, and it is possible,
but sometimes, it's not possible.
And with this poem, it is in monorhyme in the original.
I tried to do it in monorhyme in English and I just gave up.
I realized that I couldn't do it and keep
it close to the meaning of the Persian,
and also the feel of the Persian.
So I've done separate rhymes for each stanza,
but it would be one rhyme right through in Persian.
The "you" in this poem is her daughter
who died, apparently, when she was two or three years old.
That's what the poem seemed to indicate.
In one of the poems, she talks about her just
beginning to speak.
"Your heart, a rosebush, and your soul, a cypress.
Sweet pleasure's bud, fruit worthy of the spirit.
And I, a mother now without her child, denied life's joy
and all life should inherit.
How men loved seeing what they'd never
seen, till, like a fairy's child, she slipped from sight.
Don't criticize me when I weep, but think how Jacob
wept for Joseph day and night.
What wound is this whose only balm is tears?
What pain whose cure is lamenting and distress?
I weep a flowing river, and Oman has never
seen these pearls that soak my dress.
While I have eyes within my head and while my tongue is
in my mouth, I'll always see her image in my eyes,
and by my tongue, her name will be repeated constantly.
This grief so scorched my heart that when I'm dust,
that dust will show my sorrow all too well.
My house that was a shining paradise
is darker now than any dungeon cell.
My heart was like a home that welcomed pleasure.
Now, only grief comes knocking at its door.
My suffering heart has borne so much,
it's like a storm-tossed boat that cannot reach the shore.
Prepare to quit this wretched hovel here.
When autumn comes, the nightingales are leaving.
It's fate that heaps these sorrows on our heads.
You can't say time's to blame when you are grieving."
The wretched hovel is the world.
This is a cliche for the world at this period.
It's not just Jahan Khatun's.
"You can't say time's to blame when you are grieving,"
she says it's fate that keeps these sorrows on ice.
What it means is that my loss of this child
was fated from the beginning.
That it's not something that happens in the passing of time.
It's always been there, as it were, waiting to happen to me.
A short poem about the death of her daughter too.
This mentions Rizvan, who is the angel who guards paradise.
He has the role of Saint Peter, as it were.
He admits you or doesn't admit you
into paradise, Saint Peter in the Christian tradition.
And she's talking about her daughter,
who she calls her rose here.
It's only four lines in English.
"My heart's new rose was snatched from me,
and grief replaced her, given by the hand of fate.
But then my eyes saw Rizvan's kindness
when, as she approached, he opened heaven's gate."
So she sees her go into paradise, in her mind.
OK.
The next poet I'm going to talk about is Mehri.
Now, Mehri is a really feisty poet.
She's certainly one of those poets who you feel cannot be
kept locked up.
She's bawdy, she's cheeky, she's angry.
She's quite a lady.
She's from the end of the 14th, beginning of the 15th century.
She was an intimate of the Timurid princess Goharshad,
who lived from 1378 to 1457.
And she was the consort of the Timurid emperor Shah
Rukh, who was one of the major patrons of the arts
of his time, and the ruler of the eastern Timurid
empire, which stretched from Herat to Samarkand.
When Shah Rukh died in 1447, Goharshad,
who was by this time nearly 70, became the de facto ruler
of her husband's empire.
Both while she was her husband's consort and after his death,
Goharshad maintained her own highly
accomplished and independent and largely female
court, of which this person, this poet, Mehri,
was a prominent member.
Mehri was married off at a young age
to a court doctor who was much older than she was,
and a lot of her poems complain about this.
Her poems' occasional sexual frankness--
some of them are really frank.
Her poems' occasional sexual frankness
and their relative openness about unsatisfactory husbands--
especially unsatisfactory husbands in bed--
suggests that they were written for an audience mainly
of women, most likely Goharshad's numerous female
courtiers.
Some poems seem to imply that she had a lover or two,
but this may be no more than convention.
And it may not, of course.
She may have had a lover or two.
The frequent feistiness of her verses
can be similar to some of those shown
by Jahan Khatun in a number of her poems.
And since the two poets' lives probably
overlapped by a few years, Jahan's poems
may still have been in circulation
during Mehri's lifetime.
As a court ruled by an empress such as that which
employed Mehri would be a likely place for a princess's poems
to be valued, it seems a reasonable assumption
that Mehri was perhaps familiar with at least some
of Jahan's work.
One of the forms of--
not form.
Form is the wrong word.
One of the tomes that--
one of the things that Persian poetry likes to do,
particularly the very short poems.
A lot of very short poems in the early medieval period,
they are put-down poems.
They're poems which make fun of somebody, which
dismiss somebody, which tell somebody that they're useless,
or a pain in the neck, or go away, so forth.
And Mehri is particularly good at these put-down poems.
There's a famous put-down poem-- well, it's not that--
there's a put-down poem, a very short poem--
it's only a fragment, in fact, it's obviously part of a longer
poem that's been lost--
by Rudaki, the poet who is contemporary
with Rabe'e, the first poet.
And you have to think about this for a moment.
You think, what the hell does that mean?
And then you see what it means.
The English as this goes, "Have you seen a fish catch a pigeon?
Your sword is the fish.
Your enemy is the pigeon."
Got it?
All right, then.
OK, here's Mehri's poems.
This is to her husband.
"Between us now, I feel there's no connection left.
No loyalty, or kindness, or affection left.
You've grown so abject and so old,
you haven't got the feeble strength
to manage an erection left."
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
I wouldn't have an argument with her.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
This is another one to her husband.
"In your distinguished house, the thing I thought to have,
it isn't there.
The freedom my distracted spirit thought to have,
it isn't there.
You say I've everything.
I've untold wealth and luxury.
Oh, yes, there's everything, but what I ought to have,
it isn't there."
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
"A young girl married to a man who's old
will find, till she's old, happiness denied her.
Better an arrow pierced her side, they say,
than have a husband who is old all beside her."
And here's perhaps the most angry one of all.
This is to her husband.
"We sleep together and you never satisfy me.
I talk to you at night.
Your silence is defining.
I'm thirsty, and you claim that you're the fount of life.
For God's sake, where's the water, then, that you deny me?"
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
An answer to an old man who proposed himself as her lover.
"Good God, what do you think my flesh is?
What?
It's handsome men I fancy, young and hot.
If I liked weak old men, why would I whine about the one
that I've already got?"
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
And the next one is very bawdy, and I will just
read it and pass on and say nothing about it.
When I first read this poem, I thought,
can that possibly mean what it seems to mean?
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
And I just checked with my wife, who's Iranian,
and she said, yes, Dick, that's what it means.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
It's very short.
It's only two lines.
"He asked if he might kiss my lips.
Although not which lips.
Those above, or those below.
No night is shorter than a night that's spent with you,
since, as you draw aside your veil, the sun shines through.
If I had known to draw my skirts back from an old man's grasp,
sorrow would not have grabbed youth's collar
and undone its clasp.
Old men are cautious with themselves."
She's obviously talking about her husband again.
"Old men are cautious with themselves.
The young are more, who cares?
It's older buildings that require continual repairs."
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
There's a very touching one here.
I like to think that this is to a real lover,
but it might just be a conventional thing.
It's only two lines.
"Put up your tousled hair that hides your features
from my sight.
Give me my first glimpse of the dawn
in place of this dark night."
The dark night, of course, would be the hair,
because hair is always black in the Middle East.
The last poet I'm going to talk about is Makhfi.
Now, she's much later than the other poets.
She lived from 1637 to 1702.
Her real name was Zeb-un-Nissa, and she
was the daughter of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb.
Now, the pseudonym Makhfi is said
to have been a common pseudonym which
was used by women poets at the Mughal court.
In particular, it's said to have been
the pseudonym of the empress Nur Jahan,
who wrote poetry too, who was about 100 years before Makhfi.
I've read all the poems by Nur Jahan that exist,
and in none of them does she refer to herself as Makhfi.
Still, that's what the books on Nur Jahan and so forth
say about her.
But this is a Makhfi who is the daughter of Aurangzeb,
and she's the most famous of these people who
called themselves Makhfi.
At one time, she was engaged--
just in case anybody doesn't know
this, the Mughal court in India, which
ruled from the 16th century really
into the 19th century, at least nominally,
the court language of the Mughal court
was Persian for complicated reasons we needn't go into,
but it was Persian.
At one time, she was engaged to the son
of Dara Shukoh, who was the translator of the Upanishads
into Persian.
Though whether he actually did the translating himself--
which seems to be implied--
or commissioned the translation is unclear.
But this guy, Dara Shukoh, he's a very interesting prince.
He wanted to find some reconciliation between Hinduism
and Islam, as his great grandfather Akbar had also
wanted to do.
And he clearly either commissioned--
I mean, the books say he did it himself,
but I can hardly believe it.
It would be an immense amount of work.
Translating the Upanishads into Persian
was obviously part of this aim he had
of uniting the disparate parts of the kingdom,
or the disparate religions, at least.
But now, she was engaged to Dara Shukoh's son for a while.
But the marriage never took place.
And it almost certainly didn't take
place because of the opposition of her father, Aurangzeb,
who had little love for Dara Shukoh.
Dara Shukoh was Aurangzeb's older brother,
and he was the legitimate heir to the Mughal throne.
Dara Shukoh was.
But Aurangzeb rose in rebellion against him and killed him,
had him killed, and Aurangzeb became emperor instead.
So she was engaged to this man's son,
who was clearly the wrong person,
according to her father.
For 20 years, she was kept under house arrest
on the orders of her father in the Salimgarh Fort in Delhi.
She never married, although stories that may or may not
be true circulated about various clandestine affairs.
Couple of very short poems by her.
The first one mentions the Kaaba,
which I think most people will know here what it is.
But just in case you don't, the Kaaba
is the black stone at the geographical center of Islam
around which pilgrims perambulate.
And the Kaaba, according to Islamic tradition,
was made by Abraham, by Ibrahim, or put there by Abraham.
This is only two lines.
She says, "My heart circle the heart
which is the hidden Kaaba.
That Kaaba was made by Abraham.
This one, by God."
Another tiny one.
She was famous for her shyness, and this poem
sort of indicates that.
"I flee from knowing others so much
that, even before a mirror, my eyes stay shut."
Now, the most famous of her poems are--
she wasn't the only person who did this,
it was fairly common--
poems that were exchanged between people
for various social reasons.
Sometimes between lovers, or would-be lovers.
If you know the Japanese 11th century
novel, The Tale of Genji, almost every social occasion
is preluded by poems exchanged between the relevant people.
This is a similar kind of thing.
Now, the women of the Mughal court
had much more freedom than the women of Iran by this time.
We've forgotten the Injus.
We've moved into the Safavids.
And the women would appear at court celebrations.
They were not veiled at these big celebrations.
There was a governor of Lahore called Aqil Khan.
And he was so smitten with Makhfi,
who he saw at one of these great celebrations,
that he sent her this poem.
So this is not by Makhfi.
It's by Aqil Khan trying his luck with Makhfi, as it were.
"I'll be your nightingale if I should see you in the garden.
With others there, I'll be your fluttering moth,
if I should see you.
Showing yourself to be the shining light of an assembly,
well, that's no good to me.
It's in your shift I want to see you."
Shift, slip, nightgown, something like that.
Makhfi sent back this answer.
"The nightingale forsakes the rose to see me in the garden.
The pious Brahmin will forsake his idols when he sees me.
I'm hidden in my words like scent within a rose's petal.
Whoever wants to see me, it's in my words he'll see me."
There's another exchange between Aqil Khan and Makhfi.
And again, Aqil Khan is pushing his luck by being a bit risqué,
and Makhfi is fending him off.
And this time, she fends him off with an implied insult.
Two lines each.
Aqil Khan.
"What feeds on nothing and will rise, and standing, vomits,
and then dies?"
Makhfi.
"Women provoke this thing to stir.
Your mother's sure to know.
Ask her."
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
That's really rude, you know.
In that kind of society, that's profoundly rude.
OK, one more exchange between them.
This time, the exchange is initiated by Makhfi herself.
She refers to Layla and Majnun.
I think most of us know who Layla and Majnun are.
But if we don't, they're sort of the classic Romeo and Juliet
lovers of Islamic culture.
In terms of the way that Makhfi uses Layla and Majnun,
Layla is the kind of passive one who just sits around and weeps
and moans and cries, et cetera.
And Majnun goes off into the desert
and tears his hair out and becomes
a madman because of his unrequited love for Layla.
The actual poem is more complicated than that,
but that's how she treats them.
OK, this is Makhfi speaking.
"Although my sensibility is like Layla's, my heart
is like Majnun's and wants to roam.
I think of wandering in the wilderness,
but shame's the chain that keeps me here at home."
And Aqil Khan thinks, ah, possible.
Aqil Khan says, "When love is young, and new, and innocent,
it's very true, shame might restrain it.
But when it's grown up, wild and confident,
what shame or modesty could chain it?"
Makhfi isn't having it.
"Pure-minded folk are always circumspect,
and shame will keep them modest and discreet.
But when a bird's as shameless as you are,
what shame could ever claim to chain its feet?"
OK.
I'll read three more short poems by Makhfi.
"Oh, waterfall.
Why do you groan incessantly?
Who's made your forehead frown like this in agony?
What dreadful pain is it that makes you constantly
batter your head against a stone and weep like me?"
The next poem refers to stone and glass.
Stone and glass in Persian poetry
are like water and oil, or chalk and cheese.
They're sort of opposites, with the added factor that stone,
of course, can break glass.
"I'm upset with my heart, and with me, she's the same.
We're stone and glass, and I'm to blame, and she's to blame.
When, Makhfi, shall I reach the dwelling of my friend?
The road ahead of me is dark.
My horse is lame."
The friend there almost certainly means God.
The last poem I'll read of hers, and the last poem I'll
read altogether.
"No shoot of joyful green grew from my being soil.
My thirst was never quenched by happiness's wine.
The precious springtime of my life was spent in searching.
For all my efforts, though, no wedding dress was mine."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
If there are any questions, I'll attempt to answer them.
Well, that's good.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
Seriously, are there any?
Yes.
I'm just curious.
And I don't know, it might be [INAUDIBLE]..
Because I know you mentioned several times
there was like [INAUDIBLE] autobiography.
But one of the [INAUDIBLE] woman, Mehri?
Mehri, yes.
Mehri.
She had an image of [INAUDIBLE] asking her to put their hair up
Yes.
And you also mentioned that she was a close companion
of [INAUDIBLE] in the court.
Do you know-- are there any hints in there by the way these
female authors talk about gender, that--
they were-- I don't know, what the dynamic was there?
How long have we got?
[CHUCKLING]
This is a very good question, and it has a huge answer.
And in fact, I didn't stray into that
because I thought it would take up the whole talk.
Jahan Khatun, for example--
not the poet you asked about, who I'll come to.
Jahan Khatun often-- many of her love
poems, she refers to herself as the man.
And she refers to the person we assume
is the man to whom the love poems are addressed
as the woman, which is a very strange reversal.
The analogy that always occurs to me with these poems
is, it's like Shakespeare's plays,
where women's parts were taken by boys.
And then in the play, they were boys.
But they were boys who were described as women,
whereas they really were women.
And Jahan Khatun, she is a woman pretending to be a man,
but she takes on womanly characteristics as a man,
and she really is a woman.
So it's the same kind of thing.
Gender is very subtle and nuanced in these women's poems.
There's another point I didn't make, again,
because I thought it would lead us off into a completely
different talk.
In the Persian ghazal, which is the love poem,
the basic assumption is that the ghazal is a homoerotic poem.
It's a poem by a man to an adolescent.
So it's male to male.
Now, I don't think, certainly, all--
it's complicated.
All Persian love poems are not male to male.
It's clear.
And the fact that, in Persian, gender
is not indicated by pronoun.
There are very few words in Persian,
except some borrowings from Arabic, that indicate gender.
So you can write a poem and it's completely unclear what gender
you're talking about.
The fallback assumption is it's a male.
But it might not be.
It might be a woman.
When I translated Hafez, I tried to do sort of half and half,
but it's completely arbitrary.
Except just occasionally, sometimes, you
have either a girl's breasts are mentioned,
or a boy's mustache is mentioned.
Something like that.
But usually, it's completely arbitrary.
Now, when we have women writing these poems,
our assumption is that they are written to men.
But they may not be, in fact.
They may also be-- some of them--
homoerotic poems, like the male poems are homoerotic poems.
And some of, for example, Mehri's poems.
She clearly didn't like her husband much.
And she has these poems about removing a veil, for example.
That sounds like a woman.
But women didn't veil themselves before other women.
But we don't know.
There is a suggestion in some poems
that we are talking about a homoerotic relationship, rather
than a male-female relationship.
I don't think that answers your question.
Does that say, more or less, what you want?
Yes.
OK, thank you.
Yes.
What about God?
Is there no mystical kind of love,
like there is in some of the--
That is interesting.
I would have thought.
I would have expected, because women were relatively powerless
in this kind of society, and powerless people,
they do tend to turn to God.
Jahan Khatun, in some of her poems, turns to God.
And a number of Jahan Khatun's poems
say, the world has treated me so wretchedly,
and all my friends have betrayed me.
I put my trust in God and nobody else.
But it's not done in a particular mystical way.
It seems sort of fairly orthodox Islam.
And also, she makes fun of Sufism occasionally.
The very first poem I read by her says, I'd be a Sufi.
And then she says, no, I can't do it.
I'm not going to be a Sufi.
It's too difficult.
Most of these-- there are some women poets
who wrote mystical poetry, but there are far fewer of them
than I expected to find, for example.
And they are mostly much later.
They're mostly 18th, 19th century.
But from this period, the period that I've just read
poems from, virtually no one that I'm aware of,
that I've come across.
Yes.
It is often mentioned in the history of Persian poetry
that female Persian poets, the pre-modern ones
basically emulate the aesthetics of the male poetry.
And they don't really get much into the detailed sensuality
from the female perspective until Forough Farrokhzad,
who is modern.
And [INAUDIBLE], as an example.
Are you saying that's wrong?
Yeah.
I'm saying that's wrong.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
In fact, medieval Persian women poets--
and I want to make a distinction.
A distinction between being bawdy and being obscene.
A lot of obscene poetry is written
by men in the medieval period.
And the most famous poet, of course,
is Ubayd-i Zakani, whose poems are filthy.
Or some of them are filthy.
Not all of them, but some of them are filthy.
Women don't write obscene poems, but they write bawdy points.
The difference is that they joke about sex.
And there are a lot of medieval women who joke about sex.
They make fun of it.
They make fun about husbands who can't sleep with them.
Like that kind of thing.
They laugh about it.
They joke about having lovers, or wanting lovers, or what
lovers might do to them.
There's no private sphere here, then.
It's private.
A lot of obscene poetry in Persian,
it has an edge of anger in it.
But that's male poetry.
The female poetry doesn't.
It jokes about-- you can imagine that Mehri,
with her useless husband, is very angry with him.
But her poems are not full of anger.
They're full of contempt.
They're full of laughing contempt.
She's sneering at him.
You're useless, you silly old fool.
There's that feeling in them.
And a number of these earlier women
poets in the medieval period, they're just as sensual
as Forough Farrokhzad with the difference
that they joke about it.
They're lighthearted about it.
I can give a nice example of this.
There is, throughout the whole of Persian poetry--
and we've just seen Mehri as an example--
the whole of Persian women's poetry,
the subject of old men marrying young women
comes up again and again and again.
Comes up all the time.
In the early poets, it's treated from the point of view
of the woman who is married to this older man,
and she is laughing at him.
So there is anger in the poem.
I've been married off to this guy I can't stand.
But she makes a joke about it.
She doesn't sit-- there are no tears.
There's laughter.
She's sneering at him.
In modern poets, there's a poem by Forough Farrokhzad.
There's a poem by [INAUDIBLE].
There's a poem by an Afghani poet called Barlas.
These poets, they talk about the same subject.
The marrying off of young women to old men.
But they don't choose that moment
when you have the middle-aged woman laughing at her husband.
They choose the moment when the girl is being married.
And the poem is tragic.
The feeling in the poem is--
the most appalling thing's going to happen to this girl,
and she doesn't know what she's in for.
It's a completely-- the subject is the same,
but the feeling is quite different.
Oh, sorry.
Thank you so much for the talk.
I have a question about the sources that you use.
Sure.
The biographies, or the anthologies that
talk about the lives of these women,
the information is coming from the poems,
or like they are documented some other [INAUDIBLE]
that the lives they were talking about Jahan Malek Khatun, who
lost a daughter.
Is it something that they got it from the poem, or no?
It's a bit of each.
In the case of Jahan Malek Khatun's poems to her daughter,
that is taken from the poems.
In fact, originally, when people found these poems,
they first of all assumed they were poems for a lover.
And then it became clear, from details in the poems,
that they weren't about a lover at all.
Then a couple of the poems name the person
who has died Sultan Bakht.
Sultan Bakht was the name of Jahan Khatun's stepmother.
And it was assumed that they might
be poems about Sultan Bakht, her stepmother who had perhaps
died when--
and who was supposed to have been close to Jahan Khatun.
Can I ask a second question?
Can I just finish?
But finally, the details of the poem--
that she's a little girl, that she's just beginning to talk--
and the way that Jahan Khatun talks about her as an opening
bud, or an unopened bud, it's clear she's
talking about a baby.
And she's saying, it's my baby.
So that comes from the poem itself.
In other cases, they come from the-- you
will know the [INAUDIBLE],, the biographical notices
about poets.
Where their information comes from, we don't know.
My question is do you think there
is a possibility of the convention of creating
this baby for the poet?
It just came to my mind, it's just a little bit strange
that all these male poets had a son who lost at early ages,
like Nizami and [INAUDIBLE].
And--
And Ferdowsi, yes.
--for the female poets.
Maybe is it a convention of writing
poetry that's making it?
I'm pretty sure, in Jahan Khatun's-- in the cases--
I can think of, I think, four of these women who write
about the loss of a child.
Jahan Khatun's the only one I'm aware of who writes
about a very little child.
There are a couple of women who write
about sons who died in battle.
There's a poet of the 18th century called [? Ayesha ?]
[? Afghani, ?] and she has a wonderful lament for her son
killed in battle.
It's very moving.
That's clearly real.
Well, to me, I feel it's clearly real.
I don't think it's--
you can say that women write a lot of eulogies.
There are quite a few eulogies written by Gujar princesses.
The Gujar court was enormous, and there
were an awful lot of women and an awful lot of babies,
and a lot of them died, presumably.
So there are a number of poems by Gujar princesses
about dying children.
But I feel-- you might be right, but I
don't feel it's a convention.
But it's just a feeling.
I can't prove it.
Anything else?
OK, let's give it up, yes?
You have another question?
Yes.
So all the translations that you read, it's all yours.
Yes.
Is there any other--
if I want to read about these women in English,
is there any biographical book or any source [INAUDIBLE]??
No.
Not in English.
No.
You're going to have to read my introduction when it comes out.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
Are you going to include the Persian?
Well, this book-- which is the book that
has Jahan Khatun in it.
The publisher published the Persian separately.
Where is it?
It's here.
This book has the Persian of these poems.
There's a couple of mistakes, actually, in that we--
it was my fault. I didn't proofread carefully enough.
There are three poems, I think, by Hafez in which we printed
not the version I had translated from,
but another version, so the lines are in different orders.
But basically, it's the same.
The publisher is interested in doing this,
he says, because so many of these poems
are completely unknown.
And so it would be a service for Persian speakers too.
Because otherwise, it's very difficult to find these poems.
So the aim is to do this.
Whether it happens or not, I don't know.
Who is the publisher?
It's going to be published by Mage Publishers, who publish
all my translations for stuff.
Mage has an agreement with Penguin Classics
that they have first refusal on my translations.
We hope Penguin Classics will do it too, but they might not.
We have to offer it to them and see if they want it or not.
Obviously, if Penguin Classics do it,
it'll have much wider distribution.
Mage will do a nice hardback, which will be expensive.
And I hope Penguin, but they may not.
As I say, they have first refusal.
They haven't refused one yet, but there's always a first.
Yes.
Two, three sort of connected questions.
Sure.
First of all, of the poems that you're
working with for the anthology, how many of them
have their own diwans versus how many of them
is an anthology drawing from earlier anthologies--
[INAUDIBLE]?
That would be one.
And in the case where there are diwans,
what do you have [INAUDIBLE] anthology evidence that these
were all copied [INAUDIBLE]?
Well, the short answer is that, before the 19th century,
there's virtually nobody whose complete diwans we have.
I have heard of diwans by these poets,
but I haven't been able to get a hold of them.
And I have a feeling they're still in manuscript,
and who knows where the manuscripts are?
Jahan Khatun is a special case.
She was a princess.
And she, I presume, as a princess,
she arranged for her poems to be copied.
There are two complete copies of her poems
which are almost indistinguishable.
There are very slight differences between the two.
And they seem to be in the same hand.
They seem to be done by the same copyist.
And there are two partial copies which
seem to be done by different copyists of Jahan Khatun's
diwan.
The poet Mehri-- the one who's rather bawdy,
who's fed up with her old husband--
I have read that her diwan exists,
but I haven't been able to find it.
And certainly, inter-library loan knows nothing about it.
So my feeling is it's in manuscript somewhere,
but I haven't seen it.
Once you get to the 19th century, things change.
And then, there are diwans.
Yeah.
Yes.
Thank you for the talk.
You mentioned, of course, that many of these women
poets, that they're unread or under-read, historically.
I wonder if, in your reading of all these women poets,
do you detect women poets paying more attention to their women
predecessors [INAUDIBLE].
That's a very good question.
The question, if some of you didn't hear it, was that,
do these women poets pay attention
to women poets who precede them?
Are they aware of these poets who precede them?
And the answer is that many of them do.
Jahan Khatun, for example, she's one
of the very few poets whose diwan is prefaced
by a preface which she wrote.
She writes this preface herself.
And the preface is quite revealing.
She says that she didn't write poetry
for a long time for two reasons.
One was that women don't write poetry,
and the other was that she thought
she didn't have enough talent.
She asked people to--
it's a kind of modesty topos.
It's the opposite to the male poets,
who all boast about what great poets they are.
She says, I'm not that good a poet.
Please forgive me.
And she's a fabulous poet.
She's a really terrific poet.
Certainly, in her best poems, she is.
But Jahan Khatun then says, I thought women didn't do this.
And then I found-- and she lists, I think,
three Arabic poets and four Persian women poets.
She said, I found these women poets did it,
so I thought I would.
The poet Makhfi, the last poet I read,
there is a later Makhfi called Makhfi Badakhshi.
And Makhfi Badakhshi says in one of her poems,
this poem is to the Makhfi Hindi, the Indian Makhfi.
That is, she calls herself Makhfi
because she admires the Indian Makhfi.
There's a late 19th century poet,
I can't remember her name now, who says--
I mentioned that poet Mahsati, the poem
I read at the very beginning, "She Can't Be Kept Locked Up."
She says, I am the Mahsati of my age.
I am the Mahsati of my time.
So a number of these women poets,
they were aware of a kind of lineage
of women poets preceding them.
And you can see also that they're not
just aware of the lineage, but they're
aware of the specialness of it, and the particularness of it.
And that they are in that-- and they're
proud to be in that line.
Yeah.
Could it be that Mehri was the court jester for Goharshad?
I never thought of that.
What makes you think that?
You mentioned that, after her husband's death,
Goharshad had this--
Yes, all-female court.
It was thought to be all-female.
And the bawdiness in Mehri's poetry,
it's as if she feels comfortable talking to a female audience.
That's certainly true.
Those poems are certainly written for a female audience,
yeah.
It may be that she was a sort of licensed jokey poet.
Yes, that's a nice idea.
I hadn't thought of it, but I'll go along with it.
[CHUCKLING]
Yes?
Other than writing about love, or [INAUDIBLE]
of their children, or uselessnes of their own husbands,
do these poets go into, say, more societal or cultural
issues as well in their poetry, or not really?
That's a good question.
You see hints of it now and again.
You see hints of it in Jahan Khatun's poetry.
Jahan Khatun has all those poems about the political upheaval
that happened halfway through her life
when her family were killed off.
So she has poems about politics in that way.
But women poets become conscious of society,
and of their own position in society,
around the middle of the 19th century.
And at that moment, you get a lot of poets.
And that becomes their main subject.
And there's a very strange dynamic
happens then, because the end of the 19th century,
towards the constitutional revolution in Iran
at the beginning of the 20th century, there's a great--
to begin with, newspapers begin to be published,
so there's much more--
and the newspapers would publish some of these women's poems.
There's a lot more literacy in the country.
And there's a kind of consciousness
that society is changing.
And women poets contribute to this.
There are many very patriotic poems by women poets
at the end of the 19th century.
And they're often patriotic poems reproaching men, saying,
why don't you get off your behind and fight?
There's a lot of that.
But there's a kind of paradox in those poems,
which is really interesting, which--
it needs unpiecing by somebody.
These poets at the end of the 19th century,
they demand two things which, in many ways, seem contradictory,
or to go against each other.
One is, they say-- they actually mention Europe.
They say, why can't we be free like women in Europe?
We want to have the same--
of course, they have a fantasy of what Europe's like.
We want to be free like European women.
We want to choose our own husbands.
All that kind of stuff.
We want to be in control of our own money,
and so on and so forth.
As I say, it's a fantasy of European life, but it's strong.
They often mention Europe.
At the same time that they are saying,
we want to be like Europe, they are saying,
we want Europe completely out of our country.
So they are both turning against Europe and saying, please,
can we be like Europe?
There's a real strange tension there.
And it seems to be almost unconscious.
There's a sense that the future will bring both those things,
although they don't seem really to fit together.
And there's a number of poets who write in that way.
Yeah?
How about their perceptions, or their interaction
to the relationship with earlier male poets, like [INAUDIBLE]??
You do get poets--
yeah.
They're very conscious of the canon of Persian poetry.
But Persian poetry, really, from Jami on, from the 15th century
on, or even earlier, it's very intertextual.
People are very aware of the poets who've gone before.
They quote the poets.
They use lines from them to riff off their own poems on them.
And they take part in that too.
Although sometimes, you get the sense
that perhaps they don't have access to the number of books
that the male counterparts do.
But they're still aware of previous poetry.
And some poets actually refer to--
Jahan Khatun, for example, refers to Saadi.
She says Sheikh Saadi in one of her poems,
and she says she wants to write like Saadi.
Which is interesting, because Saadi is 100 years before her.
And in fact, her poems are more like Saadi's than they
are like Hafez's, although Hafez was her contemporary.
They have that kind of limpidity and clarity that Saadi has,
and they don't have that complexity that Hafez says.
Jahan Khatun talks about one thing at a time.
Hafez talks about six things at a time, so.
Or three.
Shall we leave it at that?
Thank you.
Well, if there are no further questions,
I would like to thank Professor Davis
for the attention to poetry, and the love for it,
as well as the recovery of female poets' voices
which were subjects that were indeed
close to the heart and the practice as translator
and scholar of Professor Moayyad,
particularly with respect to his edition of translation of,
and holding of the first academic conference here
in 1989 on the modern poet Parvin E'tesami.
So it was an extremely appropriate lecture
for the occasion, and it was most engaging.
And thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Frank.
[APPLAUSE]
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