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International Society for Iranian Studies
A Literary History of Persia by Edward G. Browne
The Divan-i Hafiz by H. Wilberforce-Clarke
Modern Persian Prose Literature by Hassan Kamshad
Review by: Dick Davis
Source: Iranian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 585-588
Published by: on behalf of Taylor & Francis, Ltd. International Society for Iranian Studies
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Reviews 585
work but before the appearance of its English edition, a document collection on
Franco-Persian relations has appeared: Asniidi az raviabit-i Iraln va Faransah:
dar dawrah-i Fath 'AIShauh Qiijiar, 1213-1250/1798-1834 (1997). This publi-
cation may challenge an assertion made by Farrokh Gaffary, author of the
appendix on the Persian sources, that any discussion of Persian documents will
have to await the classification and opening of the Iranian archives.
Finally, although Napoleon and Persia discusses diplomatic and political
aspects of Franco-Persian relations in considerable depth, it offers only tanta-
lizing hints about cultural, economic, scientific, social, and military connections
between the two countries during this important era. Hopefully, further studies
of this topic may take up this task and build upon the research presented here.
Ernest Tucker
U.S. Naval Academy
A Literary History of Persia, Edward G. Browne, 4 volumes, reprinted Iran-
books / Ibex Publishers, Bethesda 1997.
The Divan-i Hafiz, H. Wilberforce-Clarke, reprinted Iranbooks/Ibex Publishers,
Bethesda, 1998.
Modern Persian Prose Literature, Hassan Kamshad, reprinted Iranbooks/lbex
Publishers, Bethesda, 1996.
The Western scholars of Middle Eastern literatures who wrote the pioneering
works in their fields have in general lost the luster that once clung about their
names. It is almost impossible, for example, to read anything on Ottoman liter-
ature without quickly coming across an apparently obligatory excoriation of the
hapless E.J.W. Gibb, who, if he is sentient beyond the grave, must by now be
seriously wondering why he bothered to spend so much time and effort on his
six volume History of Ottoman Poetry (1900-1909). Gibb's contemporary E.G.
Browne, who devoted himself to Persian literature, has however fared much
better, partly because his obvious deep sympathies for his subject, together with
his outspoken opposition to his own country's policies towards Persia, have
made it very difficult to fit him into the category of the Saidean orientalist
scholar who was a mere catspaw for the West's sinister designs of hegemony
and exploitation. Even at the height of the unpopularity of his countrymen in
Iran, the fiercely nationalist poet Bahar could write a squib denouncing the
British lock, stock and barrel, with the single exception of the revered Edward
G. Browne. It is probable that Browne's interest in and documentation of the
emergence of the Babi and Bahai religions have made him a somewhat less
sympathetic figure in the eyes of the present ruling elite in Iran (supposing they
care one way or the other), but outside the Islamic clergy he is still apparently
well thought of by Iranian intellectuals.
Iranbooks has recently reissued his major work, the four volumes of A Lit-
erary History of Persia. As the work has now been superseded, as a reference
source, by a number of other works both in Persian and in Western languages, it
seems legitimate to ask, beyond reasons of sentiment, why? Certainly a student
in search of factual information, or even interesting opinion, on Persian litera-
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586 Reviews
ture can usually turn with more profit to the volumes by Bausani and Safa, or
those edited by Rypka and Yarshater. This is not at all to denigrate Browne's
achievement, which was enormous and, given the state of Persian scholarship
during his lifetime, extraordinary. Nor is it to denigrate his subsequent influ-
ence: most of the best British writers on Persian literature of the twentieth cen-
tury were Browne's heirs, in that they were either trained by him or by those he
had trained. If we see further than Browne was able to, it is largely because we
stand on his shoulders, and our insights would not be remotely possible without
his preliminary achievements. However, we indubitably do see further: much
has been discovered since he wrote. Particularly but not exclusively on the pre-
Islamic period, he cheerfully and openly allowed his own prejudices for and
against certain types of poetry to color his opinions, and he made some mistakes
(as who does not?). Further, the nature of writing on literature has become
immeasurably more sophisticated since Browne's time. It may well be thought
that much of this sophistication is not pure gain, particularly when the writing
degenerates into the self-regarding and incomprehensible, or gives itself over to
polemics for various political and social agendas. Nevertheless our increased
awareness of, for example, the ways authorial personae are presented in litera-
ture, or of the nature of literary genres, or of the typologies of epic and romance,
or of the ways comparative studies can fruitfully be brought to bear on Persian
literary questions, can all at times make Browne's approach appear dated, sim-
plistic, and only minimally useful.
The reissue contains an introduction by J.T.P. de Bruijn, which says some
very nice things about Browne, but is actually rather hard put to come up with a
reason for bringing the book before the public's attention again. Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is adduced as a work that was pioneering
in its field, has been superseded by subsequent scholarship, but which is still
read. This is not a very persuasive analogy. Gibbon is now read largely for aes-
thetic rather than scholarly reasons: he is one of the most striking writers of
expository prose in English. Browne's prose style is hardly a compelling rec-
ommendation: he writes very charmingly at times, but so did a great many of his
contemporaries. Edwardian English belles lettres is full of books at least as well
and often much better written than A Literary History of Persia. A price of $275
seems a bit steep for the occasional wry chuckle at a deftly turned apercu or
witticism. True, the volumes are quite handsomely produced and do look very
nice on the bookshelf. But if how one's bookshelf looks is not a major concern
the money would perhaps be better spent acquiring Safa's, Rypka's and Yar-
shater's volumes, and one might still have some cash in hand for a few good
editions of Persian poetry. (Bausani's wonderfully argumentative, idiosyncratic,
and provocative Storia della letteratura Persiana [Milan 1960] cannot be
obtained for love or money, which is a scandal: if a publisher wants to do schol-
arship on Persian literature a real service, reissuing Bausani, or
commissioning
an English translation of Bausani, would be of much more use than reissuing
Browne.)
The reissue of Wilberforce-Clarke's The Divan-i Hafiz (1895) seems
equally problematic, and the introduction justifying its reissue is even less reas-
suring, as its author candidly admits that he finds little to admire in Wilberforce-
Clarke's work. Indeed Michael Hillmann's introduction is largely taken up
with
tracing the history of the Persian ghazal prior to Hafez, and when he comes to
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Reviews 587
the text in hand the best he can offer is "readers ... can ... expect a sense of
being transported to a poetic world of experience not unlike the sense which
Iranian readers often describe as their experience of Hafiz." This is faint praise
indeed, and is made even more faint by the fact that in the previous paragraphs
Hillmann has just disassociated himself from the particular "sense which Iranian
readers often describe as their experience of Hafez" in question, a disassociation
with which most other scholars would agree. For
Wilberforce-Clarke, Hafiz's
text is a labyrinth of Sufi symbolism, and virtually every mundane object that
appears in the poems is to be interpreted as a symbol of Sufi arcana. This is not a
view of Hafiz's poetry, which now has much scholarly credibility. On the other
hand, the book is offered as a "crib for English speaking readers attempting to
read and understand Hafiz in Persian," and at this level it does have its uses, as
long as the reader ignores most of Wilberforce-Clarke's voluminous and often
quite batty notes. To this end a useful table, identifying the translated poems in
the editions by Khanlari and Qazvini, is included. The life of Hafiz (by Wilber-
force-Clarke) which precedes the translations contains some pretty anecdotes
but is of virtually no value as a reliable source: two appendices however, one
listing the historical individuals mentioned in the Divan, and the other the fig-
ures of speech used by Hafiz (with examples) are helpful. Consulted with cau-
tion, then, this book can be of real assistance to someone who has acquired a fair
amount of Persian but not enough to read the poems unaided. However, read by
someone who has little or no knowledge of Persian (and this seems its more
likely audience) it can only help to perpetuate the image of Hafiz as yet another
writer of inspirational, sentimental, goofy-Sufi verse, who had not a sensible
thought in his quaintly mystic mind. On balance this seems a disservice-to
Hafez, to Persian culture, and to poetry.
After considering two reprints of such dubious value it is a pleasure to turn
to one that can be greeted with more or less unequivocal enthusiasm, and this is
Hassan Kamshad's Modern Persian Prose Literature. Now almost forty years
old, the book's chosen areas of emphasis, and its judgments, have in general
held up remarkably well. Recent scholars of Persian have perhaps begun to
develop a more nuanced history of Persian prose than that which lies behind
Kamshad's book (which might be crudely paraphrased as "early prose was sim-
ple and that was good, recent prose is simple and that is good: everything in
between was ornate and that was bad"). The almost hagiographic portrait of
Hedayat with which the book ends also seems to need a little more shading than
Kamshad was prepared to offer. For example, Hedayat's unabashedly racist
view of Arab civilization seems hardly to bother Kamshad at all, and this is
more than slightly embarrassing for a contemporary reader; an indication of how
our sensitivities on such matters have shifted since he was writing, and certainly
since Hedayat himself was writing. Also, the comparatively little space given to
Al-e Ahmad is at first sight surprising, given his immense posthumous reputa-
tion and influence, and thus the way he looms so large for us, but of course there
was no way that Kamshad could have foreseen this. All cavils aside, the book's
general thesis, the clarity and detail of its narrative, the persuasiveness of its
arguments, its very welcome lack of jargon, and its generally fair and perspica-
cious assessment of well-known figures such as Dehkhoda, Jamalzadeh, Hejazi,
Afghani and Alavi, as well as its advocacy of now lesser-known figures like the
historical novelists of the early part of the twentieth century, together make it the
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588 Reviews
best available short introduction to its subject. One's only worry is that the new-
comer to Persian studies may be deceived by the title into thinking that he or she
is purchasing a guide to post-revolutionary Persian prose. Caveat emptor.
Dick Davis
The Ohio State University
Borrowed Ware: Medieval Persian Epigrams, Dick Davis, trans., Washington,
D.C.: Mage, 1997, 203 pp.
The choice of "epigrams" rather than poems in the title signals that we are
looking at the small units of poetry-the single turns of phrase that stick in
memory or the rare juxtapositions of words whose sound seems inexplicably
right. It makes this collection a miniature anthology of effects-more in the
manner of Longinus's "On the Sublime," with its sampling of individual tropes,
than the manner of Aristotle's "Poetics," with its emphasis on complete
works.
Dick Davis is well known for his translations of Mantiq al-tayr and from the
Shahnamah. What sets these translations apart is the visible act of choice,
the
short works or fragments of longer poems which make it seem a manifesto of a
personal taste.
One of the particular pleasures of Borrowed Ware is that the poems
Davis
has culled are not well known. (I found only one that had been translated
before.) It succeeds in sketching a tradition of delicate compliments, witty
abuse, and close observation. Often the smallest effects are the most successful,
as in this pair of bayts from a tenth-century poet named Manjlk (also voweled as
Munjik) which takes visual nuance to an erotic pitch: "Look at this part-colored
flower/ An agate streak, a pearl-pale streak/ Two lovers who have crept away/
And lie together, cheek to cheek."
Another source of pleasure is that we hear in this collection the poet's dis-
tinct lyrical voice. (Here it differs from the more neutral prose versions of
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Shadow of a Bird in Flight, where one's eye drifts
inevitably leftward to the Persian text on the facing page.) In this respect Bor-
rowed Ware doesn't resemble any previous collection of Persian lyrics, but
rather Dudley Fitts' Poems from the Greek Anthology (1956), which draws from
a tradition of comparable wit and works unobtrusively to remold those rhetorical
shapes in a distinctive poetic voice. Inevitably, when an English poet does a
book of translations it is not only an affirmation of the individual writer's taste
but a statement that orients itself in the history of English poetry.
There is a poem by cUnsur, a miraculously compressed dialogue in which
two speakers exchange seven questions and answers in two bayts. Basil Bunting
(writing in 1949, attributing it to Rudaki) translated like this:
Came to me-
Who?
She.
When?
In the dawn, afraid.
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