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  THE MIRROR OF MY HEART

  dick davis is the foremost English-speaking scholar of medieval Persian poetry in the West and “our finest translator of Persian poetry” (The Times Literary Supplement). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an emeritus professor of Persian at Ohio State University, he has published more than twenty books, including Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations. His other translations from Persian include The Conference of the Birds; Vis and Ramin; Layli and Majnun; Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz; and Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, one of The Washington Post’s ten best books of 2006. Davis lives in Columbus, Ohio.

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  First published in the United States of America by Mage Publishers 2019

  Published in Penguin Books 2021

  Copyright © 2019 by Mage Publishers

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  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Davis, Dick, 1945– translator.

  Title: The mirror of my heart : a thousand years of Persian poetry by women / translated with an introduction and notes by Dick Davis.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020046588 (print) | LCCN 2020046589 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135616 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525507260 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Persian poetry—Women authors.

  Classification: LCC PK6434.5.W64 M57 2021 (print) | LCC PK6434.5.W64 (ebook) | DDC 891/.55100899287—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046588

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046589

  Cover design: Matt Vee

  Cover illustration: Homa Delvaray

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For Afkham, of course

  The liberating space that was Persian poetry . . . allowed subversive—indeed, heretical—expressions forbidden in any other media. Skepticism, even about the most sacred beliefs and duties, and sneering at the authorities, religious and political, was tolerated as the fruit of poetic imagination.

  —Abbas Amanat1

  Woman’s crime in our country is to be a woman.

  —Alam Taj (Zhaleh), Iranian poet (1883–1947)2

  Contents

  The Poets

  Introduction

  The Medieval Period

  From 1500 to the 1800s

  From the 1800s to the Present

  Selecting the Poems in this Volume

  Translator’s Note

  A Note on the Sources

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Iranian Dynasties

  Map Showing Places Mentioned in the Book

  THE MIRROR OF MY HEART

  The Medieval Period

  From 1500 to the 1800s

  From the 1800s to the Present

  Notes

  The Poets

  THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD

  Rabe’eh

  Mahsati

  Anonymous

  Motrebeh

  Daughter of Salar

  Aysheh Samarqandi

  Fatemeh Khorasani

  Padshah Khatun

  Delshad Khatun

  Jahan Malek Khatun

  Mehri

  Atuni

  Zaifi Samarqandi

  Ofaq Jalayer

  FROM 1500 TO THE 1800s

  Pari Khan Khanom

  Dusti

  Golchehreh Beigum

  Golbadan Beigum

  Bija Shahi

  Bija Nehani Qa’emi

  Tuni

  Bibi Mah Ofaq

  Hejabi

  Jamileh Esfahani

  Nehani Shirazi

  Nur Jahan

  Makhfi

  Zinat al-Nissa Beigum

  Soltan Daghestani

  Agha Beigum

  Hayati

  Aysheh Afghani

  Reshheh

  Maluli

  Effat

  Agha Baji

  Qamar Qajar

  Esmat Khanom

  Jahan Khanom

  Efaf

  Fakhri

  Mariam Khanom

  Mastureh Kurdi

  Mastureh Guri

  Shah Jahan Beigum of Bhopal

  Baligheh-ye Shirazi

  FROM THE 1800s TO THE PRESENT

  Tahereh

  Shahdokht

  Soltan

  Gowhar

  Gowhar Beigum Azerbaijani

  Shahin Farahani

  Makhfi-ye Badakhshi

  Farkhondeh Savoji

  Jannat

  Kasma’i

  Nimtaj Salmasi

  Alam Taj

  Zinat Amin

  Batul Adib Soltani

  Parvin Etesami

  Zhaleh Esfahani

  Simin Behbahani

  Lobat Vala

  Forugh Farrokhzad

  Tahereh Saffarzadeh

  Mina Assadi

  Nazanin Nezam Shahidi

  Fevzieh Rahgozar Barlas

  Soheila Amirsoleimani

  Farzaneh Khojandi

  Azita Ghahreman

  Parween Pazhwak

  Khaledeh Forugh

  Mandana Zandian

  Mana Aqai

  Pegah Ahmadi

  Granaz Moussavi

  Sara Mohammadi-Ardehali

  Shabnam Azar

  Rosa Jamali

  Hengameh Hoveyda

  Fatemeh Shams

  Fatemeh Ekhtesari

  Introduction

  A significant feature of Persian poetry that distinguishes it from most verse written in a European language is that almost all of it—from the earliest poems, written over a thousand years ago, to the present day—remains relatively accessible to a contemporary speaker of the language. The seventeenth-century English poet Edmund Waller bemoaned the fact that, already, his contemporaries could no longer easily read the works of the fourteenth-century poet Chaucer:

  But who can hope his lines should long

  Last in a daily changing tongue . . .

  We write in sand, our language grows,

  And like the tide our work o’erflows.

  Chaucer his sense can only boast,

  The glory of his numbers lost!*

  And as if to confirm Waller’s complaint, it was in Waller’s lifetime that passages from Chaucer were first “translated” into contemporary English, by Dryden. The Persian language, especially its literary form, has remained far more stable over the past millennium than is true of most European languages. There have been some changes of vocabulary and grammar, but by Western standards they are minor: a modern-day Iranian can read the works of the tenth-century poet Ferdowsi with about the same ease as a modern-day English speaker can read those of seventeenth-century authors such as Waller and Dryden; there are some difficulties for a non-specialist in the period, but they do not obscure what is usually the obvious se
nse and rhetorical force of any given passage. A side-effect of the fact that poems from centuries ago can seem and sound relatively “contemporary” to the Persian reader is that such poems could be—and were—taken as models by poets from a much later date, and this in turn has led to a quite extraordinary continuity of poetic rhetoric from the earliest poems until at least the mid nineteenth century, and even beyond that period.

  There is perhaps something else at work in this rhetorical continuity: all poetry is artificial in its language, but poetry in English has frequently tended to aim at “language really used by men,” as Wordsworth put it,* and when this is the case it tries, as far as possible, to disguise its artifice; by contrast pre-modern* Persian poetry tends to display, and delight in, its artifice. To say a poem in English sounds “artificial” is to condemn it; the same remark about a pre-modern Persian poem could well elicit the response “Of course it does; it’s a poem, isn’t it?” And so the fact that a particular metaphor or rhetorical trope has been used by many other poets, and is thought of as intrinsically “poetic” rather than as colloquial, is not so much a barrier to its continued use as a validation of it. The poets Ayyuqi (tenth–eleventh centuries) and Nezami (twelfth century) both say that the poet is like the woman who tends to a bride’s physical appearance before her wedding; that is, the poet uses his or her skill and artifice to make the subject as dazzlingly beautiful as possible. Other common metaphors used by poets themselves to describe poetry are that it is something woven, such as brocade, or a piece of jewelry, such as a pearl necklace. All three of these metaphors emphasize the aesthetic, artificial, fabricated, and artisanal nature of the craft, rather than, say, its sincerity or its truth-telling qualities as they are foregrounded in much Western poetry (“to hold . . . the mirror up to nature,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet says).

  To indicate something of the density and complexity of this artifice in pre-modern Persian poetry, here is a translation of a very early poem that is made up almost entirely of motifs that belonged to a common stock widely utilized by other poets for centuries to come. The poem is by the tenth-century poet Rabe’eh, who, as is appropriate for this volume, is the earliest-known woman poet to write in Persian:

  The garden shows so many flowers, as though

  Mani had painted their resplendent glow

  Dawn’s breezes never bore Tibetan musk,

  How is the world so musky when they blow?

  Are Majnun’s eyes within the clouds, that they

  Shed Layli’s cheeks’ hue on each rose below?

  Like wine within an agate glass, his tears

  Have filled each tulip with their crimson glow

  Raise up the wine bowl, raise it generously

  Since bad luck dogs deniers who say “No”

  Narcissi glow with silver and with gold

  It’s Kasra’s crown their shining petals show

  Like nuns in purple cowls the violets bloom

  Do they turn into Christians as they grow? (this page)

  The poem is a baharieh—that is, a poem welcoming the spring, a form that is still, a thousand years later, a recognized category of Persian poetry—and it is set in the archetypal beautiful place for Persian culture, the locus amoenus to end them all, a garden. But what is “Mani,” the third-century founder of the religion of Manicheism, doing in the poem? In Persian lore he was also a painter whose beautiful paintings looked so true to life that they deceived both people and animals, and this accounts for “painted” in the second line. Because the flowers are compared to Mani’s paintings, this means they must be very beautiful, and Persian poetry takes it for granted that beauty is a major concern of every civilized person. And something else is also going on here: Mani was the founder of a pre-Islamic religion seen as a heresy by Moslems, and yet he is mentioned, apparently favorably, in a poem written by someone we presume to be a Moslem. Persian poetry often mentions religions other than Islam, and in short lyric poems, like this one, the reference is almost always either favorable or neutral; it virtually never implies condemnation (this is less true of long didactic poems, in which religions other than Islam are sometimes implicitly or explicitly condemned). This suggests that Persian lyric poetry perhaps sees itself as somewhat at odds with an exclusively Islamic world-view, or at least as not prepared to denigrate other religions in its favor, and this is indeed the case. Persian lyric poetry is in general welcomingly receptive to both the pre-Islamic past and non-Islamic faiths. The implication is that there is not one sole Truth applicable at all times to all people; that other ways of being, from the past or as an adherent of another faith, can be considered to be equally valid. Later on, such references were read as allegorical (the mention of a figure from another religion, for example, was seen as a metaphor for one who transmits mystical knowledge—that is, a knowledge outside of the mainstream of “orthodox” Islam), and in later poems they often are allegorical, but they were meant quite literally, for themselves, in Rabe’eh’s poems, as they were in the poems of her contemporaries and of many subsequent poets.

  Regarded as particularly refreshing and pleasant, the cool breeze of dawn, referred to in the second stanza of the poem, is a constituent of the idealized landscapes of much Persian poetry. This breeze apparently brings the scent of musk, the most valued and expensive of medieval perfumes, and again we see that we are being presented with an idealized situation in which everything, including the scented air, is as beguilingly charming and special as possible. The musk comes from Tibet, a remote and exotic place for the speaker, and the poem momentarily opens on a distant, almost fabulous, reality, as with the mention of Mani. Here the musk is a metaphor for the scent of the garden’s flowers as it is diffused by the breeze, the logic being that musk is the most precious perfume, so the flowers in this idealized garden share its scent, and this rare, idealized loveliness provokes wonder in the speaker. Wonder at what seems perfect (a garden, a person, a state of mind—usually love or grief), or extreme to the point of unreality, is a very commonly evoked effect in Persian poetry.

  Next we come to Layli and Majnun, star-crossed lovers from an originally seventh-century Arabic tale that quickly spread all over the Islamic world. Since he is a tragic figure, unable to be united with his beloved, Majnun is often represented as weeping and this is why he is mentioned in the third stanza of the poem as being “within the clouds”—he is weeping the dew onto the flowers below him (dew continues the implication that the poem is describing a scene in the early morning, which is considered to be the loveliest and most refreshing time of day). Layli’s cheeks are imagined as red, either as an indication of her beauty or of her flushed, bewildered distress, or both, so Majnun’s tears, which are the same color as her cheeks, are red. The conceit is that the tears are bloody, indicating that Majnun has wept so long and so hard that his eyes are injured and he weeps blood; with the same implication of relentless injurious weeping, tears are almost always referred to as red in pre-modern Persian verse (an exception is when they are compared to pearls). So the roses are red because Majnun has wept his red tears onto them. The metaphor is continued in the next stanza, in which tulips are compared to wine glasses (short wild tulips, whose shape is easy to imagine as like that of a wine glass, are meant), and in which the dew/bloody tears present in these wine glasses is implicitly being compared to red wine. The association of red flowers (almost always roses or tulips), bloody tears, and wine is common in Persian verse, with any one of the three being able to stand in metaphorically for either of the other two.

  Having implied the presence of wine, Rabe’eh now runs with the idea and brings literal wine into the poem, admonishing the reader (in Rabe’eh’s time more likely a listener, as lyric poetry was meant to be performed rather than silently read) to drink deeply, and to ignore those who would censor such behavior. The obvious candidates for people who would find fault in this way are strictly orthodox Moslems, as the drinking of wine is forbi
dden by Islam. This trope, of the wine drinker criticized by the strictly orthodox (often characterized as being hypocrites), with the poet explicitly siding with the drinker against the orthodox, became extremely common in Persian lyric verse. Again we see behavior that is at odds with strict Islamic norms being celebrated, and again we find later generations taking the trope as an elaborate metaphor for Sufi (mystical) experience (wine is the mystical knowledge or practice which brings about the “drunkenness” of mystical experience). This is true of later Persian poetry, and from the late fifteenth century onward, mention of wine in a poem is, as often as not, allegorical. However, this “Sufification” of the vocabulary of secular Persian poetry had not even begun in Rabe’eh’s time, and there can be no doubt that she is talking about literal wine here.

  As the poem is written to welcome the coming of spring, it would be associated in the minds of its first readers/auditors with Nowruz, the pre-Islamic festival held at the spring equinox, which heralds the Persian New Year. This festival is still celebrated in Iran and is perhaps the only festival in which all Iranians, whatever faith they profess, participate. Wine was drunk in the pre-Islamic celebrations of Nowruz, and because of this and similar ceremonies, wine retained its association with pre-Islamic Iran, and the pre-Islamic religion of Iran, Zoroastrianism. The mention of wine drunk in spring therefore introduces another non-Islamic religion into the poem, not explicitly but by an implication any educated Iranian reader would recognize. Also, by implication, the line that dismisses those who criticize the drinking of wine, who are most likely to be orthodox Moslems, suggests a tension between the religion that condemns wine (Islam) and the religion that celebrates it (Zoroastrianism). The opposition does not merely consist of refraining from wine or drinking it, but by extension of celebrating worldly pleasures or of condemning them; many Persian poems implicitly associate worldly pleasures such as wine drinking with Zoroastrianism and pre-Islamic Iran, and the conjunction of the two is contrasted with Islam, which is often characterized, in poetry at least, as condemning such pleasures. This tacit association of pre-Islamic Iran with Zoroastrianism and pleasurable celebration leads us to the poem’s next lines, which include a mention of “Kasra.”