The Mirror of My Heart Read online

  75. Part of the force of the poem is that in pre-modern Persian poetry one kind of ring (an earring) was indeed the mark of slavery.

  76. For further commentary on Tahereh Saffarzadeh, see the Introduction, this page.

  77. This poem is dated two months after the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran in February of 1979, which marked the beginning of the Islamic Revolution. At this time the walls of the main cities, especially Tehran, where Tahereh Saffarzadeh was living, were covered in political slogans and graffiti.

  78. The “family” refers to the Ghaznavid dynasty, who began as slaves and rose to rule an empire, centered on the city of Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan, which conquered much of Iran and northern India in the first years of the eleventh century.

  79. Balkh is in northwest Afghanistan, Nayshapur and Bayhaq (now called Sabzevar) are in northeastern Iran, and Bokhara is in modern-day Uzbekistan.

  80. A large oasis south of the Aral Sea. The English form of the name used to be Chorasmia (Shelley referred to “the lone Chorasmian shore” in his poem Alastor, l. 272).

  81. Khwarazmi (ninth century) and Biruni (tenth–eleventh centuries) were both polymaths and scholars.

  82. Among the most important Persian-language poets of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

  83. Prominent members of the Ghaznavid court; Bayhaqi is best known for his History, which is one of the major works of early Persian prose.

  84. The story of Hasanak, a vizier of the Ghaznavids in the eleventh century, who was accused of treason by a rival (Maymandi) and executed, is told in Bayhaqi’s History (see previous note); in Persian culture, the incident has become emblematic of intrigue, betrayal, and the ingratitude of princes. The poem traces the dynasty’s slave-to-emperor narrative, and its paradoxical mixture of greatness, sophistication, brutality, and betrayal.

  85. A pre-Islamic hero whose tale is told in the major Persian tenth-century epic the Shahnameh; he is emblematic of the betrayed stoic young hero who is innocent of the accusations made against him, one of which eventually brings about his death.

  86. Mariam is Mary, the mother of Jesus; “gnostic” can imply both that she is in touch with the divine, but also that she is aware of her son’s future fate.

  87. The biblical Rachel, the wife of Jacob (in the Qor’an, Yaqub); the “fourteen years” is the time in which she waited for news of her son Joseph, who had been sold into slavery by his brothers. Persian poetry often refers to Yaqub’s sorrow during this period; a reference to his wife’s sorrow, as here, is much more rare.

  88. The woman known in the Bible as Potiphar’s wife. Her illicit love for Joseph is a major theme in Persian poetry, often given a mystical interpretation.

  89. In Islamic belief, Hagar is the second wife of Abraham and the mother of Esmail (Ishmael); at the prompting of Sarah, Abraham’s first wife, she and her son are abandoned by him in a stony waterless desert.

  90. Among the earliest Iranian poets (both tenth century); Rabe’eh is the first poet represented in this book.

  91. Nakisa was a celebrated female harpist and composer at the court of the pre-Islamic king Khosrow II (d. 628 ce).

  92. Khosrow Parviz is another name for Khosrow II (see previous note).

  93. A male musician at the court of Khosrow II; he and Nakisa collaborated as joint supervisors of the court’s music.

  94. Ferdowsi (940–c.1020), Iran’s most important epic poet, author of the Shahnameh. The “noble epic meter” refers to the meter of the Shahnameh, which became standard for epic verse after Ferdowsi’s use of it.

  95. Avicenna, or Ibn Sina (980–1037), philosopher, astronomer, and physician.

  96. Atossa (550 bce–475 bce) was a daughter of the Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great and the wife of the first King Darius (r. 522 bce–486 bce); for much of her life she was the power behind the Achaemenid throne.

  97. Jamshid is a mythical king whose story is told near the opening of the Shahnameh; his “arrogance” refers to the fact that he thought himself equal to God, and lost his throne as a consequence.

  98. Hafez (c.1315–c.1390) was the major lyric poet of Iran.

  99. Bayhaqi (995–1077) was one of the most important of Iran’s early historians. (See note 83 on this page.) The Masnavi is the major long mystical poem of Mowlavi/Rumi (1207–73), sometimes referred to as “the Qor’an in Persian.”

  100. Shams was the wandering dervish who is said to have been decisive in Mowlavi’s commitment to Sufism.

  101. In both Moslem and Christian tradition this refers to a group of young men who in order to escape religious persecution hid in a cave where they slept for 300 years before waking and emerging from their hiding place.

  102. Farhad is a figure in the romance “Khosrow and Shirin,” by the poet Nezami (1141–1209). A mason in love with Shirin, the wife of King Khosrow, he wounds himself with his own tools when he hears the false news that she has died, and commits suicide. (See note 19 on this page.)

  103. A traditional symbol of blood in Persian poetry.

  104. The cities of Nayshapur and Balkh and the provinces of Khorasan and Khwarazm were among the first places to be annihilated during Genghis Khan’s invasion of Iran, which began in 1219.

  105. This is the third of three poems dealing with war. Kobane is a mainly Kurdish town in the north of Syria that was besieged by ISIS forces in 2014. The capture of the town and its surrounding villages caused the flight of an estimated 400,000 refugees.

  106. The words “celebrity” and “selfie” (stanza 2), “placards” (stanza 3), and “feminists” (stanza 4) are in English in the original poem.

  107. The Iranian poet Hafez (c.1315–c.1390) and the American poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).

  108. Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915).

  109. The anti-war novel published by Kurt Vonnegut in 1969.

  110. A reference to The 120 Days of Sodom, the novel written by the Marquis de Sade in 1785.

  111. Tribute: literally “zakat,” alms—a religious tax on wealth.

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  * Friday is the Moslem holy day, and so a day on which wine should certainly not be drunk. As in the Jewish calendar, the day begins at its “eve,” that is, sunset on the previous day.

  * Edmund Waller, Seventeenth Century English Minor Poets, ed. Anne Ferry (New York: 1964), p. 143.

  * Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Poets on Poetry, ed. Charles Norman (New York: 1962), p. 138.

  * “Pre-modern” is here used to refer to Persian poetry written in the “classical” metrical system (aruz) in which virtually all Persian poetry was written before the mid-twentieth century. Though a number of poets still use this system, sometimes in a modified form, the last major woman poet to have used it exclusively was Parvin Etesami (1907–1941).

  * Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (London: 1781), p. 226.

  * A. Bausani, Storia della letteratura persiana (Milan: 1960), p. 310.

  * Linda M. Paterson, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c.1100–c.1300 (Cambridge, UK: 1993), p. 262.

  * Paterson, The World of the Troubadours, p. 262.

  * Sunil Sharma, “From A’esha to Nur Jahan: The Shaping of a Classical Persian Poetic Canon of Women,” Journal of Persianate Studies 2 (2002), p. 157.

  * Gender is conceived of as extremely fluid in pre-modern Persian poetry, with the same epithets being used to describe both beautiful girls and beautiful boys; the physical ideal implied by descriptions of the beloved in a ghazal is androgynous—a very boyish girl or a very
girlish boy. A striking example of this is that in one poem (ghazal 321 in Khanlari’s edition [Tehran: 1359/1980], vol. 1, p. 658) Hafez begins by describing the subject of the poem as being “an angel-like houri,” and houris are of course conceived of as female; later in the same poem he remarks on the “black line” of the beloved’s incipient mustache, who is now clearly being depicted as an adolescent boy.

  * The Great Khan Möngke (r. 1251–59), a grandson of Genghis Khan, is said to have remarked to a French envoy: “It is proper to keep the commandments of God. But the Jews say they have received these commandments from Moses, the Arabs say they have them from Mohammad, and the Christians from Jesus. And there are perhaps other nations that honor their prophets, through whose hands they assert they have received the divine precepts. Therefore how shall we arrive at concord?” Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), quoted in Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: 2004), p. 239. Writing in the early fourteenth century, Marco Polo puts a virtually identical sentence into the mouth of the thirteenth-century Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. Marco Polo, Travels (London: 1908, reprinted 1954), p. 159.

  * Weatherford, Genghis Khan, p. 219.

  * “Nor let it seem strange that in India, in the countries of the Moghol, the Persian tongue is us’d more perhaps than the Indian itself, since the Mogholian Princes being originally Tartars, and of Samarkand, where the Persian is the natural tongue of the country, have therefore been willing to retain their natural speech in India; in brief, the Persian is the language of the Moghol’s court, most spoken and us’d in all publick writings.” Pietro della Valle (1586–1652), quoted in Sunil Sharma, Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court (Cambridge, MA: 2017), p. 3.

  * “Flocked” is not an exaggeration: an anthology confined to poets who were born in Iran but worked in the Indian Moghul empire between 1500 and 1796—Ahmad Gulchin Ma’ani, Karavan-e Hend (Mashhad: 1990)—lists over 1,500 poets, and quotes verses by most of them.

  * It is this translation that was translated into Latin by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron in the late eighteenth century, the version that was used by both Hegel and Schopenhauer, and so became known throughout nineteenth-century Europe.

  * One important exception is the daughter of Shah Tahmasp, Pari Khan Khanom (1548–78), who was known as a poet, although only one poem attributed to her with any certainty has come down to us (see this page). She was ambitious and powerful, and for a short time after her father’s death was de facto ruler of Iran; at the age of twenty-nine she was murdered at the instigation of a political rival.

  * Widespread demand for political reform, including representative government, developed throughout Iran in the late nineteenth century. This finally led to Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1896–1907) signing a new constitution in 1906, but he died shortly afterward, and his successor on the Persian throne, Mohammad Ali Shah, abrogated the new constitution and had the parliament building bombarded by a Cossack regiment in 1908. Renewed protests led to a march on Tehran by supporters of the constitution, and Mohammad Ali Shah was forced to abdicate in favor of his son Ahmad Shah Qajar, who re-ratified the constitution in 1909. A long period of turmoil ensued, culminating in the coup of 1921, which marked the end of the Qajar dynasty (although in theory Ahmad Shah continued to rule until 1925). The soldier Reza Khan, who had risen quickly through the ranks after joining the Persian Cossack Brigade at the age of sixteen in 1894, took over the government; he declared himself king in 1925, formally taking the name Reza Shah Pahlavi, and was crowned in 1926.

  * This culminated in the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907, which divided Iran into three separate areas of influence: a northern zone in which Russia could have a relatively free hand economically and politically; a southern zone in which the British were to have the same privileges; and a neutral zone between the two. Iran was not invited to send representatives to the conference that arrived at this agreement, and Iranian resentment of its provisions was naturally emphatic and widespread.

  * Novels by Alain-René Lesage, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, François Fénelon, and the Comtesse de Ségur, as well as some of Molière’s plays, and Voltaire’s L’Histoire de Charles XII, were all translated into Persian before the period of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. Translated works by Dumas and Molière were particularly well received.

  * This of course seems appalling to us, but before we rush to judgment, we should remember that at this time such husbandly prohibitions were also considered quite normal in the West. For example, Gustav Mahler forbidding his wife Alma to compose any more music once they were married, in 1902, happened four years after Alam Taj’s husband forbade her to write any more poetry once they were married, in 1898.

  * Divan-e Alam Taj Qa’em-Maghami, Zhaleh, ed. Ahmad Karami (Tehran: 1374/1995), p. 149.

  * Ridiculous as it may seem, a number of articles and even books were written claiming that Parvin’s poems could not be by her since they had obviously been written by a man; the main “evidence” for this claim was that the poems had such a sophisticated vocabulary and were so well written that it would be absurd to think that a woman could have written them. This idiotic claptrap was still being repeated in the 1970s, over thirty years after Parvin’s death in 1941. Frequently the highest praise that was bestowed on Parvin by writers who accepted that her poems were in fact by her was that she “wrote like a man.”

  * Ganj-e Sokhan (Tehran: n.d.), vol. 3, p. 291.

  * For an English-speaking reader, she can seem like a poetic Dickens: that is, one who empathetically records the sufferings of the lowest members of her society (often in terms that can seem to readers untouched by such sufferings to be grossly sentimental), but who, like Dickens, has no remedy to offer other than the generosity and kindness of society’s wealthier members. Like Dickens, she is constantly, explicitly or implicitly, admonishing her readers and herself to be kind.

  * Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse, NY: 1992), p. 120.

  * Simin Behbahani’s introduction to Lobat Vala’s poetry collection Farda-ye Digar (“Another Tomorrow”) (London: 2008), pp. 12–13.

  * Behbahani, introduction to Vala, Farda-ye Digar, p. 13.

  * The Captive (1334/1955), The Wall (1335/1956), Rebellion (1337/1958), Another Birth (1343/1964). A fifth book, Let Us Believe in the Dawn of a Cold Season, appeared posthumously (1353/1974).

  * For an informative, in-depth comparison between Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath, see Leila Rahimi Bahmany’s Mirrors of Emancipation and Entrapment: Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath (Leiden: 2015).

  * She studied in Iowa while Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was shah of Iran, at a time when he was largely seen by self-consciously progressive intellectuals in Iran as a Western puppet. She later said in an interview that while she was in Iowa she felt closest to the leftist South American poets studying there, poets who in many cases, like Saffarzadeh herself, saw the United States as at least partially responsible for political repression in their home countries, and this may well have had some effect on her future political allegiances.

  * Auden has succinctly summed up the relationship between politically acceptable poetry and contemporary autocracies: “ . . . the poetry he invented was easy to understand . . . / When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter / And when he cried the little children died in the streets.” “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: 1976), p. 183.

  * Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (London: 1857), p. 188.

  * Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (Harmondsworth, UK: 1977), p. 10.

  * “Hesterna quam te solum quod nocte reliqui, / ardorem cupiens dissimulare meum.”

  * “Toujours suis mal, vivant discrètement, / Et ne me puis donner contentement / Si hors de moi ne fais quelque saillie.”

  * Women Poets of China, trans. Kenneth Rexroth an
d Ling Chung (New York: 1972), p. 61.

  * Women Poets of Japan, trans. Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi (New York: 1977), p. 137.

  * Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture (New Haven and London: 1998), p. 209. Part IV (pp. 185–222) of Woods-Marsden’s book deals with women painters in Renaissance Europe; the whole section provides a fascinating insight into women working in a parallel artistic field to that of women poets within what was a traditionally and predominantly male artistic environment.

  * A similar story is told about the sixteenth-century Italian poet Isabella di Morra. From an aristocratic family, she is said to have been her father’s favorite child; after his death she carried on a secret correspondence with a man with whom she was in love, and of whom her brothers disapproved. Her brothers intercepted the correspondence, had her lover killed, and then personally killed their sister.