Vis and Ramin

Fakhreddin Gorgani, Dick Davis

Description

Vis & Ramin is one of the world’s great love stories. It was the first major Persian romance, written between 1050 and 1055 in rhyming couplets. This remarkable work has now been superbly translated into heroic couplets (the closest metrical equivalent of the Persian) by the poet and scholar Dick Davis.

 

Vis & Ramin had immense influence on later Persian poetry and is very probably also the source for the tale of Tristan and Isolde, which first appeared in Europe about a century later.

 

The plot, complex yet powerfully dramatic, revolves around royal marital customs unfamiliar to us today. Shahru, the married queen of Mah, refuses an offer of marriage from King Mobad of Marv but promises that if she bears a daughter she will give the child to him as a bride. She duly bears a daughter, Vis, who is brought up by a nurse in the company of Mobad’s younger brother Ramin. By the time Vis reaches the age of marriage, Shahru has forgotten her promise and instead weds her daughter to Vis’s older brother, Viru. The next day Mobads brother Zard arrives to demand the bride, and fighting breaks out, during which Vis’s father is killed. Mobad then bribes to hand Vis over to him. Mobad’s brother Ramin escorts Vis to her new husband and falls in love with her on the way. Vis has no love for and turns to her old nurse for help….

 

Told in language that is lush, sensual and highly inventive, Vis and Ramin is a masterpiece of psychological perceptiveness and characterization: Shahru is worldly and venal, the nurse resourceful and amoral (she will immediately remind Western readers of the nurse in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), Vis high-spirited and determined, Ramin impetuous and volatile. And the hopeless psychological situation of Vis’s husband, Mobad, flickers wearily from patience to self-assertion to fury and back again. The origins of Vis and Ramin, are obscure. The story dates from the time of the Parthians (who ruled Persia from the third century bce to the third century ce), and certainly existed in oral and perhaps written form before the eleventh century Persian poet Fakhraddin Gorgani composed the version that has come down to us.

Sujets

• Middle Eastern
• Medieval
• Edad Media
• Persian literature
• Ancient history
• Middle East
• Middle Ages
• Poetry
• Ancient

Informations

• Publié par: Mage Publishers Inc.
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781933823614
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

VIS & RAMIN
FAKHRADDIN GORGANI
TRANSLATED FROM THE PERSIAN WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
DICK DAVIS

MAGE PUBLISHERS



Copyright © 2008-2013 Dick Davis
Some sections of this translation have previously appeared in The Hudson Review and The New Criterion.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced
or retransmitted in any manner whatsoever,
except in the form of a review, without the
written permission of the publisher.
Front and back jacket paintings by Reza Abbasi circa 1630, Sarre Collection, 1910; and Art and History Trust, Houston, Texas. Persian calligraphy by Amir Hossein Tabnak
Map by Karen Rasmussen, Archeographics
Library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Fakhr al-Din Gurgani, fl. 1048.
[Vis va Ramin. English]
Vis & Ramin/Fakhraddin Gorgani ; translated from the Persian with an introduction and notes by Dick Davis. -- 1st hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-933823-17-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
I. Davis, Dick, 1945- II. Title. III. Title: Vis and Ramin.
PK6451.F28V513 2008
398.220955--dc22
2007041742
eISBN 978-1-933823-61-4
MAGE PUBLISHERS
202-342-1642 • [e-mail] • 800-962-0922
VISIT MAGE ONLINE AT
WWW.MAGE.COM



CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE PRONUNCIATION OF NAMES
A GEOGRAPHY OF VIS AND RAMIN
THE BEGINNING OF THE TALE
THE BIRTH OF VIS
VIS AND VIRU
VIS AND MOBAD
VIS AND RAMIN
VIS RETURNS TO HER MOTHER
RAMIN COMES TO VIS IN THE DEVILS’ FORTRESS
MOBAD ENTRUSTS VIS TO THE NURSE
RAMIN AND GOL
VIS’S LETTER TO RAMIN
RAMIN RETURNS TO VIS
THE END OF THE TALE
NOTES
APPENDIX: COMPARISONS FOR THE BODY




For Afkham




INTRODUCTION
VIS AND RAMIN WAS WRITTEN between 1050 and 1055 by the Persian poet Fakhraddin Gorgani; it is the first major Persian romance, and one of the most extraordinary and fascinating love narratives produced anywhere in the medieval world, Islamic or Christian.
Vis and Ramin is Gorgani’s only surviving long work, and no more than three other short scraps of extant verse are ascribed to him. We know virtually nothing about the poet, apart from what he tells us in the exordium and conclusion to his poem. Remarks by medieval poets about themselves have to be treated with care; many such comments, especially boasts, and complaints likely to elicit sympathy, tend to be drawn from a common stock and to vary little from one poet to another. In general, the less specific self-referential remarks made by medieval poets are, the more unreliable they are.
But Gorgani is very specific about two things: his patron’s identity and the circumstances under which his poem was written, and there seems no reason not to take his account at face value. In 1050, the Seljuk sultan Abu Taleb Toghrel Beg left the city of Isfahan under the control of one ‘Amid Abu’l Fath Mozaffar. Gorgani says that he accompanied the new commander to the city, who commissioned the poem from him as an entertainment, during their sojourn there. Other sources confirm that ‘Amid Abu’l Fath Mozaffar was the ruler of Isfahan from 1050 to 1055, which gives us the date for the poem’s composition. Gorgani’s name suggests that he, or his family, was from an area to the east of the Caspian, either the town of Gorgan itself, or the surrounding countryside, which was also called Gorgan. The town and its surroundings figure quite prominently in Vis and Ramin (geographically, it is about halfway between the two main areas of the poem’s action), and it may be that the tale was thought of as a largely local story in the places where the poet grew up. We know, however, that it enjoyed a wider currency than the merely local, as the Arab poet Abu Nawas mentioned it in the eighth century, three hundred years or so before Gorgani wrote his version. Twice in the course of telling his lovers’ story Gorgani refers in general terms to his age, but the two instances seem to contradict one another. At one point he tells us that his own days of romantic involvements are long over, suggesting that he is at least middle aged, and then at the very end of the poem he asks his friends to pray that God will “Forgive the youth who wrote this pretty story.” All we know for sure about Gorgani is that he wrote his poem in Isfahan at some point between 1050 and 1055, and that he was familiar with the atmosphere and protocol of a local ruler’s court; we can guess that he was probably from the area to the east of the Caspian known as Gorgan. Occasionally, in the course of Vis and Ramin , he will address his reader or auditor directly, and sometimes when he does this he recommends generosity as a noble course of action; these remarks are probably there as a hint to remind ‘Amid Abu’l Fath Mozaffar of his duties as a patron.
The eleventh century was a period when a number of Persian authors were interested in writing versions of stories from pre-Islamic Iran. The country had been conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century, and then subsumed into the Arab and Moslem caliphate. Iran had existed as an independent country, and as the ruler of much of Western Asia, for most of the previous millennium, and the conquest was such a shocking reversal of fortune that it took some time for the culture to recover. Persian poetry of the eleventh century shows a strong nostalgia for the stories and civilizations of pre-Islamic Iran, for a time when Persian political and cultural hegemony in Western Asia was unquestioned, and its rulers could style themselves King of Kings without apology. The most spectacular example of this literary nostalgia is Ferdowsi’s great epic, the Shahnameh (completed in 1010 ce), and Gorgani’s Vis and Ramin is another instance of it. In some ways Vis and Ramin is an even more interesting example than the Shahnameh ; usually when Ferdowsi comes across a pre-Islamic custom of which Islam disapproves he glosses over it, or, if mention of it is unavoidable, he is shamefaced about it. Gorgani makes no bones about such moments and seems to make no effort whatsoever to trim his tale to suit Islamic sensibilities; similarly, although Ferdowsi’s diction is relatively conservative, Gorgani’s is at times even more so, and his poem is a major source for lexical survivals from pre-Islamic Persian into the Persian of the post-conquest period. In his poem’s introductory material Gorgani implies that he understands “Pahlavi” (pre-Islamic Persian) well – we have no way of verifying whether this was true or not – and he will occasionally refer us to the meaning of Pahlavi words or phrases, as when he gives us the etymology of Khorasan (page 139).
In a series of cogently argued articles, * the twentieth-century Russian scholar Vladimir Minorsky drew on geographical, philological, and historical evidence to demonstrate that the story of Gorgani’s Vis and Ramin derives from the Parthian period. The Parthians ruled Iran from 247 BCE to 224 CE , so the tale comes from around the beginning of the Christian era, give or take a century or two. The dominant religion of Iran during the period of Parthian rule was Zoroastrianism. We have then a Parthian/Zoroastrian story that is being retold by an author who has grown up in an Islamic milieu and has at least a nominal allegiance to Islam. As might be expected, the text is often a kind of cultural palimpsest, with both cultural and religious traditions present; even when one is brought into especial prominence the other usually remains discernible in the background. Perhaps deliberately, Gorgani begins and ends his tale by invoking both cultures simultaneously; at the opening of the story he mentions both Korah and Kasra in one image; Korah is a figure from the Qur’an, Kasra from pre-Islamic Persian history; at the end of the tale he imagines the Islamic angel Rezvan looking down on the Zoroastrian temple of Borzin, where Vis’s tomb is located.
T HE S OCIAL W ORLD OF V IS AND R AMIN
The first thing that strikes any reader of Vis and Ramin is the very peculiar nature of the marriage customs that seem to be in place at the beginning of the poem. These customs are (and were in Gorgani’s time) as bizarre to Middle Eastern readers as to Western readers, as they belong not only to the Zoroastrianism of two millennia ago, but also to the marriage customs of the pre-Islamic Persian royal dynasties. Marriages that are now universally regarded as incestuous were relatively common among the pre-Islamic dynasties of Iran, and were even seen as especially praiseworthy. * In the ancient world, royal incest was of course not unique to Iran; it was also common in the Egyptian royal dynasties, and the pharaohs were usually married to their own sisters. The brother-sister marriage that comes near the opening of Vis and Ramin, and generates much of the subsequent plot, is taken by the poet simply as a norm within the society out of which the story comes. The custom will have been as strange for Gorgani as it is for us, but he gives no hint of being in any way troubled by it; he has clearly decided to accept, without judgment, the tale as he has received it. The erotic relationships within the poem stay highly endogamous: the lovers, Ramin and Vis, share the same wet nurse, which makes them a kind of honorary brother and sister, a relationship recognized within the culture as being equivalent to that of siblings; and Ramin is the younger brother of Vis’s husband, Mobad. *
The society Gorgani invokes in Vis and Ramin is almost entirely a courtly one. The characters in the poem are members of major or minor royal families, or they are the servants of such families. Power and pleasure are central preoccupations both of the characters and of the poet, and a great deal of time is spent in feasting, gift