Layli and Majnun Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  LAYLI AND MAJNUN

  nezami GANJAVI (1141–1209) is considered the greatest romantic epic poet in Persian literature. A Sunni Muslim born to a Persian father and a Kurdish mother, he lived most of his life in his hometown of Ganjeh, in present-day Azerbaijan. He was married three times; all three of his wives predeceased him, and, rarely for a Persian poet of his time, he wrote with apparently heartfelt and surprisingly personal eloquence about his affection for them and his sorrow at losing them. His introduction of an element of mysticism into his romance narratives is an innovation that was followed by most of his many imitators.

  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; The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women; 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 2020

  Published in Penguin Books 2021

  Copyright © 2020 by Mage Publishers

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  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Niẓāmī Ganjavī, 1140 or 1141–1202 or 1203, author. | Davis, Dick, 1945– translator.

  Title: Layli and Majnun / Nezami Ganjavi ; translated with an introduction and notes by Dick Davis.

  Other titles: Laylī va Majnūn. English.

  Description: First. | New York : Penguin Books, 2021. | Series: Penguin classics | Translated from Persian into English.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020041422 (print) | LCCN 2020041423 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133995 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505778 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Niẓāmī Ganjavī, 1140 or 1141–1202 or 1203—Translations into English.

  Classification: LCC PK6501.L33 D53 2021 (print) | LCC PK6501.L33 (ebook) | DDC 891/.5511—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041422

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041423

  Cover illustration: Juan Bernabeu

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  This translation is dedicated to Asghar Seyed-Ghorab, with my gratitude for his infectious enthusiasm for Nezami’s poetry

  Contents

  Introduction by Dick Davis

  LAYLI AND MAJNUN

  The Beginning of the Story

  Layli and Majnun Fall in Love with Each Other

  A Description of Majnun’s Love

  Majnun Goes to Layli’s Home and Sings There

  Majnun’s Father Goes to Ask for Layli’s Hand in Marriage

  Majnun’s Love for Layli Drives Him into the Wilderness

  Majnun’s Father Takes Him to Mecca

  Men from Layli’s Tribe Turn Against Majnun

  Majnun’s Father Advises His Son

  Majnun’s Reply to His Father

  Layli’s Beauty

  A Description of Layli; Layli Visits a Palm Grove

  Ebn Salam Asks for Layli’s Hand in Marriage

  Nofal Sympathizes with Majnun

  Nofal Fights Layli’s Tribe on Behalf of Majnun

  Majnun’s Anger Against Nofal

  Nofal’s Second Battle

  Majnun Frees Deer from a Hunter’s Trap

  Majnun Frees Another Deer from a Huntsman

  Majnun Talks to a Raven

  Majnun Deliberately Becomes an Old Woman’s Prisoner

  Layli’s Father Gives Her to Ebn Salam

  Majnun Learns of Layli’s Marriage

  Majnun Complains of Layli to the Wind

  Majnun’s Father Goes to See His Son

  Majnun Answers His Father

  Majnun’s Father Bids Him Farewell

  Majnun Learns of His Father’s Death

  Majnun Among the Animals

  A Tale

  A Description of Night; Majnun’s Invocation to the Heavens

  A Message from Layli Reaches Majnun

  Majnun Reads Layli’s Letter

  Majnun’s Letter Reaches Layli

  Majnun’s Uncle, Salim Amiri, Comes to See Majnun

  A Tale

  Majnun Is Told of His Mother’s Death

  Layli Sends a Message to Majnun

  Majnun Sings in Layli’s Presence

  Salam Baghdadi Comes to See Majnun

  On the Greatness of Majnun

  Zayd’s Love for Zaynab

  The Death of Layli’s Husband, Ebn Salam

  Zayd Tells Majnun of Layli’s Husband’s Death

  Layli Prays to God

  Layli and Majun Come Together Again

  A Description of Autumn; the Death of Layli

  Majnun Learns of Layli’s Death

  Salam Baghdadi Comes to Visit Majnun for the Second Time

  Majnun Dies on Layli’s Grave

  Zayd Dreams that He Sees Layli and Majnun in Heaven

  Notes

  Introduction

  The earliest Persian romances, like those in a number of other cultures, are hybrid affairs in which their authors’ mores and sensibilities are blended with something that has originated in a remote time or place, or both. They have notable affinities, for example, with Greek prose romances written in the early years of the Common Era* and their plots never take place in the here-and-now of their medieval authors’ lives. Although they present themselves as accounts of things that have actually happened somewhere at some usually unspecified time in the past, they always retain an aura of fantasy and make-believe. In a way they are dream narratives, filled with delicious and exciting situations, characters, and details that could almost never be present in such an unambiguously attractive form in the world of their medieval authors and audiences. We can see this dream-hybridity clearly in the three earliest Persian verse romances that have come down to us: Varqeh and Golshah, by the late tenth- to early eleventh-century poet Ayyuqi, was in origin an Arab story, Orwa wa Afra; Ayyuqi’s contemporary Onsori (c.961–c.1039), based his verse romance, Vameq and Ozra, of which only a few pages have survived, on the Greek story Metiochus and Parthenope (of which, also, only a few pages survive);* and Ayyuqi and Onsori’s slightly later contemporary Gorgani based his romance, Vis and Ramin, which was written in the 1050s, on a pre-Islamic Persian story which he thought was Sasanian (the Sasanians ruled Iran from 224 ce to 651 ce) but which scholarship has shown to have originated in the era of the Sasanians’ predecessors, the Parthians—that is, around the time of Christ, give or take a century or two. It’s not unfair to the earlier authors to say that there is a noticeable jump in literary sophistication between Ayyuqi and Onsori’s narratives on the one hand and Gorgani’s on the other (a major reason for t
his is probably that Gorgani lived in a post-Ferdowsi period, and it was Ferdowsi in his epic poem the Shahnameh (“The Book of Kings”)—completed in 1010—who can be said to have taught Persian poets how to write coherent and compelling narrative verse).

  None of these authors invented the stories they tell in their romances, and in fact they would not and could not have done so as they considered them to be in some sense at least “history.” The qualities that define romances—the idealized and apparently hopeless love affairs, their equally idealized and hopeless heroes and heroines whose separation and seemingly endless trials form the basis of the plot, the presence of someone in authority who has a legal right to demand the heroine’s virginity but never exercises this right (a figure that goes back to the prototypical Western romance, the Persian tale of Panthea, Abradatus, and King Cyrus, as told in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia)—would not stand in the way of such a perception. The tales took place in other countries (and this was true even if their origin was in pre-Islamic Iran, reflecting the words of L. P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,”* for in the tenth and eleventh centuries Persian literary nostalgia for pre-Islamic—pre–seventh century—Iran had recreated it as an almost fabulous country of the mind where almost fabulous things had once commonly occurred), and who is to say what may or may not have happened in such exotic places?

  Like Ayyuqi’s Varqeh and Golshah, Layli and Majnun* was in origin an Arab story (purportedly about lovers who had lived in the seventh century ce), and we know that it had been current in Iran before Nezami composed his version of the tale, because a number of Persian poets who preceded Nezami (Rudaki, Rabe’eh, Manuchehri, and Gorgani) mentioned its lovers in their poetry; it’s clear from these pre-Nezami references that the fabled pair were already known for the characteristics which Nezami was later to ascribe to them—that is, Layli’s incomparable beauty and long-suffering patience, and Majnun’s love-madness that led to his forsaking human society to live among wild animals.

  Nezami, whose birth name was Ilyas Ebn Yusuf, became famous as a major poet within his own lifetime, and his reputation has never been seriously challenged since his death. Given his fame, it seems somewhat strange that relatively little is known about his life; probably the main reasons for this are firstly that he was not a poet who was affiliated with a specific court for a long period of time, though this seems to have been Nezami’s own choice rather than a failure to find a suitable position, and it was court poets who tended to be memorialized; and secondly that he lived his whole life in what was then a relatively provincial part of the Persian-speaking world, away from the main centers of literary activity, which makes his recognition as an important poet in his own lifetime all the more remarkable.

  He was born in Ganjeh (hence his second name “Ganjavi”) around 1141 in what is now independent Azerbaijan and he died around 1209, having almost never left the immediate area of his birth. Born to a Kurdish mother, he was orphaned at an early age and brought up by an uncle. He married three times. His first wife, who was probably named Afaq (though the meaning of the line in Nezami’s verse in which she seems to be referred to has been disputed), was said to have been a slave-girl presented to him by a king who admired his poetry. Instead of keeping her as a concubine, as would have been expected, he married her; she was the mother of his son Mohammad, whom he mentions with obvious affection a number of times in his poetry, and she died while still relatively young. His other two wives also predeceased him; his poems include laments for their deaths, and at one point he bemoans the fact that for a while the completion of each of his narrative poems coincided with the death of one of his wives. The affection and regret Nezami displays in these passages is not a conventional trope of the period in which he lived (and could even have been derided as signs of weakness or effeminacy), which means that there is no reason not to take his expressions of grief at face value; this together with the tenderness he shows toward his heroines (particularly Shirin, in Khosrow and Shirin, and Layli in Layli and Majnun) has earned him the reputation of being a poet who was, for his time, preternaturally affectionate, considerate, and respectful toward women. His geographical isolation seems to have entailed his isolation from most of his fellow poets, and the only poet with whom we know he was in touch was Khaqani, another inhabitant of Azerbaijan who was patronized by some of the same local princes who patronized Nezami. Khaqani (c.1120–c.1199) was mainly a panegyrist whose verse displays much of the didactic seriousness, complicated rhetoric, and occasional obscurity that we find in Nezami’s own poetry (and in a similar fashion to Nezami, Khaqani also wrote an affecting memorial poem on the death of his wife).*

  Most of what we know about Nezami is gleaned from his own prologues and epilogues to his narrative poems, and out of these rather scant materials, together with his impression of the poet’s character from his writings in general, the British scholar of Persian literature E. G. Browne (1862–1926) wrote a striking character portrait of the poet. Browne praises Nezami for decidedly Victorian virtues, almost as if he were relieved to have finally found a Persian poet whose personal life he could praise unreservedly in terms that his largely middle- and upper-class British audience could appreciate. (Browne was always on the lookout for ways to persuade his readers—who, as citizens of the British Empire in its heyday, were likely to assume any number of automatic and unwarranted prejudices about anyone not British, particularly anyone Moslem or Asian, or both—that there was much to admire in Persian/Iranian civilization). Nevertheless the little that we know about Nezami does support Browne’s characterization, or at least nothing we know about the poet contradicts it:

  And if his genius has few rivals amongst the poets of Persia, his character has even fewer. He was genuinely pious, yet singularly devoid of fanaticism and intolerance; self-respecting and independent, yet gentle and unostentatious; a loving father and husband, and a rigorous abstainer from the wine which in spite of its unlawfulness served too many of the poets (especially the mystical poets) of Persia as a source of spurious inspiration. In a word he may justly be described as combining lofty genius and blameless character in a degree unequalled by any other Persian poet whose life has been the subject of careful and critical study.*

  Although we don’t know much about his life as a whole, Nezami tells us quite a lot about the circumstances of his composition of Layli and Majnun. He writes that after his first romance, Khosrow and Shirin, had been greeted with acclaim, a local king, Shirvanshah Akhsetan, suggested to him that he put into Persian verse a version of the Arab story Layli and Majnun. Now the “foreign country” that Nezami had visited for Khosrow and Shirin was pre-Islamic Iran as mediated by Ferdowsi’s epic the Shahnameh, a poem that celebrated Iran’s pre-Islamic civilizations at great length, and the Shahnameh was also to be the source of the romances Nezami would write after Layli and Majnun. Given such a focus on pre-Islamic Iran, an Arab story would seem to be of limited appeal to him, despite the precedent set by Ayyuqi almost a century before in his rewriting of an Arab story (Orwa wa Afra) as a Persian romance (Varqeh and Golshah).* Nezami dithered; one doesn’t want to offend a king; on the other hand, he clearly did not find the story especially attractive. And then, he writes, his son Mohammad sat beside him “like my shadow,” and kissed his father’s feet, and said, “When you wrote Khosrow and Shirin / You made people’s hearts rejoice / You should write Layli and Majnun / So that it can be the partner-jewel [of Khosrow and Shirin].” Mohammad goes on to say that now that such a splendid king as Shirvanshah has made this request, his father should not hesitate but get on with the task. And so Nezami agrees to write the poem.*

  When this exchange took place, Mohammad was only fourteen years old, and it seems a little strange that Nezami should take his son’s advice on such a serious matter. Nezami also tells us that he wrote the poem very quickly (in four months, which as the poem is about 4,500 couplets long, means that he wrote at the rate of over thir
ty-five couplets a day nonstop for 120 days—a quite astonishing feat given the unfailingly high finish of the poem’s rhetoric).* Both these statements, that he wrote the poem on the advice of his fourteen-year-old son and that he completed it in four months (that is, in a hurry), look like ways of subtly evading responsibility for the poem, as if he is saying, “It wasn’t my choice to do this, and if you don’t like it, well I wrote it very quickly.” Nevertheless, as the first (or at least first surviving) verse narrative version of the Islamic world’s most famous love story, Layli and Majnun has over the centuries proved to be by far Nezami’s most popular work, and has achieved the same status as the archetypal love narrative in the Islamic world that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has gained in the West. And although the two works are very different in many ways, they share a number of similarities—the frequently lush and extravagant rhetoric of the language, the doomed nature of the lovers’ relationship played out against a background of familial enmity and strife, and the violent emotions that tear a society apart and leave mourners and desolation in their wake.

  Layli and Majnun’s enduring popularity has had one unfortunate effect: it has survived in many different manuscripts and, as is often the case with repeatedly copied works, there are major discrepancies between the manuscripts, even those generally deemed to be “good.” No manuscripts have survived that were written within two hundred years of the poet’s death, so there was obviously plenty of time for widely differing versions of the poem to become current. Many lines and some whole episodes that certain but not all editors feel are genuine are missing from particular manuscripts, and printed editions of the poem often differ from one another quite radically.*

  * * *

  • • •

  In a number of senses, Nezami is an intensely literary poet. His chosen pen-name, Nezami, immediately alerts us to this: the literal meaning of the word, nezam, from which it derives is “order,” in the sense of a correct arrangement, and one of its subsidiary meanings is “ordered” language, that is, verse, so that the name “Nezami” can be taken as meaning, among other things, “a poet,” or even “the poet.” Evidently poetry was not something he took up lightly, as he is effectively saying that for him it defines his identity, it makes him who he is, and perhaps one factor that persuaded him to write the poem is that its main male character is a poet, someone with whom Nezami could presumably identify, at least in part, and whose “poems” as they appear in the narrative Nezami, as the author, would have the opportunity to write. This literariness is also apparent in the way that he is preternaturally aware of his three main predecessors in the field of Persian narrative poetry, and it is clear that he attempts both to incorporate their example into his own work, and to go beyond them. The predecessors in question, all of whom completed their major works in the eleventh century, are Ferdowsi (c.940–1020), the author of Iran’s major epic poem (the Shahnameh); Gorgani, the author of the first major verse romance in Persian (Vis and Ramin); and Sanai (1080–c.1131), who wrote the first important collection of anecdotes linked together to form a mystical-didactic poem (Hadiqat al-Haqiqat, “The Garden of the Truth”). It is broadly true to say that Ferdowsi and Gorgani used their poetic skills to tell the stories that were for them the reason that they wrote poetry at all,* whereas Nezami used the stories he told as vehicles to display his truly prodigious poetic skills, and also as a quasi-didactic medium. This is not at all meant as dismissive of Nezami, who by any standard is a major Persian poet, but it does indicate differences of emphasis and purpose when we compare his practice with that of Ferdowsi or Gorgani; for them the story was paramount, and therefore clarity of meaning was also paramount. It’s not an exaggeration to say that clarity of meaning often seems to come quite low on Nezami’s scale of criteria as to how a poem should be written.