Layli and Majnun Read online

  Nezami wrote five long narrative poems of which Layli and Majnun is the third; his first, Makhzan al-Asrar (“The Treasury of Secrets”), is a collection of mystical anecdotes that is clearly modeled on Sanai’s Hadiqat al-Haqiqat (as is his propensity for moralizing, something he does in all his narrative poems), while the other four, including Layli and Majnun, are all romances. Three of these (Khosrow and Shirin, The Seven Portraits, and a version of the Alexander romance) draw their inspiration from material in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, while Gorgani’s romance, Vis and Ramin, is the main stylistic source for all four, though what was probably Nezami’s last poem, on Alexander the Great, is a romance in the broader sense of the word when applied to medieval narratives, and not a love story. Nezami’s treatment of Alexander is instructive: he divides this final poem into two halves, the first depicting Alexander as history has done—that is, as a conqueror of much of the then known world; the second as an ethically oriented proto-Sufi* who travels the world in search of knowledge and gnostic insight. The didacticism inherent in such an undertaking echoes that of Nezami’s first long narrative poem, the Makhzan al-Asrar, and the three intervening love stories are also, more quietly but nevertheless palpably, imbued with this ethical/mystical quality; unlike the romances written by Nezami’s predecessors, they are concerned as much with ethical and spiritual admonition as with hedonism and the search for an elusive this-worldly soul-mate.

  The presence of Vis and Ramin as Nezami’s model is most noticeable in his first romance, Khosrow and Shirin, which is in the same meter as Gorgani’s poem and includes episodes imitated from it wholesale, but it is also present in Layli and Majnun (in, for example, a long astrological description of the night sky, and passages of reproach by one of the lovers comparing his or her situation to that of the addressee and couched in an “I-am-this/you-are-that” form, as well as in a number of stylistic mannerisms). What is perhaps especially interesting is that Nezami often incorporates material that he has found in Gorgani’s work into his narratives even though this considerably stretches the reader’s credulity, suggesting that literary precedence is finally more important to him than narrative verisimilitude. In Khosrow and Shirin, for example, following Gorgani, he includes a paraclausithyron (a lover vainly begging for admittance to his beloved’s residence) that takes place in a long and violent snowstorm. This seems plausible in Gorgani’s case as, in his Vis and Ramin, the episode occurs in Marv in Central Asia where Gorgani may well have believed that such snowstorms were likely, but seems improbable in Khuzestan and Kermanshah where Khosrow and Shirin is set; Khuzestan virtually never has snow, and even Kermanshah, where snow falls in the mountains, has a milder climate than Marv, making the kind of raging storm Nezami has adapted from Gorgani’s model an unlikely occurrence.

  More glaring instances of the uneasy fit between material adopted from Gorgani and utilized in Nezami’s work are present in Layli and Majnun. In general these derive from the fact that Layli and Majnun is in origin an Arab story that takes place in an Arab setting, although at various points Nezami treats it as if it were a poem about the Persian nobility taking place in an aristocratic or even royal Persian milieu. Numerous examples of this could be adduced, but two should suffice to illustrate the nature of the discrepancy. The description of the wedding gifts presented by Ebn Salam to Layli’s family would be appropriate in a royal Persian romance such as Gorgani’s, but seem too lavish, costly, elaborate, and aristocratic for a marriage between pre-Islamic Bedouin tribes in what are described as desert regions of Arabia. Even more telling is the fact that Layli’s family live in tents, as is appropriate given the tale’s pre-Islamic Arab origin, and as Nezami reminds us from time to time, but then Layli is also described as going up onto the roof of her dwelling, which at such moments is clearly conceived of as a Persian palace, in order to see if she can glimpse her beloved, or if not him someone to take a note to him, just as Gorgani’s Vis had done in Vis and Ramin. At such moments we have to forget that she lives in a tent, and view her as being like Gorgani’s Vis—that is, as a princess whose home is a solid structure with a roof that can be walked on. One thing that Nezami does not take from Gorgani is the way in which the earlier poet placed his poem’s heroine (Vis) front and center in his narrative, leaving the hero (Ramin) to occupy a relatively secondary role; Nezami’s romances are concerned primarily with a male hero who is supported, complemented, even educated by a heroine (or, in The Seven Portraits, heroines) whose role is nevertheless distinctly subordinate to that of the male protagonist. In this foregrounding of the male of the pair, Nezami was followed by virtually all his many imitators.*

  Because of the many poets who took Nezami as a model, he is considered to be the greatest of romance writers in Persian, which has led to a corresponding under-evaluation of his own model, Gorgani. Perhaps the main reasons for this are firstly that Gorgani’s one romance is entirely worldly and carnal, containing no hint of Sufism whatsoever, and secondly that it includes material drawn from its pre-Islamic sources (for example, a brother–sister marriage) that an Islamic audience might well find offensive; it is perhaps also relevant that Gorgani seems to be much more interested in his heroine than in his hero, a bias that, as we have seen, Nezami emphatically “corrects.” In introducing a didactic, spiritual, and implicitly Islamic, or at least Sufi, dimension into the romance narrative, Nezami redefines the genre, making Gorgani appear to be merely a precursor who hadn’t yet worked out how a romance “should” be written. Interestingly enough, although Nezami acknowledges both Ferdowsi and Sanai as models and predecessors, he does not mention Gorgani, despite his major stylistic and thematic debts to him, which suggests that he may have felt that Gorgani had wasted his talents on unworthy (carnal—not didactic, not spiritual) subject matter that he, Nezami, did not wish to be associated with.* Nezami is very much a “how to live, what to do” sort of poet.* There is something non-judgmental, unbuttoned, almost casual about Gorgani’s moral posture, at least as it appears in his poem, when we compare him to Nezami; on the other hand we can say that, for all his tenderness and empathy toward his heroes and (especially) his heroines, there is something quite prim and proper, potentially even censorious, about Nezami, at least as he appears in his poems, when we compare him to Gorgani. E. G. Browne’s rather Victorian Nezami, with all the pluses and minuses this implies, often seems about right.

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  As well as in his consciousness of his poetic predecessors, Nezami’s preoccupation with poetry as a source for his verse is also apparent in a number of his figures of speech. For example, when he is describing the young Layli’s extraordinary beauty, he concludes by saying that she is “The best line in a poem praising youth” (this page); Majnun’s isolation from Layli “is like a line of verse without a rhyme” (this page); and when Layli is separated from Majnun her glances are “Sadder than are a thousand sad romances” (this page). The poems Majnun composes are also songs (the association of music with verse, any kind of verse, was strong in the medieval world, but strongest when it came to lyric verse, as the word “lyric” tells us), and when he is in despair he says of himself that he is “a tuneless song” (this page); describing his relationship with Layli he says, “And we’re so mixed and mingled we belong / Together like two voices in one song, / And if we’re ripped apart the song will be / A tuneless chaos, a cacophony” (this page).

  Not only poetry is present as a vehicle for Nezami’s figures of speech, but also poetry’s physical manifestations, books and pages in books. A dying warrior is described as a “book [that] had no more pages left” (this page); when Majnun’s father senses that he will die soon, he says “My page is written now” (this page); “Majnun’s days were a black page” (this page) is how Nezami describes his hero in despair; and when Majnun leaves Layli, the poet uses the same metaphor: “He’d torn himself away, as if to tear / A page from one with which it made a pair, / While Layli was the facing page . . .” (
this page). Words themselves, even letters of the alphabet, both as they appear and as they sound, are used in a similar way: a messenger describes Layli to Majnun by comparing her different features to the shapes of different letters (this page); Majnun says that he and Layli are “two letters that . . . make a single sound” and a little later they are “a single letter / Repeated, making one sound” (this page).

  Nezami’s relentless “literariness” is most apparent in the deliberate complexity of his rhetoric, which, to use a wholly anachronistic term, can perhaps best be described as “mannerist.”* Persian literature’s major historian Zabihollah Safa praises Nezami’s style in terms that are both extravagant and appropriate, since it really does involve an extraordinary and almost incomparable display of literary skill, but he also adds:

  A fault some have found in his language is that sometimes—either in order to find new meanings and material when he becomes wrapped up in obscure imaginative flights of fancy, or when in order to create new locutions he manipulates and plays with language to an extravagant extent—it becomes difficult for the reader to understand a considerable number of his lines. It is also the case that, following the fashion of his time, Nezami uses many Arabic words not in common use in Persian, as well as a great deal of material and vocabulary taken from philosophy and other intellectual fields . . . the result is that many of his lines have received extensive commentary, and can only be understood with the help of such commentary.*

  And we might add that, despite such assiduous explorations of possible meanings, Nezami’s commentators quite often end a wide-ranging discussion of a line by tersely stating that the line’s meaning remains unclear. Some popular editions of his poetry simply miss out the more opaque lines and passages, and as the plots proceed at an extremely leisurely pace, it is usually possible to do this with little or no loss of the overall sense.

  The Italian writer Italo Calvino has described Nezami’s poetry as follows:

  The decorations of this verbal tapestry are so luxuriant that any parallels we might find in Western literature (beyond the analogies of medieval thematics and the wealth of fantasy in Renaissance works by Shakespeare and Ariosto) would naturally be with the works of heaviest baroque; but even Marino’s Adonis and Basile’s Pentameron are works of laconic sobriety compared to the proliferation of metaphors which encrust Nezami’s tale and germinate a hint of narrative in every single image . . . Nezami . . . paints a visionary world full of erotic tension and trepidation which is both sublimated and enriched with psychological chiaroscuro . . . the unbridled licentiousness of the figurative language is an appropriate style for the upheavals of youthful inexperience.*

  As Calvino indicates, Nezami avails himself of every possible figure of speech; metaphors and similes come thick and fast, very often in a manner that is typical of a great deal of medieval Persian poetry in that only the vehicle of a conventional comparison will be given (“narcissi” for eyes, for example, or “rubies” for lips, or “a cypress” for a beautiful young person of either sex, with no mention of actual eyes, lips, or a person in the text); he delights in puns, as well as in anaphora and grammatical parallelism between lines. Wherever possible he uses gorgeous and often unfamiliar language. In the preface to his translation of the Odyssey, T. E. Lawrence describes his approach as a translator: “Wherever choice offered between a poor and a rich word richness had it, to raise the color”;* this was deliberately coat-trailing when Lawrence wrote it in the 1930s, but Nezami would have seen the remark as simply what a poet does. Given the intentional richness of his poetry, it is not surprising that he utilizes a number of rhetorical devices that are relatively rare in English; for example, he will often use, in the words of Dryden complaining about Ovid, “a dozen more . . . expressions poured on the Neck of one another and signifying all the same thing.”* Here “the same thing” is the news that Majnun wishes to hear, that Layli is at last free of her unwanted husband:

  Tell me I’ll see my longed-for ruby shine

  Freed from the darkness of her stony mine,

  Tell me the pale moon will break free at last

  From the fell dragon that has held her fast,

  Tell me that the officious bee has flown

  And left the lovely honey all alone,

  Tell me the garden’s nasty owner’s gone

  And that the hideous crows there have moved on,

  That nightingales replace them, that the rose

  Is cleansed of dust and wears her loveliest clothes,

  Tell me the blackguard’s forfeited his head

  And that the treasure’s guardian snake is dead,

  Tell me the castle jailer’s dreadful fall

  Has left him dying by the castle wall . . . (this page)

  Occasionally Nezami will do the opposite and use a single metaphorical vehicle to stand in for a number of different referents mentioned in close proximity:

  When jewelry made of pearls adorned the night,

  Making the darkness glitter with their light,

  Layli, the loveliest pearl, wept copious seas

  Of pearls as numerous as the Pleiades . . . (this page)

  In the first line “pearls” means “stars,” in the third line “pearl” means “virgin,” and in the fourth line “pearls” means “tears.”

  Or Nezami will set up a metaphor and then apparently subvert or rewrite it with an unexpected twist:

  And when the scented curls of darkness lay

  Upon the pallid forehead of the day

  That like a Georgian girl shone palely white

  Till daylight was a curl cut off by night . . . (this page)

  The basic metaphor is clear—the day is like the forehead of a pale-skinned Georgian girl whose black curls resemble the encroaching night; but then suddenly it is day, not night, that is like a single curl—one that night cuts off. The metaphor as a whole means “night fell,” but within it the curls are the night and then one curl is the snipped-off day.

  Or Nezami can mention something, and when he has finished with whatever it is in its literal sense, he will use it to generate similes and metaphors for a few lines. This happens when Majnun converses with a raven that then flies off and leaves him:

  The startled raven flew from tree to tree;

  Majnun spread wings of all he had to say—

  The raven spread its wings and flew away . . .

  Night like a raven’s sable wing descended,

  Bats woke up from their sleep, and day was ended;

  You’d say the stars were lamps that lit the skies,

  Or that they shone like ravens’ glittering eyes.

  Majnun was like a lamp that gives no light

  As raven-darkness blotted out his sight . . . (this page)

  And after a few lines in which the raven is not mentioned, when Majnun sets off the next morning Nezami unexpectedly wrings one more, farewell simile from the trope:

  Majnun flew like a raven here and there

  Or like a moth that flutters through the air . . . (this page)

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  Calvino describes Shakespeare’s work as possibly analogous to Nezami’s, and for the anglophone reader certain of Shakespeare’s rhetorical strategies provide parallels that can perhaps give an inkling of the nature of Nezami’s language and the various ways that he deploys it. Some passages of Layli and Majnun, particularly near the poem’s opening, are very similar to Shakespeare in one of his early styles, as exhibited in Venus and Adonis, for instance, or in some of Berowne’s speeches in Love Labor’s Lost—a style that delights in elaborate figures of speech to flesh out consciously decorative accounts of romantic and erotic encounters and their attendant joys and woes. When Nezami employs the flights of fancy and outré expressions that Safa remarks upon, his rhetoric can be like that of Shakespeare in some of his so-c
alled problem plays, when metaphor and syntax are so jammed up against each other that paraphrasable meaning can momentarily seem at a discount while extreme mental struggle, frustration, or puzzlement is being presented. Toward the end of his poem—for example, in Layli’s speech when she dies in her mother’s arms—Nezami’s language can have the stately, melancholy elevation and nobility that Shakespeare sometimes gives to those of his characters who are despairing victims of circumstance, a nobility that is more than a little self-conscious on both the speaker’s and the author’s part, but which is none the less moving, and perhaps even more so, for that (as, for example, Constance’s speech in King John that begins, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child, / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me” [III.iv.93–4], or Richard’s in Richard II that begins: “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings” [III.ii.155–6]).