Layli and Majnun Read online

  The question of Nezami’s realism or lack of realism is not a simple one. As noted above, Calvino remarks on how “the unbridled licentiousness of the figurative language is an appropriate style for the upheavals of youthful inexperience,” which is certainly a kind of realism, and Nezami can also use startlingly realistic metaphors, as for example when he comments on how Layli’s “husband’s watchful jealousy was spread / Like broken glass wherever she might tread” (this page).(The Persian here actually reads “like a broken diamond,” but commentators gloss “broken diamond” as a metaphor for broken glass, indicating that Nezami is using a metaphor within a metaphor—something he often does.) Yet much of the poem evades realism. At its center is the love between Layli and Majnun, but only one love scene is described as actually, really, happening; this is the last scene in which Layli and Majnun meet, when what has been for much of the poem the lovers’ consummation devoutly to be wished—that is, their physical union—is passed up as irrelevant. The other love scenes, if this is what we are to call them, are all imagined, usually by Majnun; they are fantasies, would-be encounters, not records of real events. We might say that there are two exceptions to this relative absence of “real” love scenes: the description of Layli and Majnun as children in school together near the opening of the poem; and Zayd’s vision of them, at the end of the poem, together in heaven after their deaths. That is, one happens before puberty, and the other after the lovers have transcended their bodies and left them behind as earthly dross. Neither scene involves sexuality, and the love between Layli and Majnun is presented as in some crucial sense bodiless. Given Nezami’s predilection for ambiguity and multiple meanings, this suggests that their love is to be interpreted in a non-corporeal, spiritual, mystical fashion.

  Is the poem, in fact, a Sufi poem, or at least a poem written so that it can be interpreted in Sufi terms? This is indeed how it has tended to be read in the Middle East, but not everyone agrees, and though some commentators, such as Asghar Seyed-Ghorab,* emphatically claim the poem as Sufi in orientation, others, including Jan Rypka, the author of a highly respected, single-volume History of Iranian Literature, just as emphatically deny this: “The whole conception is entirely psychological without any trace of Sufism.”* What is noticeable is that although the poem does not begin with any particular references to Sufism or Sufi beliefs, as it progresses such references become more and more numerous until by the poem’s closing pages they are everywhere. When finally it is legally and practicably possible for Layli and Majnun to be together physically, carnally, they seem indifferent to the possibility and don’t make any use of it; as far as the reader can tell, both die without having had any sexual experience at all. If we are to interpret the poem as being primarily about a “real,” physical, bodily love affair, the lovers’ behavior at this point is inexplicable. And Layli’s dying words, which she asks her mother to convey to Majnun, are surely crucially significant:

  Look at how wrong you were to think of you,

  Your self, so that this “you” was all you knew!

  So that for all your shrewdness you became

  Mad in yourself, your life, and in your name! (this page)

  Layli’s dying admonition expresses a fundamental Sufi tenet, that in order to reach spiritual truth the self must be suppressed, destroyed, and transcended. Majnun’s single dying phrase is also significant, as it is not the expected apostrophe, “O Layli” or “O my love,” but “O friend . . .” (this page). This could of course be taken as referring to Layli, but the Persian word Majnun uses here for “friend” is one of the commonest Sufi words for God, and it is likely that Nezami wishes us to take this as the primary meaning, even as Layli is also being invoked as a different kind of friend, as the “illusory” (human) love that leads to “real” (divine) love. The poem seems to present a gradual volatilization of reality, so that little by little the spiritual gradually replaces the physical; what begins with two children delightedly playing at love becomes a process of denial and askesis, a continual stripping away of the mundane and the physical in favor of the extraordinary, the asocial, and the spiritual. The poem’s literariness, its unremitting artifice, can be seen as a metaphorical analogy for this; for Nezami, rhetoric rescues reality from the quotidian and transforms it into something “rich and strange,” both beautiful and artificial, purging it of coarse contingency. In his verse we can say that literary artifice functions as a kind of purification of gross subject matter, one that is analogous to the spiritual purification his poems’ protagonists undertake. I alluded above to the way that Shakespeare’s example may help the anglophone reader come closer to what Nezami is doing in his poem, and a remark by the Shakespearian critic Marjorie Garber seems apposite here; she says that in his late play Cymbeline, a romance in a different but not wholly different sense from that in which Layli and Majnun is a romance, Shakespeare turns “away from mimesis, from the direct imitation of a human action, toward epiphany and transcendence,”* and this is perhaps the most useful way to understand the realism/lack of realism continuum that we find in Layli and Majnun.

  Writing about the epic poet Ferdowsi, Shahrokh Meskoob contrasts Ferdowsi’s poetry, which takes place in the real world, with that of the mystical poet Attar, in which “the real world is a ‘sea of metaphor’ and has no truth to it. Truth cannot be found in awareness and sobriety but in dreams.”* Farid ud-Din Attar (c.1145–c.1221) and Nezami were contemporaries living at opposite ends of Iran (Nezami in the west, Attar in the east), and although one wrote romances and the other mystical/Sufi narratives, Meskoob’s characterization of Attar’s work is also relevant to the way that, as Layli and Majnun proceeds, Nezami spiritualizes quotidian reality, which finally for him, as for Attar, “has no truth to it.” Attar’s most famous poem is his Manteq al-Tayr (“The Conference of the Birds”), which describes a mystical journey taken by a flock of birds toward the vale of “poverty and nothingness,”* beyond which lie both their transfigured selves and ineffable divine Truth. The journey that Nezami’s Layli and Majnun undertake is also a gradual stripping away of all that makes up worldly society—family, wealth, reputation, friends, home—toward the “poverty and nothingness” of lonely death, but just as the poverty and nothingness encountered by Attar’s thirty birds leads to their union with the divine, so Layli’s and Majnun’s journey is the prelude to their union in heaven, as seen by Zayd. Perhaps not coincidentally, when Attar’s birds see the vision of Truth and ask its meaning, they are answered “without tongue,”* that is, silently; and when Zayd asks the meaning of the vision he sees (Layli and Majnun together in heaven), he is answered “with a mute tongue,”* that is, also silently. Two great contemporary poets who were perhaps quite unknown to each other bring their poems to a close in heaven, the vision of which is described in and by silence, as if both acknowledge that ultimate truth is ineffable, or at least beyond audible language, and so beyond poetry, no matter how ravishing, complex, startling, or marvelous that poetry may be.

  dick davis

  The Beginning of the Story

  Hear what the teller of this history said

  By stringing speech’s pearls on verse’s thread.1

  *

  There lived an Arab king, whose excellence

  Increased his splendid realm’s magnificence;

  Lord of the Amir tribe,2 his virtues nourished

  His prosperous country, which grew great and flourished.

  The sweet breeze of his fame made Arab lands

  More fragrant than the wine cup in his hands—

  A lord of virtues, chivalry’s copestone,

  For worth—in all the world—he stood alone,

  An Arab king, successful beyond measure,

  Wealthy as Korah,3 rich with endless treasure,

  Attentive to the poor, and to his friends

  A generous host whose kindness never ends,

  As though Good Fortune were the so
ul within

  His nature, like a pith beneath the skin.

  *

  But he was childless still, for all his fame,

  And like a candle when it has no flame.

  More needy than a shell for pearls, or than

  A husk without its seeds, this desperate man

  Longed for a son, for Fate to let him see

  A fruitful branch spring from the royal tree,

  Hoping that when the cypress seed was sown

  Another cypress would have quickly grown,

  So that a pheasant in the meadows would

  Perceive a new tree where the old had stood,

  And once that tree’s allotted life had passed

  He’d shelter in the shade the new tree cast.

  A man survives if in the world somewhere

  His memory lives within his son and heir.

  And to this end he gave in charity

  Money to mendicants perpetually,

  Giving out gold to gain the moon; but though

  He sowed the seed he saw no seedling grow.

  He sought and did not find, for all his pains,

  And rode straight on, and would not tug his reins

  And stop or turn aside, and still it seemed

  He’d never find the son of whom he dreamed.

  (And if you seek like this in vain, accept

  That this is not an outcome to regret,

  Whatever good or bad is brought by Fate—

  Look, and you’ll see that it’s appropriate:

  That pearl you thought you wanted, look once more

  And see that it’s not worth your struggling for.

  Many desires don’t see the light of day

  And men are lucky that they stay this way!

  Men dash this way and that, all unaware

  Of what is best for them and why or where;

  The clues to how Fate works are hard to see—

  Many a lock when looked at is a key.

  Poor wretched man! A breath of wind’s enough

  To scatter all his dust—a tiny puff!

  Be strong within this pit of little worth,

  Consign to earth whatever comes from earth.)

  But still he longed, like rubies in a mine

  That vainly long for light to make them shine,

  And since his longing had been so intense,

  God gave a son to him, in recompense—

  A child whose rosy body blushed as though

  It shared a pomegranate’s ruddy glow,

  A shining jewel that made earth’s sullen night

  As radiant as the dawn’s resplendent light.

  When he beheld the son he’d hungered for,

  The father opened wide his treasury door,

  And as a rose sheds petals, in his joy

  He gave out gold in honor of the boy.

  *

  He ordered that a wet-nurse take his son

  And rear him with her milk to make him strong;

  Time like another wet-nurse kindly smiled

  And nourished with her strength the growing child;

  Each time his lovely lips and milk united

  Prayers were both written for him and recited,

  And when they gave him food they also gave him

  Their hearts that would do anything to save him,

  And carefully they dabbed a dark blue dye4

  Upon his cheeks, to thwart the evil eye.

  When milk had touched his tulip lips, they grew

  Like jasmine petals with their milky hue;

  You’d say his milk was mixed with honeycomb

  Or that his cradle was the full moon’s home—

  That moon in two weeks was as beautiful

  As is the heavens’ moon when she is full;

  Qais was the name they gave the royal child

  And faith’s rites kept him pure and undefiled,

  Growing in grace until a year had passed

  And his perfection was now unsurpassed.

  Love fashioned him, and love’s bright jewel now shone

  With greater luster from this royal son.

  *

  His happy second year, and third, were spent

  In gardens of sweet kindness and content.

  At seven, ringlets clustered round his face

  Like tulips held in violets’ dark embrace,5

  From seven to ten his beauty and renown

  Became the common gossip of the town,

  From those who glimpsed his face astonished sighs

  And prayers arose like winds into the skies,

  A face that filled his father’s soul with joy;

  He knew the time had come to send the boy

  To school, and so he chose a master, one

  Who’d day and night take pains to teach his son.

  Soon others, drawn there by his reputation,

  Came to the same school for their education;

  With hope and fear the children did their best

  To learn their lessons and to pass each test—

  Among these clever boys, a few girls shared

  Their classroom, and the lessons they prepared.6

  From different clans and tribes, from far and wide,

  In school they were together, side by side—

  And Qais’s lips were rubies spilling pearls,

  Reading his lessons with the boys and girls.

  *

  And from another clan, a different shell,

  An unpierced pearl was in his class as well,

  A young girl, nobly born, intelligent,

  A girl as pure as she was elegant,

  As splendid as the moon, as slender as

  The comely shape a cypress sapling has.

  Her playful little glances were like darts

  That pierced not one but many thousand hearts,

  Her doe-like eyes each moment seemed to slay

  A world each time they looked and looked away,

  Her face an Arab moon, and yet a Turk

  In stealing hearts and suchlike handiwork.7

  The hair upon her head was dark as night,

  Her pretty face a garden of delight—

  Her face framed by her hair appeared as though

  A shining torch were flourished by a crow;

  A tiny mouth of such sweet elegance,

  A sugar grain whose savor was intense—

  Her mouth was just like sugar, you might say,

  If sugar routed armies in this way.

  She seemed to be a charm against disaster,8

  Worthy to join the pupils and their master;

  She seemed life’s hidden beauty, and in truth

  The best line in a poem praising youth.

  Her forehead’s beads of sweat, her fragrant hair

  Were all the necklaces she chose to wear,

  Her mother’s milk accounted for her eyes

  And blushing cheeks, not make-up’s specious lies;

  Her tumbling curls, her little mole were all

  The jewels she needed to be beautiful;

  Her lovely hair was dark as night; her name

  Was Layli,9 and she set all hearts aflame.

  And seeing her, Qais gave his heart away

  (For love it seemed a paltry price to pay),

  And Layli too loved Qais as he loved her,

  In both their breasts young love began to stir.

  Love gave them its new wine, which worked within

  These two so innocent of guile and sin

  (The first time that we’re drunk’s the worst of all,

  No fall hurts like the first time t
hat we fall);

  Once they had smelled love’s roses, come what may,

  They were together all day, every day.

  Qais gave his soul up for her beauty’s sake,

  He stole her heart, his soul was hers to take;

  She saw his face and gave her heart, but knew

  She must still act as chaste girls have to do.

  Their friends were busy studying, while they

  Were busy with the words true lovers say;

  Their friends were making speeches, they delighted

  In other words than those their friends recited;

  Their friends debated grammar, their debates

  Concerned the noble feelings love creates;

  Their friends read learnèd pages, while they sighed

  Unstintingly, since love was now their guide—

  They only saw each other, unaware

  Of all their many friends assembled there.

  Layli and Majnun Fall in Love with Each Other

  As beautiful as Joseph to men’s eyes

  Each dawn the sun lit up the eastern skies,

  Like a ripe orange, lovely to behold,

  Turning the heavens from basil’s green to gold;10

  Layli sat with her chin propped on her fist

  So beautiful that no one could resist

  Her loveliness, and like Zuleikha’s maids

  Who cut their careless hands with sharpened blades,11