Volume 2

A literary history of Persia / by Edward G. Browne.

  • Edward Granville Browne
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A literary history of Persia / by Edward G. Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    71/596 (page 47)
    in 1589, and quoted hereinafter from Mr. Arber’s reprint of 1869; while most varieties of the tajnls, or word-play, may be illustrated from the Ingoldsby Legends, the works of Tom Hood, and similar books. The more important of these artifices of the Persian rhetoricians and poets are illustrated in a qasidci-i-musanncd, or “ artifice-qasida,” composed by the poet Oiwami of Ganja, the brother of the celebrated Nidhami of Ganja, who flourished in the twelfth century of our era. This qaslda. comprises 101 bayts, or verses, and is given on pp. 198-201 of vol. i of Ziya Pasha’s Kharabat. I reproduce it here, line by line, with prose translation, and running commentary as to the nature of the rhetorical figures which it is intended to illustrate. 1. Ay falak-ra hawa-yi qadr-i-lu bar, W’ay malak-ra thand-yi- sadr-i-tu kar! “O thou the love of whose worth is the burden of heaven, And O thou the praise of whose high place [affords] occupa¬ tion to the angels 1 ” This verse exemplifies two figures, husn-i-matla\ (“ beauty of exordium ”), which is, as Gladwin says, “ when the poet exerts himself in the matlac ” (or opening verse of a qasida ”aS3 Taraf‘!a' or ghazal) “ to fix the hearer’s attention, and excite his curiosity for the catastrophe”; and tarsi', which literally means “ setting with jewels,” but in poetical composition is when the words in two successive misrads, or half-verses, correspond, each to each, in measure and rhyme. An English example (but imperfect at two points) would be :— “O love who liest on my breast so light, O dove who fliest to thy nest at night! An excellent Latin example is given in Morgan’s Macaronic Poetry (New York, 1872, p. 101) :—