 Lecture by Professor Dick Davis on the wonders of Persian poetry, female women Persian poets of the medieval period. This is the second year of the Comron Jam annual lectures. It's my pleasure to welcome you this evening. I'm sure many of you have braved the storms and all sorts of obstacles to get here, which is probably why a smaller turnout than we would have ordinarily expected. But I want to thank you, particularly those who are new tonight. I did a short welcome on Friday, so this is going to be even shorter. The Friday, the first lecture was a magnificent tool to force and I can assure you you'll be in for a second treat. We wanted to impress Professor Davis. First, we put on a storm. He wasn't impressed. He comes from the Midwest. And then we tried the Persian carpet, which we have here in the Suas vaults. And the subtext is that I want to make sure that he falls in love with Suas, which is not very difficult to do. And he comes back again and again and again. So without further ado, just one or two small housekeeping announcements. I'm sure you've already switched off your mobiles. I don't need to remind you. Thank you for that. We are recording the lecture and there will be an opportunity for you to put your questions to Professor Davis. And there will be roaming microphones. I would ask you to wait till the microphones reach you. And then you really have to speak into the microphone so that you can be heard, but also you can be recorded. As on Friday night, this session is chaired by my Suas colleague. I called her our Persian princess. I repeated that just because some of you weren't there on Friday. And those of you who know me, I'm not the best known for my sense of humor. But can I hand over to Nages, who will chair and take the session through to 7.30. Unfortunately, there isn't a reception tonight, like Friday. And Professor Davis has another engagement, so we have to end 7.30 prompt. Thank you very much. Because I like that added to my title director. I see you sitting there. Well, as Hassan said, a very warm welcome back to those of you who were with us on Friday. And thank you to those who are joining us tonight for the first time, Khosha Ahmadid. On Friday, Professor Davis explored the presentation of the female character, the women, in medieval Persian poetry. And we particularly, or rather he particularly, focused on the depiction of women in the narrative poems, mostly in the Shahnameh and then in Visor Amin. And we followed these women through to the later romantic epics of Nezami. And we wondered that what has happened, that the 30 or so prominent, rather bold, courageous women of the Shahnameh, and indeed the supreme amongst these women, Vis, what became of them. And it seems that as we approach the Safarids, the Saljuks, and Mongols, as we move from the 11th century on, these women tend to disappear, or they're depicted very differently as Professor Davis gave an example of Jami's poetry. And perhaps there is a parallel in this because our bold heroes, the heroes who take responsibility for their choices, who are facing the enemy courageously, who are in the fields of polo or battle, who whine and dine and live the good life. Somehow they disappear as they take solace in the dark, damp, rather miserable corners of the tavern. And no longer raising the goblets of the clear wine, but taking refuge in the dredges of the morning draught. So if we had these extraordinary women depicted in the poetry invariably composed by men, should we not expect there to be female poets? So in tonight's lecture, Professor Davis will look at female poets in medieval Persian, and of course, he will fast forward, I believe, to one of the most remarkable women who is a contemporary of Hafiz and Obeda Zarkani. And I know that he would look at those before we get to Malik Jahan Khartun. Now, with these tempestuous weather out there with the Tufan, the typhoon, we know that we need not worry, Professor Davis. Aidellar, Seylefana, Bonyad-e-Hasti, Barkanad, Chontura, Nuhast, Kashdiban, Zetufan, Qammaqor. So we need not worry about the tempestuous ups and downs of Persian literature as Professor Davis will be our Kashdiban. And I chose that line because it reminds me, I'm no expert on any of this poetry, but I thought that particular qazal of Hafiz has a lot in common with one of the qazals of Jahan Khartun. So perhaps by the end of the evening, we will discover who inspired whom in that period. Again, could you please join me to invite Professor Davis to deliver tonight's lecture? Well, I've been called many things that I've been compared to many people, but I have never been compared to Noah before. And if you think I'm going to get you through the flood, well, let's hope. Well, I would like to thank Nages for that very nice introduction and Professor Hakimean for inviting me in the first place. I think there's a possibility that Dominic Brookshaw may be here tonight. I don't know, he told me he was coming, but he might have got held up by the weather. If he is here, I would like to thank him too, not for bringing me here in any way, but for his writings on Jahan Khartun, who's the person I'm going to talk about mostly tonight. I think Dominic Brookshaw knows more about anybody else in the world about Jahan Khartun than anybody else in the world. And I'm very indebted to his writings on Jahan Khartun, and his writings have saved me an enormous amount of spade work of discovering who she was related to in what way and so on and so forth. Most of which he has worked out. So I'd like to thank him as well. If we look at the history of Persian medieval poetry, there aren't very many women poets. We have to be honest about it. But there are some right at the very beginning. And almost in every generation, there are one or two. There is rather a big break around the Safavid period when it's very difficult to find anybody at all. But before that, there are always one or two in any generation. And then after that, when we get into the late 18th and into the 19th century, of course, they start again. And there, of course, there are a very large number of Persian women poets in the 20th and 21st centuries. It's the medieval poets I'm going to talk about today. And I'm going to concentrate on this particular poet, Jahan Khartun, who is the only medieval Persian woman poet whose complete divan has come down to us. And it includes an introduction, a prose introduction by herself. And this in itself is very rare by any poet of either gender, to have an introduction talking about the writing of her poetry, the genesis of her poetry, why she wrote, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, it's an introduction which is extremely careful and conventional. And so much of what it says is so hedged around with politeness and conventional phrases that it's actually difficult to home in on facts about where she wrote what and that kind of thing. Nevertheless, it does give some idea of what she was like. One of the things it shows us is that she was a very modest person. Now, you might think that modesty is a topos that lots of authors produce when they talk about their own work. I'm nothing compared to so and so and so and so and all these great people who went before me, they're much greater poets than I am. And that is true generally of Western poetry, but it's very rarely true of Persian poetry as everybody who knows Persian poetry who's here will be aware. Persian poets tend to be very pleased with their own productions and often to say, I am the best poet that has ever been, you know, and if you pay me, I will write you such a panagiric, the world will remember you forever. So this modesty, in fact, is not that common among Persian poets when they talk about themselves and therefore it is distinctive. In fact, the title of my talk, those who are great do not be little what is little, it is actually the very first last line. It's the very last line of her of her preface to her own work. She gives it as a, she gives it as a, as a bait of a poem. I'll read the bait in Persian and then I'll translate it for you. For those of you who don't know Persian, it's agar safiist on rodar, sorry. I'll start again. Agar safiist on rodar pazirand, basorgon chorday bar chordon nagirand. That is, although it might be a mistake to make a great fuss of them, those who are magnanimous, those who are great-minded do not belittle those who have a small stature. That is, she is asking for indulgence from her audience. She's saying, those great people who know all about poetry, don't find fault with me. A magnanimous person will not sort of nitpick with my poetry. You will accept what I have done for what it is. And this is an indication, I think, of the kind of modesty of her attitude towards her own poetry. She also says, perhaps it's wrong for women to write poetry at all. And she says that that held her back from writing poems in the first place. She thought that perhaps it was something that women shouldn't do. It's an immodest thing to do. It doesn't suit the sex as it were. But then she lists some names of some poets, including some Arab women poets and then a couple of Persian women poets who she says, well, they did it before and so I thought I could risk it as well. And then she makes this apology about her technique, which, as far as I can see, is as good as anybody's. But she apologizes, of course, as those of you who know Persian poetry will know, you cannot make metrical mistakes. It's fine in English poetry to make metrical mistakes. You just say it's a substitution, that's fine. If you've got a trochee instead of an I am, well, it's a substitution. But in Persian you can't do that. I mean, if you make a metrical mistake, it's a metrical mistake and that's that. And she apologizes for the fact that she is unsure technically. Her poetry seems to me to be completely self-assured in its technique. And I don't think she need apologize at all. But she's not unlike other women poets in the West who did that, for example. If you think of 19th century poets in English, a poet like Emily Dickinson in the United States or a poet like Christina Rossetti in England, they are both poets who were thought of as metrically as eccentric and thought of themselves as metrically eccentric. And there's a kind of, I don't really fit in with the general flow of poetry, as it were, feeling about their poetry. And there is a touch of that to Jahan Hatun herself. That's part of the way she presents herself. She presents herself as an exception whom she hopes the audience will be indulgent towards. Now, as I said, and as you know, I'm sure, she's not the first person woman poet by any means. She lived in the 14th century and there have been a number of women poets before her. The first woman poet we have is Rabi Egozdari, an Afghani poet from the 10th century. She's one of the first person poets of any kind of either gender. We don't have many poems by her. And as is always the case with medieval poets of whom we only have fairly short poems, it's not even certain that the poems that are ascribed to the poet are in fact by her. And perhaps at least one of the poems by Rabi Egozdari, for example, or that is ascribed to Rabi Egozdari turns up in the divine of Abu Sayed Abul Her, for example. So perhaps it's by her, perhaps it's by Abu Sayed, perhaps it's by somebody else. But there are a number of poems by her. One poem that's almost always accepted as being by her. I will, somebody said to me at the end of my talk on Friday, you should read more translations, Dick. So I'm going to do that. I never need encouragement to read my translations. Here's a translation of a poem by Rabi Egozdari, which is, I don't think this is ascribed to anybody else or I haven't seen it ascribed to anybody else, but here's my translation. It's a Rabi Egozdari, so it's very short, as most of the poems ascribed to her are. My hopes that God will make you fall in love with someone cold and callous just like you, and that you'll realize my true value when you're twisting in the torments I've been through. Now that's a poem that could be written, I'll read it again, because I think it's sort of went over people's head. My hopes that God will make you fall in love with someone cold and callous just like you, and that you'll realize my true value when you're twisting in the torments I've been through. That's a poem that could be written by anybody. On the other hand, it does strike a note, which I have noticed, because I got, I'm trying, at the moment, I'm trying to put together an anthology of translations of poems by Persian women from the Middle Ages to the 20th century or into the 21st century, perhaps. It's the Middle Ages I'm most interested in, so it's that that I'm working on at the moment. But I've noticed reading just women's poetry and leaving aside all these many, many, many men in between them, that there are certain notes which are struck again and again, and one of these notes is a note of angry resentment against a man. And it's in here, you'll realize my true value when you're twisting in the torments I've been through. Now that could be a poem by anybody at all, obviously. But it is a note that women poets, I've seen this, strike again and again, this kind of anger that I've been treated very badly and I hope you get it back. And so, it's Rabbe. There's not much attributed to Rabbe. The most famous woman poet of Persia, of course, medieval woman poet, is Masati. Sometimes pronounced Mahasti, but I think it's accepted that that is not an acceptable pronunciation. When I first started doing Persian, people often said it, but Masati. Now Masati is a tricky poet. Almost all, she's 12th century. She was said to be a courtier at the court of King Sanjar, who was the most successful of the Seljuk monarchs of Iran. Almost virtually all the poems ascribed to Masati are Rubayat. So they're very short poems. And of course, Rubayat are unsigned. They don't have a pen name in them. And so, of course, Rubayat wander from Divan to Divan. In fact, they're called Wandering Rubayat because they turn up in lots of different poets' Divans. And Masati, in fact, is a poet who it's very difficult to pin down which poems are actually by her. And in fact, I saw that very recently, Sandy Morton died. I just found this out yesterday, in fact, and I didn't realize he had died. And I remember talking to Sandy Morton a couple of years ago about Masati, and he put forward an idea which I think is probably right. And I would like to acknowledge that it's his idea and not my idea, particularly given his passing. He was the external examiner for my PhD, so I'm very grateful to him many years ago. Sandy said to me, he thought that the Rubayat ascribed to Masati was someone like the Rubayat ascribed to Omachayam. That is, they are ascribed to this poet because they have a particular kind of take on life, they have a particular kind of subject matter. And so that any Rubayat that has that subject matter, has that take on life, tends to get ascribed to that poet. And so that as the years pass, this poet's corpus of Rubayat gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But the ones that are actually by him or her are probably very few indeed. And in fact, Sandy said that he had a feeling that perhaps none of the poems ascribed to Masati were actually by her. I don't know if we need to go that far, but it's certainly the case that almost all the poems ascribed to her are of one kind or another. They're either poems which are rather daring in the way that they play with sexuality from a woman's point of view. Or they're poems which are cynical and witty and dismissive, or they're both. Now, given that, and I think Sandy may be right, that Rubayat that turned up, that sort of fit that description, people said, oh, that's by Masati. They got ascribed to Masati. Given that, the poems that aren't like that that are ascribed by her, perhaps those are the ones that are actually by her because there's no reason, that reason that that's the kind of poem she write, it's not operative in the case of those poems. So perhaps those poems actually are by her. And I'll read a couple in a minute. Johan Khotun herself, and I'm going to get down to her biography very quickly. I said that in the introduction to her, in the preface that she writes to her divan, she mentions some Persian women poets before her, before herself. The two she especially mentions are Pod Shah Khotun and Gotlag Shah Khotun. Now, as those of you who are in Persian studies will realize they're both princesses. The word Khotun indicates at that time anyway, it indicates royal status. And perhaps she as a princess was interested in princess poets, though she doesn't particularly say this, but it's two princesses that she chooses to mention as her predecessors and who she says she takes as her models. There are poems ascribed to Pod Shah Khotun still extend, I'm aware of two of them. I haven't found any poems by Gotlag Shah Khotun if they in fact exist, if they have been recorded. In fact, the only place I've come across her name is in Jahan Khotun's preface. But, I said at the beginning, or when I was talking about the poem by Rabia Khostari, that it's very tempting to see a female voice in these poems that are ascribed to women. One almost wants to do it despite the evidence. Because you're trying to get hold of a sensibility and a particular mind. You want to get some sense of the person who wrote this poem. I think most of us who read poetry a lot, that's one of the reasons we read it. You want to feel close to this mind. But of course, Persian medieval poetry is extremely conventional. It's very conventional indeed. And so, the deployment of convention in the poems, there's particularly in a rabbi art, which is such a short poem. The deployment of convention means that there's very little room indeed for individual expression or for a kind of accent that marks a particular sensibility. Nevertheless, you do occasionally come across poems which you feel that has to be by a woman. And I'll read a couple of them, but now, again, I'll read them in my own translations. I'm so glad that person sent me to read more translations, Dick. This is a poem by Meshul Nisa, who's a poet who lived just after Jahan Khatun. She was a member of the court of Gohar Shah at the end of the 14th beginning of the 15th century in Herat. And we know quite a lot about her biography and quite a few poems have survived, ascribed to Meshul Nisa. In fact, I have seen it written somewhere that her whole divan has survived, but I've never come across it. I just saw that once written and I thought, and it says it's survived and been published. Well, if it's been published, I can't find it. I don't know whether this is a mistake or whether it's the case. If that's the case, it means that there are two. There's one besides Jahan Khatun's. But here's a poem by Meshul Nisa. As I say, we know a lot about her because she was a member of a court which a lot was written about. And we know that her husband was much older than her. Here's a couple of poems by Meshul Nisa and they're obviously both about her husband. In your distinguished house, the thing I thought to have, it isn't there. The freedom my distracted spirit sought to have, it isn't there. You say, I've everything. I've untold wealth and luxury. Oh yes, there's everything. But what I ought to have, it isn't there. Now there, again, is that note of resentment against a male adressee that we saw in the poem by Rabih. Here's another poem. I haven't, this is a literal translation in case you think I've been pushing things. I mean, it's as literal as it can be given its verse, but I haven't invented anything in the poem. This clearly is to her husband again. Remember, I said he was far older than she was. Between us now, I feel there's no connection left, no loyalty or kindness or affection left. You've grown so abject and so old, you haven't got the feeble strength to manage an erection left. Yeah, that was an angry lady. There's another poet, an Indian poet who wrote in Persian, Zaifeh, who has a poem that says almost exactly the same thing, except that she says it slightly more obliquely. She says, my love does nothing for you. It's too late. Flubby old fool, you're in a wretched state. And you've the nerve to threaten me with blows. You haven't got the strength to stand up straight. Okay, let's get to Johan Khartoun herself. Johan Khartoun is much more polite than that. She never says anything like that. Johan Khartoun gets angry and contemptuous, but it's about politics. When her anger comes through and her contempt comes through, it's because of political situations, not because of a love relationship. Though the love relationships as they are presented in her poem are not a happy event at all. But of course that may be very largely convention. Johan Khartoun came from the Inju family who ruled Shiraz in the first half of the 14th century. Her father in fact was the second of the Inju kings who ruled in Shiraz. He only ruled for three years and then he was driven off the throne and he tried to get back the throne and he did get it back for about six months and then he was murdered. So, and that murder probably happened when she was in her teens. We know the date he was murdered. She was probably born, well her parents married in 1324. We know that she was alive by the early 1330s, so this gives us an approximate date for her birth. Her father was murdered in 1342, so she was probably in her early or mid teens when her father was murdered. There was a turmoil. Shiraz was a city of great turmoil at this time. The Inju family and a couple of other families were always struggling for who was going to control the city and it's been pointed out that in one five-year period there were eight changes of government in Shiraz in the late 1330s and 1340s. And each time there was a change of government, blood ran in the palaces and sometimes in the streets too. So there was a great deal of political infighting and violence and this was the world that Jahan Khartun was born into. After her father's murder, there was infighting for about six months and then her uncle, her father's brother, Abu Eshaq, decisively seized the throne and became king and was king for the next 10 years. And Abu Eshaq was known as many things but the thing he has come down to, gone down to posterity as his most famous act or characteristic was that he was a great patron of poets. He was the major patron of Hafez. He was also a major patron of other poets like Khadju who is a very important poet who's just a little older than Hafez who was also in Shiraz at the same time and Hafez's poetry is very like Khadju's in many ways. Khadju clearly influenced Hafez a lot. He was also the major patron of Ubeda Zalkhani who is the most famous obscene poet in Persian. Jehan Khatun seems to have started writing poetry although her preface seems to imply that she, it was a long time before she decided, okay, I can write poems, that she debated this to herself a lot. She seems to have started writing quite early in fact. From the evidence of her poems, though again one always has to take this evidence with a pinch of salt, evidence as to poets' lives in the medieval period taken from their poems is always very dubious. You have to be very tactful about taking statements in poems as autobiographical because they're often just conventional. They're not in fact autobiography, but sometimes. But she seems to have started writing fairly early and my impression, my guess is that she started writing really as a way of saying thank you to her uncle because her uncle saved her. I mean, her father was killed, her uncle took over the court, welcomed her into the court. She became a sort of major presence in the court in her uncle's court and her uncle loved poetry. There was nothing that made her uncle happier than really good poem. So my guess is that she might have taken up poetry partly as a way of pleasing her uncle. Also, of course, the fact that she took up poetry at all meant that she had received, that she was literate, that she had been taught to read and write. And this too was fairly rare for women at this time, though not as rare as we might think. The Injus were half Mongol. They were part Mongol, part, well half. They were a mixture of, they were Mongol, they were Seljuk and they were Persian. They were a mixture of the three. The women of the Seljuk and Mongol families that ruled Iran in the 14th century had much more autonomy and sort of personal space and the ability to do what they wanted. And they were much more significant within the political world of the period than we tend to think of medieval Persian women as having been. This is because, and this links up with something I was talking about on Friday, those of you who are here on Friday. This is because the Seljuks and the Mongols who were the rulers of Iran, these mixed families, the first Seljuks came then the Mongols, they intermarried and they were intermarried with the local Persian rulers too. And so these ruling families were a mixture of these three different ethnic groups. The Seljuk and the Mongol societies tended to give, they started out as nomadic societies. Nomadic societies has always much more gender equality than there is in settled societies in the Middle East. And they tended to give their women much more autonomy and authority than was usual in Middle Eastern Islamic courts. The women of the Inju court, for example, did not go veiled. This seems extraordinary from the Middle Ages, but we know it's the case from various anecdotes. There's one anecdote which is a kind of, it demonstrates it from the reverse, which is that during a coup d'etat, a particular princess tried to escape from the palace by veiling herself and running away. And she was running through the bazaar and somebody snatched off her veil and she was immediately recognized by the people there, which means that they had seen her unveiled. So Johan Malik Khartun's being educated, though it was fairly rare for a woman at this time, it wasn't as rare as we might think. Also we know that women, this was particularly true, the Mongol families and the Inju families, as I said, was part Mongol. The women of these courts took part in court life. They were not completely secluded in the way that women at other Muslim courts of the period tended to be. It's very clear that Johan Khartun knew the poetry of Hafiz, who was one of her father's poets, and her father was Hafiz's major patron, that she knew the poetry of Hafiz very well indeed. She directly quotes Hafiz in one poem, that is verbatim. Of course, those of you who know the conventions of Persian poetry will know that this is not unusual. It's a way of paying homage to a poet. You include a line by another poet in your poem, and you do a variation on it. It's a way of, as I said, paying homage to a poet. So it's not, but of course you have to know the poem. The poem that she quotes actually is a very famous poem, so that it doesn't necessarily mean that she knew his work intimately, that particular quotation. But there are many moments in Johan Khartun's poems when she seems to allude to similar moments in Hafiz, that it's not the direct word for word quotation that you have in that one example I just gave, but there are many moments when there seems to be an illusion, when there seems to be, the same kind of thing seems to be happening in the poem, the metaphors, the images, the tropes are being used in the same way towards the same end saying the same kind of thing, and she will do a slight variation on it. So I think it's fairly clear that Johan Khartun knew Hafiz's work very well. Whether she knew the work of Obed very well is more doubtful. Obed, as we know, is an obscene poet. He's the most famous obscene poet in Iran. His most famous poem, of course, is not an obscene poem. It's the poem Mushogorbe, Mouse and Cat, or Cat and Mouse, which in fact is a political satire on a particular event that happened in Shiraz whilst Johan Khartun and Hafiz were alive, and which I will get to in a minute. But Obed's, most of Obed's poems are fairly obscene, and they're very openly obscene, and he has two poems are ascribed to him which are about Johan Khartun, and both of them are obscene, and both of them are insulting. So it's very unlikely that they were friends. If these poems are in fact by him, I tend to think they are by him because they are so like Obed. One of them is only a single line, or it's only survived as a single line. It may have been more before, but it's only survived as a single line. One of them is Aruba'i, and it does exactly what Obed does, which is take a common place and then make an obscene pun on it. And Obed does this in poem after poem. It's a kind of hallmark of his style. So I tend to feel this poem actually is by Obed, though some people have doubted it. It's interesting that bad seems to have happened to Obed because of doing this, if he did in fact do it. The Inju family seemed to have been a fairly tolerant, easy going lot, and or it may be that they felt that insults to women didn't matter that much, even if it was to a princess. But you can imagine another princess getting very angry about it and saying, I would like his head on a platter and perhaps getting it. But anyway, we know that Jahan Khatun married and the person she married, and this I find interesting, the person she married was her uncles, who was the king, Abu Eshaq. He was her uncle's Nadeem, that is his bosom buddy, his friend with whom he relaxed, his drinking companion. The court was a very wine besotted court. People who think that the wine Hafez is all mystical and never real wine. Please read about the Inju court. If he wasn't drinking at that court, he was the only person who wasn't. His name, this Nadeem's name was Amin Addin, or Addin, Amin Addin Jahrami. Amin Addin Jahrami was the king's drinking companion and would be expected to drink with the king all night when the king wanted that and it seemed that the king quite often did want that. Jahan Khatun married him probably in her late teens, perhaps in her early 20s. I have an awful sinking feeling. Again, this is a guess, but I have an awful sinking feeling that she did this to please her uncle because if her poems, if the evidence of her poems has any truth in it, it was an extremely unhappy marriage. There's poem after poem in which she says how awful the person she stuck with is. Sometimes she's pleading with him to be nice to her and sometimes she's just giving up on him and saying, oh, the hell with the bastard. You know, she, there's a kind of, she hopes that he's going to be nice, but he never is. Of course, that pleading with somebody to be nice to you is entirely conventional for the poetry of the time, but it is so insistent and it is done so often that it's difficult not to believe that there is some personal history here. But again, as I repeat, getting personal biography out of Persian medieval poetry is a very risky thing to do. Okay, she married Amin al-Dinj. I'll read one poem in which she really does talk about him. She really does talk about him fairly directly if I can find it just a moment. I thought I'd made a note of it, but it seems I didn't. I'm sorry to do this. Yes, here it is. Now, this is a translation. I tried to keep in most of my translations very close to the form of the original, if possible. This poem actually deviates quite a long way in the form, but it doesn't deviate at all in the substance. This is a poem apparently to her husband, certainly to somebody who has an erotic relationship. Of course, the whole thing may be imaginary, but it doesn't read that way. You don't know how you ought to treat a lover. Not for a moment do you think of me. My heart is broken and it won't recover since you won't show me any sympathy. Your only way is to be pitiless. Your only path's the path of tyranny. You don't acknowledge my long faithfulness since you've no interest in fidelity. You spend all night asleep or drunk and give no thought at all to sleepless weeping me. And what use are my tears since all you live for is to be spiteful and act thoughtlessly. I didn't know that when you swore your oath, your yes was all that I was going to hear. You don't care for Jahan. Well, I gave both my world and soul into your hands, my dear. Submit my heart and learn to tolerate this grief since you will find no other fate. Now there are two things notable about that poem in personal terms. One is she says, you spend all night asleep or drunk. Now this is very distinctive for medieval Persian poetry. Wine is very often mentioned in medieval Persian poetry and it may be metaphorical and it may be real but it's mentioned again and again and again. It's never mentioned in those condemnatory terms that I'm aware of. This condemnation of drunkenness is specific to Jahan Khatun. It's not part of the kind of general qazal. This is a qazal, believe it or not, because my form is very different from the qazal. It's not part of the general qazal rhetoric. Wine is celebrated in a qazal. In this qazal, wine is condemned and that's what makes me think it's personal. It's specific to her because it's not a conventional way of talking about wine, it's special. The other thing is, I didn't know that when you swore your oath, your yes was all that I was going to hear. I don't know what this oath is but it sounds as if it's the marriage oath. It sounds as if she's married, they've got married and she thinks everything's going to be okay but that's the last time that he's positive to her. So the evidence of the poems is that the marriage wasn't a very happy one. But again, as I said, one has to, of course, poems of this period, they often complain about the irresponsible beloved who won't come to one and so on and so forth. But, and she is obviously working within that convention but the convention is occasionally given these personal accents, as I've suggested, happens in that poem there with the reference to drunkenness which makes me think that there is something personal in it. Okay. In 1353, a warlord who was then in Karaman, though he didn't come from Karaman, he came from near Yazd called Mubaraz-Addin. A warlord attacked Shiraz and Abouaz Haq was a wonderful drinker and a wonderful patron of poets and a great delighter in the arts but he was a lousy soldier. And Mubaraz-Addin very quickly defeated Abouaz Haq who fled to Isfahan where Abouaz Haq's cronies captured him, sent him back to Shiraz where he was executed. So Jahan Khartun has lost her father as a teenager. She's now lost her uncle who replaced her father as king after a couple of other people in between and who had looked after her and nurtured her and given her a special place at court. And she's now lost her father too. And this appalling person Mubaraz-Addin has taken over. I say appalling person because everybody who writes about him writes about how appalling he was. There's a great deal written about him. Haq Fez has many poems about how awful Mubaraz-Addin was. First thing he did was, Abouaz Haq was a great drinker and there were wine shops all over the city and of course Shiraz wine was famous. It's not an accident that there's a kind of wine called Shiraz. The first thing he did was he closed down the wine shops. He then shut down the red light district and he then for bad music of any kind he was a real royal pain in the neck this king. And then he decided he would have the tomb of Saadi who was the great 12th century poet of Shiraz. He would have the tomb of Saadi destroyed because Saadi wasn't Islamic enough in his poems. He was dissuaded from doing this. There are echoes of that more recently but I'll leave that aside. He was dissuaded from doing this but he was the most awful man. He once, his son, this is in the historian Khan Tamiyeh who was writing 100 years afterwards who has many anecdotes about Mubaz al-Din. His son once asked him, he said, is it true, daddy, that you have killed over a thousand people with your own hands? He says, no, no more than 800. Anyway, it seems, now we don't know what happened to Jahan Khartun immediately after the coup d'etat but her poems, now of course, most of her poems are Ghazals. She has over 1,400 Ghazals which is three times as many as Hafiz, for example. It's a very large divan. And then she has a lot of Rubayat, about 300 plus and then she has another section of poems which is 30 poems which are funeral laments, apparently all for the same person. This person is almost certainly her daughter who was called Sultan Bakht who from the poems seems to have died at a very young age. The poems talk about you had just begun to talk, you had just begun to delight my heart and you went. You were snatched from me. Those poems are extremely moving, by the way. So she had a daughter who died very young. That's virtually certain. I think we can believe the poems. There is no reason to write those poems because they're not written within a general convention. They're very specific about the circumstances so there's no reason to doubt those poems refer to something real, I think. So she had a daughter who died very young who she wrote over 30 elegies about. Most of them very small but some of them quite long. It was conventional in the medieval period in Europe and I wondered if this might be the case in Iran too at this period to write an elegy on the anniversary of the death of somebody so that you would get many elegies that would go on for a year after you. And I was wondering, in fact, if she was doing that. That's why there are 30 of them, that's a guess again. We don't know what happened to her after the coup d'etat but, and here we have to turn to her poems again. Now I'd like to take just a little excursion at this moment to talk about what happens in a Persian poem in terms of personal input, as it were. Persian medieval poems are highly conventional. I keep saying that but anybody who knows Persian medieval poetry will know it's true. Virtually none of the metaphors, for example, are original. Poets who write with original metaphors are very rare. Virtually everybody uses the same stock and that's not thought to fault at all. The impressiveness of the poet is the way that you deploy this stock, the way that you do variations on it and make it fit together and produce sort of startling moments within it. But it's working within a very narrow set of linguistic possibilities, as it were. But there are, if we can take three different kinds of short poem. There is the qate. The qate is the short poem which is like a truncated kazal. It starts out as a kazal and then it stops. It just doesn't go very far. It's usually about four or five lines. The qate is conventionally used for personal anecdote and reminiscence. And therefore when you, in Persian anyway, and therefore when you have a qate which says something about it, something that's happened in the poet's life, you can trust it much more than when you have a kazal that says that. Kazals tend to be much more dealing in general conventions that everybody talks about. Qates do tend to be specific. For example, it's usually taken by scholars that Hafez had at least one son. The only evidence we have for that is that Hafez has a qate in which he mentions his son. So it's taken as the qates tend to be fairly conventional. Now Jahan Khartun does have some qates and some of them are very specific about what seems to have happened to her after the coup d'etat. Then you have the rubayat. You have rubayat. Rubayat, they are very conventional but rubayat were often written in response to a particular moment or a particular situation and they were often off the cuff poems that were written when something extraordinary happened. There's a very famous rubayat by Masatih. When her king, King Sanjar, was going to go on an expedition there and there was a sudden snowfall and snow covered the ground in front of Sanjar and of course they had to stop and Masatih produced a rubayat on the spot which said this, great king, the heavens have saddled glory for you, more than all other monarchs they adore you. To keep your horses golden horseshoes spotless, they've spread a silver carpet out before you. So it's a compliment to the king. You're saying that your horses, you're so splendid and wonderful that your horse has golden horseshoes. This is very unlikely to be true. Your horse has golden horseshoes and the heavens have spread silver for your golden horseshoes to walk on so that they won't get muddy. Now, this is a rubayat produced in response to a particular situation. So there are moments in rubayat which can be taken as, if not personal, these responses to particular moments. Then you have the kazal where it's very tricky to find the personal at all. Now, Jahan Hatun has a few gates and rubayat, which do seem to refer to her situation after the kurita, and I'll read a couple of them. One of them, which is quite extraordinary poem from the Middle Ages because it's so specific in its feeling, it could almost be written now. This is my translation of it. And this clearly is written after the kurita. Here in the corner of a ruined school, more ruined even than my heart, I wait. While men declare that there's no goodness in me, I sit alone and brood upon my fate and hear their words like salt rubbed in my wounds and tell myself I must accept my state. I don't want wealth and I don't envy them, the ostentatious splendor of the great. What do they want from me though? Since I've nothing now that I'm destitute and desolate. Now, that poem is clearly very personal. That poem is not coming out of general set of conventions. That poem is coming out of Jahan Hatun being held prisoner in a school and in the next room they're discussing what to do with her. Which is an extraordinary, as I say, that could almost be a modern poem. It's extraordinary for medieval poem. Another poem, which again, it seems from a number of her poems that she was imprisoned for a while. And here's, this is a rubai. And again, this seems to be personal though, or at least it's claiming that she was in prison. And there doesn't seem to be any reason to claim that unless it's true. And this is very brief poem, but it gives a wonderful image of what being at a totalitarian court is like or a court which is ruled by an absolute ruler who can do the help what the hell he wants even when he's drunken and so forth. When someone is imprisoned for a while, men ask about his fate and want to know his crimes. If someone accidentally says my name, fear makes him beg to be excused a thousand times. That is clearly her name could not be said at court. If somebody said her name, whoever said it was gonna be in deep trouble. And if somebody said her name by accident, well, he was in a mess. She does, there are also a number of poems on exile, on being exiled from Shiraz. And she does seem to have been forced out of exile, forced into exile. Here's one. Pity the wretch forced from her native land with no one close to here or understand. World weary, heart sick, unprovided for, alone and at her enemy's command. I'm going to read one more. Well, she has many poems. What's surprising? One of the things that's surprising about her poetry, her gazelles, I'm talking about now, most of her poems are gazelles, the vast majority of her Duvali's gazelles. What's surprising about her poetry when she treats political subjects is that she uses the rhetoric of hopeless love, but she applies it to politics. And this is an extraordinary thing to do, but it really works. It works incredibly well because she says to the person, why aren't you treating me properly, you bastard? And the poem begins, and you think that this is a poem to a lover, a poem to complaining to a lover, of which she has many, many, many examples, a poem complaining to a lover. And then you realize she is complaining to Marvarez al-Din, in fact. And in one of the poems, she actually names him. She calls him by his first names, Mohammed Qasee. And I will read that poem now. Now, this poem begins, as I say, as if it's a poem complaining to a lover that he won't visit her, and she has many, many poems that do that. Why don't you come and see me? You promise you'll come and see me. You never come and see me. But then we realize, as the poem goes on, that it's not to a lover at all. But what's extraordinary is that she uses that rhetoric, which is a kind of conventional to-hand rhetoric for a gazelle, and she applies it to a situation which it was not constructed for at all, which is political complaint. Why is it you neglect me so? Why is it you never pay your captive wretch a visit? Your ranks raised your pavilion up to heaven, our government, the playground you've been given. Iran's wealth lifted you aloft. It's right her crown and throne afford you such delight. Thank God for pleasures, for such luxuries snatched at in ever greater quantities. The world's deceived you for five days and you're so proud. It's done this countless times before. Mohammed Qazi, in your reign, I'm free of hearth and home and all that's dear to me, but you'll be humbled by the world's attacks. In sorrows, flames, you'll writhe like melting wax. You remember I said about Rabi'e, that feeling of resentment against some male who's done you wrong. It's exactly the same feeling, but here it's transferred to the political sphere out of the erotic sphere, but it comes out of the same, it's the same rhetoric and it's basically the same feeling. Why have you been so terrible to me? Why are you so awful to me? You so and so. And she has a number of poems about Mohammed Qazi that, well, they seem to be about him. That's the only poem she actually names him in, but the others seem to be about him too, complaining about political oppression. There's one very general poem which I'll also read in my translation. Which is complaining generally about the political state of affairs, but again, it could be complaining about an erotic state of affairs until you get into the poem and you realize that no, it's political. So she's doing the same thing. She's using the rhetoric of erotic complaint to make a political statement. How long will heaven's heartless tyranny which keeps both rich and poor in agony go on? The dreadful happenings of these times have torn up by the roots hope's noble tree. And in the garden of the world, you say they've stripped the leaves as far as one can see. That Cyprus, which was once the sinusior of souls, they've toppled ignominiously. That almost certainly refers to her uncle, her uncle Abel S. Hart being killed. I'll read that one again. That Cyprus, which was once the sinusior of souls, they've toppled ignominiously. I cry to heaven above, again I cry, how long will this injustice fall on me? What can I tell my grieving heart that won't let dearest friends assuage its misery? You'd say heaven stuffed its ears with scraps of cotton, simply to show that it's ignoring me. That very domestic image at the end, the scraps of cotton, that too seems to belong to her. I haven't seen that image anywhere else. I said that there are almost no original images in Persian poetry. Well, that's one, I think. Though there's so much Persian poetry that nobody can read all of it and there's an awful lot I haven't read and maybe it's not original, but I haven't come across it anywhere else. It does also seem, I hope this doesn't sound too sexist, but it does also seem a feminine image, considering the roles that women had at that time and were likely to have, that she thinks of scraps of cotton as keeping her deaf. Okay. I said on Friday that I was going to talk a tiny bit about the gender of the beloved and the gazelle. I got interested in this question for a number of reasons. The gender of the beloved and the Persian gazelle is something which is argued about ignored, sort of skated over, gone back to, and so on and so forth. Of course, people who don't read very much medieval poetry anyway, when they read Persian gazelles, if they read them, they tend to read them as modern love poems. And so if they buy men, they assume that they're to women. Scholars always say, no, the gender of the beloved in the Persian gazelle is male. It's a boy. And in fact, the gazelle is basically a pederastic poem. It's written by an adult male to an adolescent, a male. The adolescent male is almost always of inferior social status too. That is, he might be a slave or he might be a servant. He's sometimes a saggy, the person who pours the wine. This is the kind of general scholarly take on the nature of the beloved and the Persian gazelle, who is very unspecifically or inspecifically described as well. The descriptions of the beloved and the Persian gazelle are very impersonal, they're general. The same tropes and metaphors and so on are applied to beloved after beloved by different poets. There isn't a distinctive. You don't get the sense of a particular beloved. You just get the sense of a generic beloved who is addressed in these poems. That's not, in fact, that's not a criticism at all. It's just the nature of the poetry. It's the way this poetry is. It's very, the things that are valued in Persian poetry are often quite different from the things that are valued in Western poetry. I'm talking about the Middle Ages. And for that reason, to read them with Western expectations is to be disappointed. And in the same way, when Persians, Iranians who are used to Persian medieval poetry, read English Renaissance or medieval poetry, they're often very disappointed because it doesn't match up to the expectations of the poetry. I know a lot of Iranians who secretly think that Shakespeare is really poor stuff compared to Hafez. But it's because they're different, they're writing according to different criteria. And if you're going to get anything out of the poetry, you have to accept the criteria for what they are. You can't say, I wish they write differently. There's no point in doing that at all. Anyway, the gender of the beloved. Now, Johan Khartoum, she's a woman and she's writing within this convention of the Khazal. Now, is she writing to an adolescent boy? Probably not. Is it still a homoerotic poem? Is she writing to a woman? Probably not. Who is she writing to? Immediately the fact that this poem is written by a woman complicates the whole structure of what's going on in the Khazal. It's almost certain that Johan Khartoum is writing to a man, virtually certain. The poems sound, they feel as if they're written to somebody she has had some, or some of them do anyway, somebody she has had some intimate aerotic experience with who is male. They feel that way. But there is a very peculiar twist. Johan Khartoum, Dominic Brookshaw points this out. Johan Khartoum very often writes as if she is a man herself. Now, in doing that, she is taken over the conventions of the Khazal. The Khazal is normally written by a man, so she writes as a man. In one Khazal, it's quite extraordinary poem. I haven't translated the whole thing, it's a long poem. In one Khazal, she goes through a list of legendary pre-Islamic lovers and she describes herself each time as the male. And she says, let me find it in my introduction. I don't want to quote it wrong. She says, you are Laila, you are Laila. I am Majnun, I am Majnun, I am Majnun. You are Shirin, I am Farhad. You are Shirin, you are Shirin, you are Shirin. I am Khosro. You are Azra, you are Azra. I am Varmegh, I am Varmegh. You are Gulshaw, you are Gulshaw. I am Vargeh, I am Vargeh. You are Vis, I am Rameen. This is a woman talking and she is ascribing the male role to herself throughout the poem. She does this in other poems too. This is the most extreme example. She does it in other poems too. We have a very peculiar gender situation here. We have somebody who we know is a woman writing as if she is a man to somebody who we presume is a man who she is addressing as if he were a woman. It's not unlike the gender situation we get in Shakespeare comedy. Shakespeare comedies, of course, were written for groups of actors who were all male and the female parts were taken by boys. So we get boys pretending to be women on stage and then those women pretend to be boys whilst they're on stage. I mean Rosalind, for example, and as you like it, it's acted by a boy pretending to be a woman and then Rosalind disguises herself as a boy. So we have a boy disguised as a woman disguised as a boy. Now Johan Khartoum's poems are often very like that. We have somebody who is writing as a man who is a woman who is writing as a man and then as a man, he will assume the female role that is the role of begging and supplication and tears that is he will assume the subservient role which is traditionally the female role. So we have a woman being a man, being a woman as it were. As I said, it's not unlike the Shakespeare comedy situation. This made me think about the complexity of gender in the Persian Ghazal. I don't think it's a simple thing at all. Sirus Shamisa, who has written the standard book on the Persian Ghazal, it's called, I'm forgetting the name. It's Sirus Ghazal, Taa Mruz. He says that the beloved in the Persian Ghazal is a male 90% of the time. He gives that figure 90% of the time. I'm not sure about this at all. Let me introduce another bit of evidence. The evidence here is the contemporary poet to Jahan Khartoum Al Hafez, who is Obed Azarkhani. Now Obed Azarkhani is the one Persian poet of the Middle Ages who actually identifies the lover by gender. He does this repeatedly. And sometimes he has boys and sometimes he has girls and in some poems he has both. Now Obed is an obscene poet and Obed is sort of deliberately trying to shock but he is using the conventions of the Ghazal and the Rubai to talk about erotic relationships and he introduces both genders with ease. There's no feeling that it has to be a boy. Certainly not that it has to be a girl, they are both there. And in fact he has a number of poems in which he debates the advantages, I'm not going to read them, in which he debates the advantages of sleeping with boys as against sleeping with girls or sleeping with girls as against sleeping with boys. This is Obed talking about gender relationships in poetry. Now, and in fact he usually comes down on the side of the girl when he does this, which is again interesting because it's assumed that the beloved is always a boy in these short poems but Obed seems to prefer girls. That might have been Obed's personal preference but we don't know, but anyway. I want to, and I'm going to end with this which is rather coat trailing. It's like the matador hanging out his cloak for the bull and then running off but I'm going to end with this which is I think the situation was quite likely to be as it was in the classical poetry of the West that is in the poetry of Greece and Rome where poems were routinely written to both boys and girls with no particular distinction and with no particular fuss about it and a poem could be to, and some poets, take for example one of the most famous lyric poets of Latin poetry of Rome, Horace. Horace says in his satires, I have a thousand passions for boys, I have a thousand passions for girls. In his odes he actually names particular girls and he names particular boys. What's interesting about this, what is really interesting I think is that he just takes it for granted that that's how it is. He doesn't sort of set up an argument that I'm peculiar like this. I swing both ways as it were. He doesn't say that at all. He just says this is it. Marshall has poems to both boys and girls even Ovid who is kind of obsessively heterosexual. Nobody was ever as interested in women's erotic lives before Ovid as Ovid was. Even Ovid says that his beloved can be a boy or a girl with beautiful long hair. That is, even Ovid says it can go either way. This I believe was the... We tend to think of sex and biology as sex as being fixed by biology but there's a lot of evidence that it is also determined in some way by what the society thinks is permissible and what the society thinks is okay. What the society... The way the society thinks the sexual world is. It's clear that in the ancient sexual world relations with both boys and girls by the same people were taken for granted. I think that this was also probably the case in medieval Iran. There is a bit... I can't get into this because I haven't time but there is a lot of evidence that much of the Hellenistic rhetoric, the rhetoric of late classical antiquity in the West and much of Hellenistic rhetoric was practised and some of it comes from Western Asia which of course was ruled by Iran and which was seen as part of the Iranian world. That that rhetoric, Hellenistic rhetoric in fact passed into medieval Persian rhetoric. There are real connections between them. I realised this when I was translating Beeson Ramin. The descriptions of beauty in Beeson Ramin ask textbook descriptions of beauty which you could find in somebody like Quintillion talking about how to describe somebody. It follows all... And some of the metaphors are exactly the same, for example. Many of the metaphors are exactly the same. So I think there was some kind of connection between Hellenistic rhetoric and the rhetoric of Persian, erotic, medieval erotic poetry particularly at the beginning, the 11th, 12th centuries but then of course it feeds into the later period. There was a connection between Hellenistic and Persian. This is facilitated in Persian by the fact that there is no gender distinction, that gender is not marked except in words which are borrowed from Arabic. If you're using a Persian vocabulary with very few Arabic words in it, gender is not marked at all. And so you can write a poem about a person and also the rhetoric which describes the beloved in Persian is extremely androgynous. It doesn't describe the male in terms of being macho. It describes him in terms of being sexually ambiguous in fact of being slim and elegant and charming and so on and so forth. It doesn't describe, the male is not described in terms of a kind of excessively male persona. And the woman too is described as being small and charming and so forth. The body is supposed to be slim, the breasts are supposed to be small androgyny was the erotic sort of ideal for both sexes as it were. The point where the sex is where the young boy you can't really tell which it is that they look so similar. That seems to have been the erotic ideal from the rhetoric of this kind of poetry. I think there is a connection with Hellenistic rhetoric. I think the poets of medieval Persia, the gazelles of medieval Persia are in fact written fairly indiscriminately to both sexes or to one sex or the other. And that this insistence that it's always to a boy I think is overkill. I don't really think it's the case. Part of my getting there was thinking about the way John Houghton plays with gender in her poems. Part of it was the evidence from Obeyed who addresses both genders sort of equally. Part of it was thinking about the rhetoric of classical languages in the West and the way that this I think feeds into the rhetoric of Iran in the early Middle Ages. I think I'll stop at that point. Thank you.