 It's a genuine pleasure to be standing before you, a pleasure that would not have come about if it had not been for the extremely competent and very efficient planning and pursuing of Dr. Haikiman. I would like to thank him personally as well as professionally. I would like to thank SOAS, London Middle East Institute and the Center for Iran Studies. It seems to have quite a hub of activity here. And it's just as it should be because London after all has been traditionally a very strong bastion of Persian studies and Iranian studies, London, England in general. And so it's wonderful to be here, in a way, home away from home of Persian, the study of Persian literature and culture, even though it's home, inside home is not much of a home after all. So in a way, it's not only us who feel in exile, it's also the whole of Persian literature in real ways. I would like to mention that there is a handout. I hope everyone has it and I will be referring to it time and again. So please make sure you have that and take a look at it from time to time as I proceed in this lecture. One of the ideas of these series of lectures comes from, of course, from the fact that I consider myself a historian of Persian literature which really to me means nothing more than an interest in seeing this literature across time along what we call in our lingo a diachronic dimension. And as such, I'm immensely interested in and absorbed by a question of change. How do things change in literature? And I contend and I have written elsewhere that this is a literature in which you can see the evolutionary process, the process of a growing complexity, stage by stage, stage after painful stage of it. And to be able to speak about this literary tradition, this aesthetic tradition historically is to really shed light, not just only on the canon and the culture behind it, but also on certain important questions in articulating and writing about literary history. How can we write literary history without distancing ourselves from the text? Notice that question has not been answered as of yet. How can we keep inside the text and start writing about its changes that come about it from within the text, rather than from an overall contextual dimension looking into the text? That would be the approach that I will take in these two talks as well. And I count on you to help me hone up that approach, how to talk about the movement of the Exilic mode in Persian literature, without distancing myself from the text, which is why you have got the handle that I have requested to be distributed. So let me take you down to where I'm going to cite John Lennon. To contemplate a figure of an original exile in a paradisical scene. One of the first extant Persian poems were fragmented or composed well over a millennium ago, probably in the Plain of Saud, the birthplace of Persian language and poetry, and considered for long one of the four heavens and earth, consists of a single line of uncertain authorship, most often attributed to a late ninth century poet. We know by the name of Abouhaf Saudi, we don't know anything more about it. It concerns the condition of a mountain deer stranded without a mate in the plain. Ahuyi kuhi, dardash, cheguni da bazaar, unadar az yar, biyaar, cheguni bo bazaar. And I have an image for you. I want you to imagine this Ahuyi kuhi. This is the Plain of Saud, and this is our mountain deer, stranded on the desert. And anyone who knows Persian poetry knows that contradictions of this time, of this kind, the binary opposition between kuh and dash, between the mountain and the plain, are the struts and beams of Persian poetry. So you have an Ahuyi kuhi with its lateral hooves very well suited to tell, that's why. I want you to imagine it, please. Ha ha ha ha. Notice the lateral hooves, how it's made to handle the crags, the rocky crags of the mountain, but may weigh upon him heavily in the plain, soft land of the plain. Notice that right knee, slightly bent. And let's talk about the scene. In a real sense Persian literature begins with this image and the idea behind it, and exiling the person of a mountain deer, and the idea of an observer contemplating it. Imagine I would have Surgri standing behind the tree looking in. Think of the dissonance enshrined in the binary opposition between kuh, mountain, and dashed in the first hemi stick. And how that dissonance makes the twin questions that follow poignant, highly suggestive. A simple, stark, black, and white, and as you would say, non-existent image, snapshot of a mountain deer who's well-hoofed, well-developed lateral hooves, enable him to clear the rocky crags, but can hardly support his weight on low lands, concretize the theme of exile in a single snapshot. Ahuikuhi, Dar-dash, mountain deer in the plain. The suggestion that someone observing the animal is asking the question as a degree of sophistication to this simplicity. Is the deer running or trying to run in vain? Look at his right knee, slightly bent. Does this mean he's striding the plane just fine? Thank you very much. To the marvel of our imaginary observer? Or is he beginning to falter, eventually to fall down? Could he be standing still? Some notion of running, taking shape, lurking only in the onlooker's head. Is the deer perhaps fallen or about to fall, provoking a rhetorical question, underlining the idea that, of course, mountain deer cannot continue to run through the plane, and here's the proof. The three perspectives, the deers, the observers, and yours, the modern readers, are still teasing our mind when the notion of the mate, the jar, that precious pearl of Persian poetry, that darling word in the entire tradition, enters the scene. In the second line, it hits us, un ador as jar. What does that wonderfully suggest the word do to the question or to the poem? As her entries announced to our imagination, the question shifts from how the deer runs to how the deer exists, Bovaza, or how he exists really. The presence of the concept, making visible a crucial absence, changes the axis of the poem from one of the deer's function running to the poem's existence. From Davaza to Bovaza stretches the path that the mountain deer must run, but can't, or can he? Let's take a moment to contemplate that question. In all likelihood, the word chagune, or to come closer to the Central Asian pronunciation of the word in classical times, chagun, that word chagun, to adopt a more likely pronunciation of it in classical Persian of Central Asia, where the scene is likely to have been observed, did not necessarily carry the connotation of logical impossibility it now has taken on in modern and modernist Persian poetry. Trace the word chagune in modern and modernist poetry. Chagune, istaud, amodid, am zamin, bezeer, dopay, amizet, hekegah, tohi, mi shavad, bagyar, mi etan, jeof, tam, bein, zevah, yeh, pooch, etan, am, rah, nemi, barat. That's Farukhzad. I can cite many other examples. So the question here becomes completely rhetorical. It's not a serious question. If you want to ask a serious question, say chetor in modern Persian. But that was not the case in the 10th century. And as such, that's one of the things that a historian of literature takes into consideration. These minute differences. The question has been encumbered. The word has been encumbered already after a thousand years of usage. So it is entirely possible that our imaginary observer is seeing a mountain deer doing fine in the plane, not just walking and running all right, but exhibiting a state of well-being otherwise, as well, even without a yard. Then there's the human being, man or woman, contemplating the scene. Who is this observer of the mountain deer in the plane? Asking those simple, terrible questions. Cheguni davazah, Cheguni bovazah. Any element to reading on the animal portrayal, portray animals portrayed here tells us that although the deer usually live in small bands, the male of the species is prone to run solitary. At least in some seasons. Of course, we can ask whether our deer is really male, but what difference does it make? Or whether the observer here may be projecting his or her own thoughts and emotions, fears, and concerns on the scene? After all, we humans have done that for as long as we have shared this planet with animals. Is the observer then possibly lamenting his own separation, his own exile, from his own mountain, without his own companion? Is this verse in the end the record of a lonely, loveless life? Reading about poetic personages like the mountain deer and his absent companion, thinking about the man or woman contemplating the scene and mulling over the things absent from it, or present in it, has been my preoccupation ever since I raised my hand to ask a 13-year-old's version of the same question of our high school teacher. And he invited me to sit down and chat up because it was obvious to him that the line had been there in our textbook in order to tell us the old conjugation of Bovazza and Devazza. So literature, how do we think about it? How do we approach it? How do we examine it? That's the question I'll be asking these two nights. Questions such as the ones, this one-line occasions, have been on the lips of Persian literature for over a millennium. The 10th century epic, the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, and other early works feature a galaxy of exiles. Salman Tour, those unsympathetic strawmen made necessary by the turn in the mythical narrative from the universal to the national, can be recast as prototypes of exiled men. Their crime of fratricide, the Akili Raj, after all, their crime of fratricide, not so much attributable to the jealousy they felt for the younger brother, having been given the fairest of the lands, Iran, but to a terribly twisted manifestation of their desperate desire to return home. In his infancy, the white-haired Zal cannot but be seen as so different from other newborns that he has to be expelled from human society and exposed at the foot of Mount Alborz. His whole youthful life, an effort to return to the Zabulistan of his human condition. The effort reaches its successful conclusion not so much when his father accepts him back, but when he demonstrates his capacity for loving a woman from a faraway land through W. Zal's grandson, Sohrab, too, wishes to return, not so much to the land of Iran as to the heroic culture of which his deadbeat dad has deprived him so cruelly. Alas, he attains that wish as he breathes his last, making one last-wise observation, Shekari Miekser, Hamepeh Shemak. We all pray before death. And Siobash contemplated that peaceful prince, that prince of peace, archetype of voluntary expatriation, he falls victim to the very violence which he is trying to avoid by choosing to live away from his beloved homeland. Exiling himself to Turan, he is doomed by his very pacific nature manifested in surpassing his fears in war games superseded by his aversion to bloodshed. Finally, to cite a single example from the myth, not from the myths not enshrined in the Book of Kings, contemplate Arash the archer, Arash, come on here. He marks the physical boundary between Iran and the lands outside of it, the un-Iran, not just to the Northwest, but inside the mind of Iranians of all ages. Iran ends where the will of his citizens to defend it by giving their lives collapses. In the process, Arash becomes the other of the exiled hero, the man who claims the land, the embodiment of a territorialized sense of identity worth dying for. So no matter where you go in Persian literature, classical and modern, you see exiles, you meet exiles. The important thing is how to recognize them. What is exiled in each case? The important thing is to imagine the scenes, to intimate the text, not to distance yourself from it, I would argue. The point I'm trying to make here is that to Ferdowsi and all those involved in the Persian epic and narrative traditions, and more importantly to those Iranians in the early centuries of Islamic Iran, who fostered the dream of their culture's resurrection, the idea of Iran must have seemed transposed from the recesses of the individual psyche to the pages of diverse literary works. Contemplate Gorgonis, Visen Ramin, or contemplate Nizami's many romances. So tonight, and to our right, we are going to contemplate this display of experience, this wonderful experience of being an exile that really, in a way, epitomizes the human condition in our time. It must be hard for us, for us, reading classical Persian literature from within modern mythologies of writing and reading of nations and languages and of individuals and collective identities to grasp the significance of such myths to those who were trying to find their way to centers of political power and privilege where the art of poetry faced the task of forging a sense of collective identity at odds with all the rest through language, through the crafting of this beautiful Persian language. Many generations of poets and patrons. It must be even harder to imagine how the theme would be articulated by those who viewed the world in its entirety as a place of exile. This is a few generations later when mysticism, the mystical discourse, takes over Persian literature in general, home being where we were on the day of Alast. To pre, or pre-eternity, up in some paradise, now lost and in the presence of some God, no longer even imaginable. And what if some sort of mist-like concept of exile began to cover the ground and came to us in the form of a plethora of etherealized, mythic manifestations of an eternal wanderer. Not too dissimilar from the wandering Jew in Western literature or the flying Dutchman or the figure of that accursed undying mariner in Coleridge's terrible poem, The Ancient Bairiner. And yet that's exactly the kind of thing that we must do. If we want the past to be meaningful through this magnificent edifice we call Persian literature. So let me begin with a poet who really experienced exile and has left us with a record of it in so many of his poems, beginning perhaps a century and a day after Abu Hafti's observation of the mountain deer in the plain. Nasser Khoso of Kobadyan. Merid's special attention also, not just because he has experienced two centers of culture and spiritual refinement in his life, but more importantly for our project because he provides a link with the mystical conceptions of exile, which we'll be treating shortly. First it is true that while it is Khurasan that has brought him up as a man and a poet, it is Cairo, that wonderful center of faith and culture where he got to meet his master and spiritual guide that beckons to him from the place, his place of exile, the horrible valley of Yongan. To have him a poet and an educated man in the valley of Yongan surrounded by towering peaks is not just an undiscovered gem buried, you know he's known as Laleh Badakhshan, an undiscovered gem buried beneath tons of quarry rock, but like discarding or intentionally burying a ruby that was once mine and whose value was determined and is a proven quality back into the quarry under the piles of rubble, of rubble. And here I want, I invite you to turn to your text number two on the handout please. Here where the above lines constitute the opening, the poet mentions not just the downside of life in exile, but also its constructive impact on the intellectual growth and spiritual development of the individual seeker as well. At one point, and this is not on your handout. So it is by moving away that you grow, it is by experiencing exile, that you work your way towards character completion, perfection. In another passage he asks rhetorically, what will you find in your native town, your neighborhood, except the little that's there in that town, in that neighborhood? So movement becomes part of a human condition, which is why we need to expand our notion of exile, not as just destructive and diminishing, but as a way of growing, especially today when it's so much a part of the human condition. A generation later to Masood Sa'ad Salman, while the court of Ghazneh remains the privileged space where he has grown in power and stature, indeed where his art has flourished, his native city of Lahore emerges as a place of the poet's fondest memories to be recalled with affection only after he has fallen from grace and is exiled. Here's his own excerpt, here's an excerpt from one of his lament poems, the Tristia, and I would invite some young colleague of ours to do a study of Tristia of the Qamnaumiz, of poets and the sorrow of life in Persian poetry, because there too is a wonderful quarry of, to be mined, about his separation, his birthplace of Lahore. Ailavahur, here's handout number three. Ailavahur, Wei haq biman cheguni, bi aaf tabe roshan roshan cheguni, ay baghe tab in az manara astetura, bi gulbi lalevo banaf shavosh susan cheguni, nagah az iz farzand asto jodah shodah ast badar deo benohe wo shivan cheguni, bar pahe mando bande geran aston tanibi jan shodih, toe aknon bitan cheguni, na Fristiaan paya mo naporsi bohas na ah, kandar yehsar basto chobijan cheguni. How many times have we experienced this kind of element from our peers today, in our modern spaces of exile? We know that the early masters of Persian, Qasida and Ghazal, and both of these are excerpts from longer Qasidas. Unfortunately, the Khurasani poets are so long-winded that they think they have to exhaust all the rhyme in the language before they end the poem. They just have not been able to discipline themselves to stop at some point in the Qasida. So Qasida goes on and on and on and on. And that's true about all the Khurasani poets from Nasir al-Khusro and Masud al-Sadr Salman to Bahar and Akhaban and Khoi, your fellow neighbor in this country. It's an alluring genre. It tests because it's such a public means of address. It's such a wonderfully occasional and formal genre that you want to test your craftsmanship in the poetry as well. So we know that the early masters of Persian, Qasida and Ghazal often lamented their separation from their native environments as well as from places where they were allowed to flourish by practicing their art. The nostalgia that oozes from the lines above is not for a lost country, unlike us, we oftentimes give it the name of Iran even though what we miss may be the turn in our own little alley of childhood somewhere. But we generalize that to an abstraction called Iran. For a lost country, not nor for a conventional poetic pose, it is rather for a far more specific and immediate feeling of being away from one's birthplace or some real urban center where the poet's craft was appreciated or rewarded. Notice when you left your provincial town or I did, when I left my provincial town of Mashhad and came to Tehran at the age of 19, I didn't view that as exile. I viewed that as part of my growth. But when it was thrown out of Iran, that became exile for some reason. That's of course because the mythology of nationalism or nationalistic patriotism that I will be discussing tomorrow night. Yet it is obvious that the sense of belonging to Lahore and the feeling of resembling a body without a soul is there in the poem. At times this conception of exile can be expressed in the idea of separation, concretizing images of unpleasant or dangerous animals. Such as we see in Manu Chheri's Raven of Separation, Qorab al-Ba'in, as you know Manu Chheri was a master of Arabic poetry as well. And he has this image of Qorab al-Ba'in, the Raven of Separation that really eats his soul. Or Nasir al-Khutr, the Scorpion of Exile, Qajdome Qorbat. Or Sana'i's Demon of Exile, Diva Qorbat, to cite only a few of the numerous examples that concretize exile as an injurious, as an injurious state affecting the person of the poet as well as the personas he creates in his poetry. It is important to note though that the poetry calling his native city after he has fallen from the favor of an important patron and from the lofty position of a court poet which gave him his power and prestige. Thus in accordance with the public and ceremonial nature of the genre, the Qasidih, the exilic mode in the Persian Qasidih begins to take shape through addresses and apostrophes that picture the grieving poet stuck in some cultural wasteland, recalling the capital where he ought to be present but from which circumstances have exiled and kept him away. In a sense, this is the reverse of the situation. Farrukhih, when Farrukhih is taking his poetry to Ghazneh, Baka Harwanu Holibaraftam Ze Sistan, Baha Holy Tani Dezidil, Baha Fdezejan, he's young, he's an up and coming poet and he's taking his way to Ghazneh. That's where it's at, nowhere else. It's in Ghazneh that someone will buy his poetry. In such works, the apostrophe to the city or court where he would prosper but from which he has been exiled contains his lament against fate and the hunchback heavens that have affected the misfortune of life in effect. Just as some has done Zal wrong by driving him away, the king would be unjust for turning the poet away from the locus of his court or take Nasir Khosroz in his exile in Yom Gan, remembering Khurasan or Masoud in Ghazneh, recalling the beloved Lahore or Sana'i residing in Bagh and remembering Ghazneh. All of these conditions, there's nobody to carry their message to the patron so they oftentimes end up addressing the wind as the messenger. That's how the wind begins its mission as the messenger of Persian poetry. In Hafiz you see the wind, the Zafar, so often taking messages from the lover to the beloved and if there's any message from the beloved rarely of course. So there's nobody to carry their message to the patron, the place or the people who have unjustly and cruelly rejected them. So this scene, this is scene one of the poetry that I'm trying to communicate of exile. Now we come to a section of my talk which I call the progress of the solitary soul. It ought to be obvious how in our search for the exilic mode in Persian literature we're approaching the portal of the mystical tradition. In the mystical tradition, an amazing thing happens and that is the whole world is a place of exile. The poet begins to recall the ahda al-ast, the covenant of al-ast of pre-eternity when God said al-astubarabbakum am I not your lord? Kalu bali, they said yes and that became the beginning of a bala. Sana'i says, as barayyik bali kandar azal guftas jan ta'ababb merdi bali and dar bala after that. So the whole of the world is a place of exile. It's not the city or that place. This we can see in Sayyid al-Abad al-Alma'ad, Sana'i's famous work. You can see this in Manta Qutay. It often amazes me how much we neglect when we distance ourselves from the text. A few years ago I wrote an article comparing the image of Simorgh, that wonderful bird of Persian poetry in the Shah Nameh, contrasting it really with its image in Manta Qutay. And it seemed to be the only thing around that did it that way. We have seen both of them. How in the Shah Nameh, the Simorgh is a real bird, the size of 30 birds, corporeal. When she lands, she raises the dust. She talks to zhal and so on and so forth. And yet in Manta Qutay, it's not a creature, it's a presence, somber and mount guft in some mirror-like surface. So I'm leaving all of that to take you to a very little, very little red text, really. And that is Sohrabardi's Ghissatul Orbatul Qarbiyeh. I often think that Sohrabardi's position in transforming Persian literature from what I call the objective mode of presentation to the interiorizes it from the objective to the subjective. Imagine the struggles and the ordeals of Rustam and compare those with the ordeals of Sheikh Saman fighting his own nafs, his own animal nature, whose struggle is more, is harder, more arduous. Imagine Jame Jam, that wonderful crystal ball. It's a crystal ball in the Shah Nameh, but it's not a crystal ball in mystical literature. Be yagin nankhe Jame Jam dile tost. It's interiorized. No matter where you turn, you see the devices of Persian poetry interiorized because now the challenge is interior. The challenge is inside the human being. It's no longer a diva or demon. It's your own nafs that you have to fight to work your way towards purity. So my choice is dictated really by my desire to find the likes of the mountain deer in the plain. And so here I have, but also I want to show you the movement from the very similar, which is what I call, it's part of the jargon of literary theory, to the allegorical and the symbolic. You'll see a similar transformation tomorrow night as I talk about certain modes of presentation, let's say in Nadirpur and Khoy on the one hand and in Qassemi and Masoudi's novels and the other. So the symbolic depiction of this person, this personage in Ghislatul Ghorbatul Qarbiyeh is wonderful to behold. And here I'm taking you to your hand up, citation number four. Because I traveled with my brother Asim from Diyar to the west of the country, then I arrived in Nagyahan to see that the people of that land are from the city of Ghayrovan. So because our ancestors came and told us that we are the sons of Sheikh Hadi Ibn al-Khair al-Yamani, they took us and locked us in chains and shackles and they imprisoned us in a place that is no end to them and there was a cup of tea for us to drink, so the two brothers are incarcerated. They receive a letter delivered by Hupo. This is where the fortunes of Hupo begin to rise here and also in Mantegotteh where he becomes the Khothodeh Hadi Shadeh, the guided seeker. Delivered by Hupo from their father Hadi in which they are instructed on how to find their way to deliverance and are informed on all that awaits them along the way. It is an arduous path indeed involving sea voyages and shipwrecks, a visit to the island of Gag and Magag and encountered with the skulls of Adan Thamud, sacrifices of their sister and mother and so many numerous other ordeals. In the end the travelers ascend Mount Sinai and again and gain an audience with their father. An old man from the brilliance of his light, the heavens and earth were nearly split open. None of the mystics call this thing God but it is an image of God. So the father addresses the sons and here's what he says, number five on your outline. It's amazing. This is Shahr-Hai-Galib or Bilad-Garib. When Hafiz says, he's really giving his own version of the mountain and the plane. Sohrabadhi's engaging narrative compels the reader to set out on her own journey in search of the parallels that make it meaningful in ways that are relevant to the specific brand of illumination philosophy. In other words, I contend here that really here, Sohrabadhi, the poetic amateur, shall we call him or the literary amateur is really serving Sohrabadhi the illuminationist, the master illuminationist. He is putting the devices of literature at the service of his own ideology of illuminationism. For many, for my purposes, I would like to offer a reading of this tale and by extension of all of Sohrabadhi's tales of initiation. He has got a dozen of those, not just as one of the most comprehensive expressions of the condition of exile in the Persian mystical literature but as one of the most palpable articulations of the longing, the mystic fields in a very real and deeply felt human sense. In Rumi, contemplate the nae. It has been exiled, uprooted, cut away from Nehista and all of that lament is because it seeks to return to the reed bed. An exile representing the whole of human being. Contemplate all of so many mystical texts where the effort, the ultimate effort is to reverse the Adamic cosmic fall and work your way through a cosmic ascent. It was, the moment of Adam's fall was a moment of catastrophe. We were exiled. And so we have to crawl our way back to that mountain once more, once more to meet, to arrive at Laqaa Allah which is a Sufi term for to see the face of God. So our mountain deer has come a long way really come to think of it from the plain of Sogd, all the way to what? The seven valleys, the Haft Vadi in Mantaghutte in the Conference of the Birds to move from Qayrovon to the presence of God. In so many ways you can use the analogy and you can see it grow in complexity and before your eyes grows in complexity. So I know of no such narrative of exile, more beautifully designed or more perfectly expressed at once comprehensive and totalizing and yet completely open to non-mystical interpretations. That's the marvel of Sogd Vadi I would contend. And then I get to the next section of my talk, the city, the world and the soul. And what I say here is of course no survey of Persian literature along the historical dimension is complete if you do not mention Haft Viz. I wish I could skip it because he's so entrapy but I can't. So let's contemplate Haft Viz. The question about Haft Viz is that all of his articulations of the exellent condition must be seen as to be creations of his own lively imagination because we have no cogent reason to believe that he ever absented himself from the city of Shiraz. People talk about the little trip to Yazd but it could have been just a tour that he took of the city and he didn't like it at all. So as such he provides proof if proof were needed that in poetry the most effective is often the most fictive, the most fictional. The more you, which is said in that wonderful Arabic thing, Ahsan Huakzebahu, the more you lie, the closer you get to the truth and you create beauty. That's the function of literature. In historical sense too, Haft Viz closes the circle opened by the masters of the Qasidah and the Qazar. Of all the poets who have shaped the lexicon and imagery of mystical poetry in Persian, he is most consistent in articulating exile as a condition of being away, not from a city, not from a city, but from the beloved. So the balance between Yahr and Yahr which began with the mountain deer being displaced and having been left without the Yahr tilts towards the Yahr. So in the end if you've got your Yahr you're okay. In him, as in Sogdi five centuries ago earlier, the Yahr and Yahr node manifestly gravitate toward the former. For him, the abode of the beloved is the homeland from whence lovers have been separated. So thus in one poem, he has this marvelous line, Notice the word sheen, and it's two meanings, the curl and China. So he's in Shiraz, he imagines his beloved in China, and of course his deal has left him and gone to China or has gone to the turn of the of the tresses. And he feels it, he feels it. And he feels it, he feels it. And he feels it, he feels it. Of the of the tresses and he feels fine at home. Thank you. He's not an exile, he is where he wants to be. It's just that he has been separated from his own Maskan-e-Ma'alouf in the chest of the port. So I have selected a few lines from another Ghazal and here's my text number five from the handout. I heard that Dr. Jahanpur mentioned that he too once sought advice from Hafiz and got exactly the same Ghazal. It's not wonderful, he has done that to others as well. You're in good company. And noticed, he has not traveled, she has, if it's a she. So, in the last line, the speaker defines himself as once again as the inhabitant, inhabitant, not of any physical place, but of the land of the beloved, Diyar-e-Habib, thus making it clear that any sense of attraction, not of the land of the beloved, but making it clear that any sense of attraction, he feels toward a place and rises from the fact that the beloved resides there. Later in the poem, he reiterates both the connection and the hierarchy by calling the air of the beloved abode, Hava'u ye manzil-e yar, and you see phrases like that in Hafiz, sprinkled all over his divan. Diyar-e-dust, Diyar-e-del-bar, Kuya-dust, Kuya-yar, Kuche-e-e-m'ashuq, Kuche-e-e-m'ashuqe, Manzil-e-yar, Manzil-e-janan, and so on and so forth. So, to recap, our mountain deer has come a long way indeed, not just along the way from the plain of Sogd in Central Asia to the southern and western cities, such as Isfahan and Shiraz, real and imaginary, and not just in time from the 10th to the 14th century, but from the simple specific image of a solitary or snapshot of a solitary soul stranded but still having his feet planted on the terra firma of some real geography, having now been transformed from a real creature to a more malleable figure that may or may not be the port caught in a world that is not necessarily the objective world out there. It's an imaginary space, somewhere in the human soul. Our initial impression of him and his abilities has changed as well, of course. It's not just a matter of a single entity in displaced in a simple place. There are so many equations for Hafiz and for us to consider. The reed bed, I mentioned that one. The changing colors and climes of seasons and so on and so forth, and I'm skipping a lot here. But let me get to the penultimate part of my talk and that's the expatriate as explorer and teacher. I argue that the next important shift in the presentation of the Exilic mode in Persian literature occurs in the 16th and 17th century as the Safavids settle and make a court of Isfahan and some of them for their own purposes begin resume patronage of poetry but only of a particular kind of that which now serves the official religion of Shiism. Some more secular poets begin to go to India. And here I'm going to skip quite a number of pages because I know I'm going beyond my time. But at the same time, it is the image of the exile that becomes insubstantial. It becomes more ethereal. It becomes less palpable. It does not have the solidity of the mountain deer in the plain. Notice how when Bashi Bafi of the 16th century says Sha'iri qane am mojarrad gard az hame tshizu az hame kaz fard do jahan pishiman pashiz iniz he tshizan bachash tshiz iniz. aaram az sohbate jahan daaram fakh az khaki aas tan daaram. So belonging not to anything or not claiming anything but really remaining content with a minimum about what you've got. And time and again you see these mythical birds appearing once again. Not just Seymour, but Homa and Anga as well. In one poem, Kaleem, who has this famous qazal about Badnam-e-hayat, he says dar kishema tajarro de Anga tamam nis dar qaidena maand agar az nishan gozash. So even one nishan is too much belonging. You really have to become mojarrad, become abstract, abstract yourself from everything in order to seek proximity to the ultimate source of existence. But there's that dimension as well where India, especially the Northern Indian courts of Akbar and Jahan Shah, of Shah Jahan and so on and so forth become important centers of Persian poetry. So Sa'a-e-Fayyaz-e-Lahiji says habbaza hendikabe-e-aamal, khase-e-yaran-aafiyat-jura. Harkeshod mostati e-fazluhunar, safarehen vajib astura. So the poets begin to make their name rise to fame in Iran, but then make their fortune in India because the patronage has shifted from Iran proper, the courts of Khorasan 500 years previously to the courts of Delhi and Agra and so on and so forth. Or Sa'a-e-16th century, 17th century, he says pishaz-e-narchan shohraddash dar mulke-e-raab, seire mulkehen sa'a-e-raab wal-an-daab al-zikar. And finally, I get to my text number 10, and that's by Bidil. Unfortunately, very few Iranians know Bidil, but he is as important as Hafiz. And Bidil-e-shanasi is an important area of investigating this poet's thought, especially because he comes closest to a secular, hedonistic kind of thought as he articulates in his poetry. So Persian poet of India in the late 17th and early 18th century builds up on the figure of the archetypal lover in the Persian tradition, that's Majnun, to make his point about exile from human society. And here's my text number 10. First of all, I want to thank the people of the world for the day of your visit, it's been a long time. I wish I could have seen someone in the sea, and Bidil in the desert. Some of them were in the pocket of their pockets. I wish I could have seen someone in the sea. I wish I could have seen someone in the desert, and Bidil in the desert. And Bidil in the desert. And Bidil in the desert. In such articulations, these and other poets of the so-called Indian school in Persian poetry depict exile not in any corporeal form and not related to the lives of real flesh and blood creatures, such as the deer or us human beings. But through shadowy figures that inhabit a liminal space somewhere between this world and the next, between the known and the unknowable, between that which is experienced and that which can barely be imagined. From the solitary image of the fratricide cane through the ghost-like silhouettes of Khizr and Gag and Magag, the mythical presences as Homa, Anga, and Simur, we have an extension of the image of exile that connects the real to the fantasized. The history of British rule in India and the decline of Persian there is itself a huge area of investigation. I invite you to look into that. But my main concern is that through the 19th century, inspired by nationalistic feelings of different types and intensities, almost all diverse groups of Iranians began to redefine the relationship between the languages in which they spoke daily and the ones in which they express themselves when writing poetry. So you see a chasm opening up between what we call today the colloquial Persian and the language of literary Persian, especially the classical texts. In their quest for authentic and original identity, different nation states that spoke the same language, let's say, not only Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, but the courts of Northern India, the Caucasus, and the Ottoman Empire. So these nation states born of such concerns developed divergent perceptions of the origins of their own nations. The waning of Persian and Caucasus and the Ottoman Empire and in the Indian subcontinent in the late 19th century brought about radically new configurations of Persian literature as limited to a few nation states, such as we know today. At the same time, Iran solidifies in the shape that we see today in our maps. One important development arising from this reconfiguration was the development of a literary language in Iran that helped problematic yet very important relations with the language of classical poetry. That's why so many people posit a revolutionary change, a kind of sea change between modern and classical traditions in Persian literature. Whereas I have argued elsewhere that really you can show stage by stage reliance of the moderns and the classical to even change it. In fact, you cannot distance yourself from a tradition, especially such a powerful tradition if you do not assimilate elements of it into your own discourse. Meanwhile, Iranian nationalism was making inroads into the minds and hearts of the country's citizens. Over the rubble of the linguistic homeland, that vast dwelling place of culture, various claimants to the legacy of classical Persian poetry began to build imaginary homes in smaller territories that are now the modern countries of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, reducing distant memory, to distant memory, the remainder of the civilization once unified or at least in the imagination of its poets and other thinkers. They then had to invent an imaginary padlocks and crossbars, wooden or metal bolts and walls and barriers of all sorts to keep out the other claimants. And that's the unfortunate thing in modern era, how the pieces of that patrimony, that relic of the past is being fought over between Iranians, Afghanistan, of course Iranians because it's the most resourceful and the vastest of these cultures. It has been able more or less to appropriate all of it in the name of Iran. So that now every classical poet that had nothing to do with the land of Iran, such as Mathut Sa'a Salman or Abu Ha'af Sogdi or Udaki or anyone else, is now being named as Iranian. So they began to view the other contributors to this glorious tradition, not as brothers, but as others. At the same time, the demands of literary modernism fostered the new spirit of pilgrimage among the Iranian elite. The young and talented Iranians who traveled to Austria and France in Abbas Mirza's famed Caravans of Knowledge gave us a whole translation movement which really enabled us to build on later on in the century and all over the 20th century. I have a part that I talk about Khaterat Ha'ash Sayyya and Safar Nameh Ibrahim Bey by Zehra Abedin Maraghi. I'll leave that aside, but I'll go to my final paragraph. A generation or two later, men like Qazvini and Taqizadeh Khuda and Jamalzadeh and Hidayat literally went to school in Europe. They viewed Europe not as a site of exile, living or expatriate settlement, but as schools even shrines to be observed, touched and yes, explored for ennoblement, edification and emulation, points of comparison to be explored. And they did some of course in all sincerity for the greater good of the motherland, its people and yes, for rejuvenating Iran's literature. Tormented souls, they were indeed and the reading of the classics most clearly reflects that torment in their soul. They read the transnational and heterogeneous past of Persian literature from an evolving mythology of nationalist Iranian identity that negated the internationalism of Persian classics and erased the hybridized aspects of the literary past. Shuttling back and forth between the need for ever more ancient origins on the one hand and the desire for self origination between departure and return, between the desire for closure and the realization of literature's eternal open-endedness. They resembled nomads upon arrival in the pasture that they had sought far and long found land scorched. What they never realized was that their destination was always simply missing, not there, not existing in the world out there, but inside that tradition. But that's another story and you'll have to wait for it until tomorrow night. Thank you very much. Thank you.