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Quatrains of Mahsati of Ganja, Literary Imagination Rebecca Gould

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Quatrains of Mahsati of Ganja, Literary Imagination Rebecca Gould From the SelectedWorks of Rebecca Ruth Gould Spring 2011 Quatrains of Mahsati of Ganja, Literary Imagination Rebecca Gould Available at: https://works.bepress.com/r_gould/4/ Literary Imagination Advance Access published March 26, 2011 Literary Imagination, pp. 1–3 1 doi:10.1093/litimag/imr013 Mahsatı¯ of Ganja’s Wandering Quatrains: Translator’s Introduction REBECCA GOULD* Downloaded from Mahsatı¯of Ganja, whose name combines the old Persian words for moon (mah) and lady (satı¯), is among the most famous of all classical Persian woman poets. Born in early twelfth century Ganja, at that time the literary capital of Azerbaijan, Mahsatı¯pioneered the ruba¯’ı¯yya¯t (quatrain) form. Best known to an Anglophone reading public from Edward Fitzgerald’s translations of Omar Khayya¯m (d. 1131), ruba¯’ı¯yya¯t is the plural litimag.oxfordjournals.org of ruba¯’ı¯(“four”), an Arabic word denoting two verses bound together by an aaba rhyme scheme. The rhyme scheme admits of variations, such as aaaa (employed in four out of the ten poems translated here). Mahsatı¯ shares much in common with the elder poet-astronomer: a pessimistic orientation to life, distaste for organized religion, impa- tience with social mores, a predilection for transgressing convention through wine-drinking, and a preference for authorial anonymity, which has accounted for many misattributed poems in the case of both poets (see Sharma 2007; Davidson 2004). at Freie Universitaet Berlin on March 28, 2011 Mahsatı¯is distinguished from Omar Khayya¯m, and, for that matter from most of her Persian predecessors and contemporaries, by one major biographical detail: alone of the major medieval Persian poets, she was a woman. Scholars will always debate the relevance of gender to Mahsatı¯’s literary output. Some will decide it is better to foreground her seemingless gender-free genius for poetic form; others will regard this as evasion, but that Mahsatı¯’s body inflected her words no less than Marina Tsvetaeva inflected hers cannot be denied. The question is how the gendered inflection affected her verse. Persian does not distinguish grammatically between male and female, even for pronouns, so, context aside, there is no way to determine whether the lover or speaker in any Persian text is male or female. For a true connoisseur of this tradition, this difficulty is in fact the point: you are not supposed to know; ambiguity is classical Persian poetry’s highest aesthetic value (see Davis 2004). Gender ambiguity does however create a challenge for the translator; American and British poets, especially in the modern age, tend to prefer to concrete rhythms of daily life, just as their readers assume that the more literal the poetry, and the more obvious its referents, the better. The closest approximation in American litera- ture to Mahsatı¯’s aesthetic preference for “telling it slant” may be the studied indeter- minacy of Wallace Stevens, or Emily Dickinson. Mahsatı¯’s ruba¯’ı¯yya¯t will fare best in English when read with a non-literalistic aesthetic, and without any attempt to reduce her multivalent texts to singular meanings. Mahsatı¯’s poems deal with sex, divinity, death, and love all at once, even and especially when they seem to be occupied with other subjects. This is thematically and formally true; *Rebecca Gould, Columbia University, Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures, New York, NY, USA. E-mail: [email protected] ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: [email protected] 2 her poems tend to elide the second object in any comparison. Two objects are often juxtaposed, for example, prayers delivered from a carpet of hypocrisy and a Brahmin’s thread in a wine-house, without being told what exactly to do with these two objects. It is left to the reader and translator to determine the form taken by the comparison. In other instances, as in the comparison between the poet’s “wine-house thieving” and a judge’s “orphan-robbery,” no word indicates that an actual comparison has taken place; the two phrases are simply given without commentary. Only mildly assisted by a laconic “than”— “better” or “worse” would have left less room for ambiguity—we infer what the poet is trying to say. Even more dramatically, as in the ruba¯’ı¯ beginning, “Be warned,” Mahsatı¯ sometimes entirely omits the grammatical endpoint of her sentences, in this case the object the addressee is supposed to be searching for. The identity of the never-attained object is Downloaded from left for the reader to discern. Such ambiguities may be unfamiliar to the Anglophone reader, but in the case of Mahsatı¯’s verse, they are formally enshrined in the grammar of her poems. Added to classical Persian’s resistance to marking gender grammatically is a generally premodern orientation away from the personality of the poet and toward the fictional litimag.oxfordjournals.org persona enshrined in the text. In reading literature before Romanticism, it is a mistake to conflate the poet’s voice with her “actual” personhood, or her authentically female self. Mahsatı¯was writing in age when literary dissimulation was not only natural but positively requisite for the attainment of aesthetic excellence. Her poems reference intimate sexual encounters, evenings passed in taverns, where she interestingly groups herself under term the masculinist term mardom (much like “mankind” in prior centuries, mardom included women by implication, but often in practice referred to exclusively male assemblies), at Freie Universitaet Berlin on March 28, 2011 and love affairs, in which she refuses to subordinate her desires to her lover. It is most useful to read such simulated moments of personal revelation as impersonal literary exercises, embedded as they are within a canon of male-generated literary representations, and as personally inflected, given that the author in question is possessed equally of a talent for imitation and innovation, and could not but write in her own uniquely gendered register. The qaBı¯da (panegyric ode) was a genre in which Mahsatı¯ never wrote, though she must have been intimately familiar with it. In the twelfth century, the qaBı¯da, not the ruba¯’ı¯, was the genre of choice for the poet aspiring to literary immortality. That Mahsatı¯never once in her life composed a qaBı¯da—or if she did, that such texts have not reached us—sets her apart from most poets of her age and suggests much about the nature of her literary ambitions. Other contemporaneous [poets] of Azerbaijan such as NiCa¯mı¯ [Nizami] of Ganja and Kha¯qa¯nı¯ of Shirwa¯n (not far from Ganja) composed ruba¯’ı¯yya¯t as occasional verses, but the ruba¯’ı¯ possessed a deeper significance for Mahsatı¯; it was the genre in which she most powerfully crafted her unique, and at the same time, entirely impersonal, poetic persona. According to the most recent count, in Mu’ı¯nddı¯n Mihra¯bı¯’s 2003 critical edition, there are 298 ruba¯’ı¯yya¯t by Mahsatı¯in all. A recently-discovered manuscript, the Treasury of Tabriz (Safı¯na-yi Tabrı¯z), had added six to this number (Sharma 2007: 156), suggesting that future discoveries may increase the number of Mahsatı¯’s ruba¯’ı¯yya¯t. Like Omar Khayya¯m (see Davidson 2004), Mahsatı¯was more interested in unmasking hypocrisy than in upholding court-sanctioned inequality. Given that no ruba¯’ı¯ author could expect financial compensation for his or her poems, the wandering quatrain genre was better suited to exposing hypocrisy than the [qasida] qaBı¯da. No doubt this explains 3 at least in part the reason for Mahsatı¯’s genre affiliations: if the qaBı¯da was the paradig- matic genre for a courtly literature founded on inequalities of class and gender, the ruba¯’ı¯ constitutes an analogous anti-courtly aesthetic that consistently accompanied and con- sistently subverted the courtly mode. Of interest is that both the ruba¯’ı¯ and the qaBı¯da tended to be composed and read by the same literati. Mahsatı¯is rare in having chosen one genre over the other. Mahsatı¯ participated in the anti-courtly ruba¯’ı¯yya¯t tradition with varying degrees of circumspection. As the poems translated here attest, she did not hesitate to cross gender boundaries and to violate social codes for proper female (and male) conduct for the sake of poetry. Many anthologists have bowdlerized or simply omitted Mahsatı¯’s sexually obscene verse, deeming it inappropriate to a feminine authorial persona to attribute sexual desire to Downloaded from herself in verse (see Ishaque 1950; Sprachmann 1995). Although she worked largely alone, and belonged to no school of poets, Mahsatı¯was a true member of the avant-garde: more than any poet in her milieu, more than anyone during her lifetime, she enabled the ruba¯’ı¯yya¯t to engage themes commonly excluded from the mainstream of classical Persian literature. Remarking on the large number of her poems collected in the ruba¯’ı¯ litimag.oxfordjournals.org anthology in a western Iranian medieval manuscript of the Treasury of Tabriz (Safı¯na-yi Tabrı¯z), one scholar suggested that Mahsatı¯ may have been more popular even than Khayya¯m during her lifetime (Sharma 2007: 157). Given both her gender and her geo- graphic location on the periphery of the Persianate world, such literary prominence would be remarkable. Mahsatı¯’s prominence in the twelfth century is also surprising given her subsequent neglect and absence from the major compendiums of Persian literature, par- ticularly those directed towards an Anglophone readership (e.g. Brown). Has the at Freie Universitaet Berlin on March 28, 2011 historiography of Persian literature been haunted by the belief that only men can compose literary masterpieces? None of Mahsatı¯’s readers would have agreed.
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