Translator: Gemma Gilani Reviewer: shirin etebar
There is always an important question,
especially with the changes that accompany
the dawning of new generations and eras,
an important question comes up.
What is literature?
What does literature do?
And how is literature made?
In order to answer this question,
we have to start with the relationship between language and literature.
It is natural that literature
is made within and with language.
Words
are the instrument through which the meanings, thoughts, feelings
and wishes of the poet and the writer are transmitted
to an audience.
An audience who knows that language.
Now we’ll see that language and literature
are closely linked together.
For this reason, if you are not familiar with a language,
you will not understand the literature of that people and language well.
A correct understanding of literature
is truly dependent upon knowing the language
and understanding the linguistic features which appear within poetry.
For this reason,
anyone who wants to understand Persian literature
must understand the Persian language.
Thus literature and language are in a never-ending cycle,
and have a eternal connection.
We’ve said that language makes literature,
but literature also nourishes and enriches language.
It strengthens language. It deepens language.
This is why
when a work of literature is created,
although many works of literature are themselves derived from language,
for example, many of the stories in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh are folk stories,
but Ferdowsi takes them, and returns them once again to the Persian language.
This language, these stories, these points, concepts and parables,
spread among the people,
and using their own specific rigor, using their own specific methods,
the people take these tales, stories, epics, and poems,
they read them, they judge them,
and they transform them into different forms,
sometimes even giving them more depth themselves.
Like the poetry of Hafez, which we are constantly adding more depth to.
To the point that the poems of Hafez
have become the spiritual history of us Iranians.
Therefore, this linguistic exchange,
this exchange between language and literature is extremely important.
When we read literature,
we are, in reality, deepening our understanding of our own language
and we are strengthening our own language.
Now we need to look at the presence of the poet,
at the space in which the poet resides.
The poet,
in his or her most exalted form, usually has complete command of the language.
That is to say, Saadi, Hafez, Ferdowsi and Shamloo,
these are people who can masterfully perform in
and express themselves using the Persian language.
But from an intellectual point of view,
the poet also holds a special status.
A poet like Saadi,
is in reality, a go-between between history and civilization.
Apart from the issue of language, there is also the issue of meaning.
That is to say that Saadi,
by making use of the legacy of Ancient Iran,
and of cultural events that happened before his time,
Saadi takes this heritage,
he merges it together,
he distils it down to its intellectual essence,
its intellectual ingenuity,
and adds his own understanding to it.
Then, he converts it into a literary and linguistic form,
and using his linguistic genius,
he reaches a delicate, powerful and clear exposition,
or as they used to say, he reaches an eloquence,
which can then be returned to history.
That is, Saadi takes a message from ancient history,
he then takes the problems and issues from his own time, and mind,
he adds these too,
and then he sends these messages, these thoughts to a historical future,
and this is where we find the answer to the question, what is literature?
What does literature do? How is literature made?
This is where it becomes clear.
That is to say that in reality, a poet
is not just language, is not just civilization,
is not just thought, is not just morals,
but all of these things together.
For this reason, two couplets, a ghazal,
a short story and a parable from Saadi
is sometimes a concentrated capsule
which encompasses all of these issues together.
A very simple example of one of these parables,
which Saadi wrote in his work, Bustan,
is a poem of which I’ll read four couplets and you should think about how
all of the issues that I’ve pointed out are present in these four couplets.
“There once was a drunkard who held his lute tight
On the head of a pious man he smashed it one night
With the breaking of day, that kind-hearted man
Went up to the drunkard with coins in his hand
’Last night I forgave you your drunken offence
You broke your lute and you wounded my sense
But my wound has healed and my fear’s taken flight
But without this silver your life won’t come right.’”
The image of this story is that of drunkenness and piety.
During the night, a drunkard smashes his instrument
over the head of a pious man.
The next day, instead of complaining and demanding punishment,
the pious man takes out some money and says
“go and use this money to fix your instrument.”
In our culture, this message is completely clear.
We are used to
witnessing such scenes in our emotional upbringing.
It appears to be a paradox.
These two matters have a lot of contradictions.
Why does such a thing occur in literature?
For two reasons.
Literature makes use of two important tools;
The first is imagination,
the world of imagination.
The world of stories, fiction.
The whole of literature takes place in this world, in this imaginary world.
And the second is emotion.
Imagination and emotion.
That is, literature and art act in tandem
as an instrument which, using an imaginary world,
transports mankind to an emotional place.
If I want to look at the issue from a legal and social viewpoint,
it’s natural that if someone hits me over the head,
I’m going to drag him in front of the sheriff and the judge.
But when....
this scene is viewed through emotional eyes,
and I want to look at this matter
as a human being who judges
with his heart and with his emotions,
it’s natural that I’ll behave differently.
This is a common trait in world literature.
Jean Valjean,
is a prisoner who has been given identity papers which mark him as such.
Wherever he goes, he must introduce himself,
and this is his sentence for the rest of his life:
to live as an eternal exile,
an outcast from society.
But when he enters the bishop’s house,
even though he steals,
when faced with this thievery and ungratefulness,
Monseigneur Bienvenu
treats Jean Valjean with kindness.
This is the true heart of “Les Miserables”
and in reality this is
also at the heart of Saadi’s poem.
“There once was a drunkard who held his lute tight
On the head of a pious man he smashed it one night”
And this is the emotional result.
Therefore, literature is really based on imagination.
It builds an imaginary world.
It constructs a conceptual framework for us,
it brings us into that space,
and it asks us to react as human beings,
to react emotionally.
Not in other ways. Two plus two is four has no place here.
Art does the same thing.
Art shows us a picture of a starving child,
or a child caught up in war, and it asks us,
it invites us to give an emotional response.
Therefore, we really must view Saadi’s poem through the same lens.
Now, when literature delivers this key message
it’s natural that there are things happening behind the scenes,
that might be hidden out of sight of the lay reader.
These two couplets, which we can spend more than an hour analysing
from a technical, literary and linguistic viewpoint,
are full of technical and literary points and literary techniques.
When we read that
“Last night I forgave you your drunken offence”
We see that it is forgiveness that comes first,
and then drunkenness.
When in reality, drunkenness is the cause
and forgiveness is the consequence.
He should have said: “It’s because you were drunk. Now I’ll forgive you.”
And it is here that start to find some linguistics clues.
We see the same thing happening in the next line too.
“You broke your lute and you wounded my sense”
You broke your lute and my head.
This happens here again,
and the ‘you’ that should have come afterwards, comes first.
Because it is you who takes precedence.
In this emotional viewpoint, you are the perpetrator, you are guilty,
but once again, I give priority to you.
“You broke your lute and you wounded my sense”
In the next couplet:
“But my wound has healed and my fear’s taken flight”
Maybe we think this is normal now. It’s not.
It’s because he is giving assurances that it’s not a problem for me.
He says this first to give the other side peace of mind.
“But without this silver your life won’t come right”
Now, there are lots of literary points here.
One such point is the silver, which is a play on words,
which refers to both the lute and its strings, and to money.
The scene setting and artistic forms
that Saadi draws on in this short but beautiful story
are incredibly interesting.
“There once was a drunkard who held his lute tight”
Why is this drunkard cradling his lute in his arms in the middle of the night?
It’s natural. It’s because of his loneliness.
Because he has no one.
Like Rumi’s old harpist who, when his voice has gone,
and his beauty has gone,
and no one pays attention to his playing anymore,
everyone has left him,
he goes into the graveyard at night and sitting in the moonlight,
he turns to the sky and says, “God, I have no customers apart from you
“and it is for you that I play my harp.”
We must all have this in our intellectual and literary history.
All of the works which,
with regards to language, that is form and feature,
and with regards to content and historical status,
and with regards to their link with our concepts of civilization,
all of these are found in poems,
albeit in poems of the highest level,
poems that has been accepted, both by mankind and by history.
Those that have become famous as classic poems.
Saadi is one of the great classic poets of Iran and of the world.
Naturally, the rest of the world has also bestowed this title upon him.
The reason is this: that we are in an eternal cycle,
we are at a crossroads where
language, linguistic talent, intellectual ingenuity,
knowledge of the times, looking to the past, conceptual understanding
and the power to combine all of these things together,
in four couplets, two couplets, one couple, sometimes a single line,
the poet has the power to do this.
And our great poets,
poets like Saadi and Hafez, Ferdowsi and Khayyam,
all possess this power,
and our desire and our need for poetry
emerges against this backdrop.
We rediscover our soul in poetry,
and we map out our futures using poetry.
And this is a very brief answer
to the question of what is literature, and what does it do.