Laylī and Majnūn

As the story of mad love par excellence, Dick Davis’s translation of Niẓāmī’s Laylī u Majnūn is a welcome addition to world literature. Davis’s translation provides a readable and teachable way for students and scholars of Persian, Middle Eastern, and medieval literature to engage with a canonical work previously only available in Rudolph Gelpke’s prose summation. The introduction, despite its many digressions, effectively contextualizes the work within a broader web of Helleno-Islamic narratives and makes compelling use of literary comparisons with Shakespearean style so as to acquaint the unacquainted reader with the work’s overall narratological and rhetorical force.The translation itself resembles Davis’ other translations—notably of Gurgānī’s Vīs u Rāmīn—in its attempt to balance literary quality with fidelity to the original. Davis acknowledges problems in the manuscript tradition (there is no surviving manuscript within 200 years of Niẓāmī’s death) and comments that he relies almost exclusively on Bihruz Sarvatiyan’s 1984 edited edition. The rhyming couplets give readers a sense of the flavor of a mathnavī (a long narrative poem composed in rhyming couplets) and demonstrate Davis’ own literary feat; some lines, such as the description of Laylī’s beauty as “She seemed life’s hidden beauty and in truth/The best line in a poem praising youth,” are likely to be as memorable in Davis’ English translation as in the Persian. The persistence of rhyming couplets, however, risks lulling the English reader into a state of sedation not necessarily intended by the dialogic encounters of the original. There are operative breaks in the translation that provide the reader with cues to thematic shifts in the text, most usefully signaling metatextual reference from narrative.At times the specialist reader will run into fidelity issues as a result of Davis’s literary choices that risk altering the overall sentiment. For example, in a homily after Majnūn’s father’s death, Davis translates “When you’ve been harmed, this wasn’t done by those/Whom you believe to be your mortal foes/All of the harmful things they seemed to do/Derived in truth from no one else but you,” which leaves the reader with an overall sense of karmic retribution and of evil as self-inflicted. The latter half of the original (bad bā tu nakard har ki bad kard/kān bad bi yaqīn bi jā-yi khud kard),1 however, leaves the sense of external evil intact and is more accurately rendered—“Whoever did you wrong did not do you wrong/For that badness was certainly inflicted upon himself.” Such lapses inevitably result from literary translation, but they need not come at the expense of altering meaning. Davis also overreads Majnūn’s prayer at the Ka’ba as sounding like a Zoroastrian prayer; while this is one option for the term for murmuring (zamzama), its proximity to other Islamic points of reference such as the well of Zamzam are not considered or referenced in the footnotes.2 As such, the reader is left with the impression that Majnūn sees himself as distinct from Islam rather than as pushing its boundaries. The translation, moreover, does not include Niẓāmī’s lengthy introduction and lacks an index of terms. The text is accompanied by helpful footnotes that should markedly aid the non-specialist reader by offering insights into Persian mythology and Sufi terminology.As noted earlier, the introduction makes extensive use of comparisons to Shakespearean style. Drawing from Italo Calvino’s work, Davis describes at length the similarities between Niẓāmī and Shakespeare in terms of “decorative accounts of romantic and erotic encounters” as well as a language of “stately, melancholy elevation and nobility” (xxxi). This is accompanied by attendant explorations of Niẓāmī’s various uses of metaphor. Such a comparison allows the reader to recognize more astutely the rhetorical similarity between the two great poets beyond the typical likening of the story to Romeo and Juliet. Moreover, in a concession to the beauty of the poem’s literariness and artifice, Davis paraphrases Shakespearian critic Marjorie Garber on the later plays in order to describe Niẓāmī’s reach for love’s appeals to transcendence as a “realism/lack of realism continuum” (xxxiv). This allows the Anglophone reader a glimpse into the complex encounter between human and transcendent love, and their literary and religious counterparts, embedded within Majnūn’s unraveling and Niẓāmī’s consistent concern with love’s role in cosmic harmony.Despite this fruitful literary juxtaposition, Davis nevertheless asserts alongside E. G. Browne that Niẓāmī’s appeals to ascesis be read as similar to Victorian virtues. Such an assertion does a disservice to the nuances of the text by forcing a dichotomy between ascetic values and erotic desire that relies on an extra-textual, Victorian, and notably Christian understanding of embodiment. Asceticism varies across religious traditions, and there is no reason that Niẓāmī’s appeals need to be read as a denial of human sexuality. Moreover, Niẓāmī’s rhetorical play often makes it difficult to sustain the dichotomy—one only has to look at moments like the winking, metatextual reference to his own repentance within a homily that separates true love from sensual desire to know that the text is engaged in a complex conversation on the nature of desire itself (232). Rather than engage these challenges, Davis insists that Niẓāmī be read as “prim and proper, potentially even censorious” (xxiv).Davis’s introduction could have thus benefited from further engaging ascetic dimensions of Islamic traditions, which would provide more apt contextualization of the work’s views on love and desire. Instead, he collapses terms when explaining the text’s diegetic levels and their import; for Davis, unlike Gurgānī’s Vīs u Rāmīn, which is “entirely worldly and carnal, containing no hint of Sufism whatsoever,” Niẓāmī’s Laylī u Majnūn introduces “a didactic, spiritual, and implicitly Islamic, or at least Sufi, dimension into the romance narrative” (xxiii). Imprecision is apparent in the number of options listed, and scholars familiar with hagiographic literature know that in the wealth of Sufi traditions there are numerous examples of great shaykhs, such as Aḥmad-i Jām or Abū Sa‘īd Abū l-Khayr, who engage precisely in worldly and carnal feats in order to prove their own spiritual manliness.Notably, Davis raises the question of whether or not the poem is or should be read as Sufi toward the end of the introduction. In order to get at this question that scholars and readers consistently ask of this text, Davis stages a dialogue between Jan Rypka and Asghar Seyed-Gohrab. While Davis distances his reading from Seyed-Gohrab’s claim that the poem is definitively Sufi in orientation, he neither engages with Julie Scott Meisami’s ethical readings of love’s work in Niẓāmī’s oeuvre nor offers an alternative. Instead, because there are no “real” love scenes (i.e., overtly sexual), Davis returns to saying that the love of Laylī and Majnūn should be interpreted in a spiritual, mystical fashion in spite of his helpful reading of a “realism/lack of realism continuum” in his comparison to Shakespeare’s works. This understanding of a continuum in the poem’s appeals to transcendence and love as a form of cosmic justice (with potential political import for a twelfth-century courtly audience) allows for a breaking down of the dichotomy between carnal and spiritual love and provides a more apt way of understanding the text’s constant appeals to ‘ishq as both in and beyond the erotic.Returning to the overall contextualization of the work, it should be recalled that the audience for this translation may go beyond those familiar with literatures of the Middle East. As such, Davis misses an opportunity in the introduction to engage more directly with the Arabic literary backdrop and Qur’anic references in the story. The introduction prudently contextualizes what it means to say that Niẓāmī “Persianizes” the story, with Davis distancing himself from Abdol Hossein Zarrinkub and others who read a condemnation of Arab culture into the text, but what about the Arabic background itself? Jaroslav Stetkeyvch, Asʿad Khairallah, Ruqayya Khan, and others have written extensively on the import of the ‘udhrī tradition to later Islamicate ideas about love, which Davis neglects in favor of stating quickly that it is a seventh-century story. Additionally, although well-explained in the footnotes, the Qur’anic background of the Yusuf and Zulaykha story and/or the role of Sulaymān could have been brought forward so as to acquaint the reader with the text’s continuous reference to these figures.Perhaps the most valuable contextualization work of the introduction comes right at the beginning, where Davis outlines a map of Helleno-Islamic narratives that connects ancient Greek prose romances to medieval Persian works. Drawing on his own previous scholarship, Davis shows the thematic and potentially historic proximity between works by authors such as ‘Ayyūqi, ‘Unṣuri, Chariton, and Xenophon. This map helps to relocate the Persian romances within a set of premodern narratives that push back on modern categories of fact/fiction, history/literature. While scholars of Greek literature have considered the Hellenistic prose works as novelistic and potentially fictional, it is left to further scholarship to engage the question of to what degree any of the Persian mathnavīs are overtly fictional. Davis only teases the question of fictionality, appealing to the L. P. Hartley quote that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (xi), and instead relies on the fact that the authors themselves considered the stories to be in some sense “history.” Scholarship on premodern fictionality, however, has become more attuned to the ways in which the rewriting of history often included referential conventions that signaled disbelief. David Konstan, Julie Orlemanski, and others in medieval studies have tracked culturally specific ways that ancient Greek prose and French courtly romance signal their own fictionality. Given that Davis places medieval Persian romances within this web, might they also have their own sophisticated appeals to going beyond historical facticity? The effective textual breaks in Davis’s translation draw attention to the parenthetical asides and narratorial interventions that mark complex rhetorical and narratological strategies embedded within the text. A careful consideration of the question of fictionality in a text like Laylī u Majnūn is thus warranted and could further Davis’s own project of locating these medieval Persian works within a premodern literary history of novelistic narrative.Made accessible to a wider audience, Niẓāmī’s Laylī u Majnūn can now be interrogated in such ways and Davis’s feat of translation is nonetheless immensely valuable for future generations of students. Moreover, its readability alongside handy footnotes as well as the contextualizing work of the introduction make this translation valuable for scholars outside the immediate field of Persian literature and for anyone seeking to more holistically approach the category of world literature. Anglophone readers can now see into the canonical source of the tale, a tale whose worldly reception has extended its tendrils into Ottoman, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Hindi, Urdu, Malay, Turkish, Bengali, Telugu, Arabic, French, and English music and literature.