Nezami

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Nezami pictured on a carpet from the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic (1939)

Nezami (from Ganja) , also called Nizami ( Persian نظامی گنجوی, DMG Neẓāmī-ye Ganǧawī ; Full name:جمال الدین ابو محمّد الیاس بن یوسف بن زکی بن مؤیِّد, DMG Ǧamāl ad-Dīn Abū Muḥammad Ilyās ibn Yūsuf ibn Zakī ibn Mu'ayyid ; born around 1141 in Ganja ( Persian گنجه, DMG Ganǧa , today in Azerbaijan ); died March 12, 1209 ), was a Persian poet and the most important exponent of the "romantic epic in Persian literature".

Life

Neẓāmī-ye Ganǧawī at the reception of the Shah. Miniature. 1570. Museum of the History of Azerbaijan
Bahram V visits the turquoise dome on Wednesday . Page from Haft Peykar from a manuscript by Nizami. Brooklyn Museum

Nezami's mother Ra'isa was a Kurd . His father Yusūf is believed to have come from Qom . Nezāmi was orphaned early and was raised by his maternal uncle, Chwadscha Umar. Nezami married three times.

He was a favorite of the ruling Seljuk princes . Little is known about his life, which he spent apart from one trip in his hometown Gəncə. In addition to literature, Nezāmi was also well versed in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, history, philosophy, music, and the arts. His students gave him the nickname Hakīm ( German  weiser, doctor ).

Works

Nezāmi's main work is the Chamsa ("five", internationally also Khamsa ) or "the five treasures" (Pers. Pandsch ganj ), which consists of five independent epics:

  • Machzan ol-Asrār ( مخزن الاسرار )
    “The Treasure of Secrets”, a didactic poem with many example stories.
  • Chosrau and Shirin ( خسرو و شيرين Chosrou-o Širin  )
    A romantic epic about the love of the Persian King Chosrau II for Shirin . It is believed that Nezāmi set a memorial to his own wife, Āfāq, who died early in Shirin.
  • Laili and Majnun ( ليلى و مجنون )
    Romantic epic, celebrating the Majnun's love for the beautiful Leila. Majnun goes crazy, flees into the desert and cultivates an unhappy love that in the end becomes an end in itself, in which the real Laila is no longer needed.
  • Haft Peykar ( هفت پيكر )
    “The seven portraits” or “ The seven beauties ”, a collection of seven poetic novellas depicting the life story of the Sassanid prince Bahrām Gur , including the story by Turandot known from Gozzi and Schiller . These serve to educate Bahrām to become a just ruler, as the frame story shows.
  • Iskandernāme ( اسكندرنامه )
    "The Alexander Book", a fabulously decorated story of Alexander the Great in two parts, one more epic and one didactic, in which u. a. also the wisdom of the conqueror is praised. In the first part Alexander conquered the physical world as a conqueror and in the second part the spiritual world as a philosopher.

In addition, Nezāmi wrote a divan with odes and poems, which should contain 28,000 distiches .

style

Nezāmi far surpassed the romantic epics written before him, Warqa and Gulschah and Wis and Ramin , and created a standard for the romantic epic to which all later poets orientated. Up to him romantic epics were simple love or hero stories. But Nezami

  • puts the development of his characters in the foreground and makes the characters richer. For example, the unfaithful hero Chosrou has his rival, the faithful Farhād, killed and goes out with impunity.
  • the literary composition of the actions is much more differentiated. For example, Chosrou and Schirin meet by chance on their journey to each other and fall in love, but do not recognize each other; a rich friend of Majnun wants to force Laila's tribe through war to unite Majnun and Laila, but Majnun hates war and forbids it; the stories of the seven princesses educate King Bahram to be responsible as king.
  • connects his stories with philosophical topics, e.g. B. Shirin = love in itself; Majnun = the seeker of God; 7 princesses = 7 planets = 7 states of mind; Alexander searches in vain for the water of life and discusses with Plato and Aristotle
  • introduces literary symbols that reflect the plot, such as his famous sunrises and sunsets, which refer to what happened next; Each of the seven princesses has a color and an area of ​​the world that symbolize the treated emotion and reappear in their stories.

Nezāmi's most important achievement is that all of his epics can be read on a philosophical level, except for Machzan ol-Asrār and the second part of the Book of Alexander, which are philosophical from the outset. On this level, Chosrau and Shirin deal with the essence of earthly love and the development of Chosrau into a faithful lover. Leila and Majnun describes the essence of heavenly love and the development of Majnun into a true mystic who no longer needs the beauty of the world. In the seven stories, the seven beauties reflect the development of a pleasure-seeking prince into a just king who ultimately has his tyrannical vizier (i.e. the ego) executed. According to Nezami's introduction, the book of Alexander shows the development of an Islamic prophet (who is considered to be Alexander) on the way to first physical and then moral world domination.

reception

Initial translations into European languages

The name Nezāmis was made famous in European languages ​​by the French orientalist Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville , with the biographical entry 'Nazami' in his life's work Bibliothèque orientale or Dictionnaire universel contenant tout ce qui regarde la Connoissance des peuples de l'Orient , das Published posthumously in 1697 by Antoine Galland in Paris.

It was not until 1786, however, that 20 stories from Nezāmis Maẖzan ul-asrār ( Treasury of Secrets ) appeared in English by William Jones , who had been a judge at the Supreme Court in Calcutta since 1783 .

Translated directly from Persian into German, the first adaptations by Nezāmis Chosrau and Schirin appeared in Christoph Martin Wieland's magazine Neuer Teutscher Merkur , which their translator Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall , a graduate of the Vienna Oriental Academy , published as a book in Leipzig in 1809. Other (partial) editions of Nezāmi's works in European languages ​​that have been published as books are: Layli and Majnún: a poem (London 1836) by James Atkinson, Behram-Gur and the Russian Princess (a partial edition of the Seven Beauties ) in a bilingual Persian-German Edition by Franz von Erdmann ( Kazan 1843) and Alexander's move to the source of life in the land of darkness by Hermann Ethe, published in Munich in 1871.

Today's reception worldwide

With sculptures depicting Nezami, the poet is commemorated in many countries around the world, in Iran and Azerbaijan in many cities as well as in Moscow , Saint Petersburg , Kiev , Beijing , Tashkent , Marneuli , Chișinău , in the Volga Republic of Udmurtia and Rome , where a monument to the Persian-speaking poet was unveiled in Villa Borghese in 2012 .

The UNESCO declared the year 1991 to Nezami year.

music

theatre

Movie

  • Isa Guseinow and Eldar Kulijew (screenplay) / Eldar Kulijew (director): Nizami . Feature film (Azerbaijan 1982; with Müslüm Maqomayev in the title role)

Current issues

Secondary literature

Web links

Commons : Nezami  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the literature tooحکیم ابو محمد الیاس بن یوسف بن زکی ابن مؤید نظامى گنجوى, DMG Ḥakīm Abū Muḥammad Ilyās bin Yūsuf bin Zakī ibn Mu'ayyid Niẓāmī-yi Ganǧawī .
  2. ↑ Jan Rypka, Otakar Klíma, Vĕra Kubíčkova u. a .: Iranian literary history. Harrassowitz, Leipzig 1959, p. 201; Stuart Cary Welch: Persian illumination from five royal manuscripts of the sixteenth century. 2nd Edition. Prestel-Verlag, Munich 1978, p. 71 (quoted)
  3. ^ V. Minorsky : Studies in Caucasian History. Cambridge University Press, 1957, p. 34: “The author of the collection of documents relating to Arran Mas'ud b. Namdar (c. 1100) claims Kurdish nationality. The mother of the poet Nizami of Ganja was Kurdish (see autobiographical digression in the introduction of Layli wa Majnun). In the 16th century there was a group of 24 septs of Kurds in Qarabagh, see Sharaf-nama, I, 323. Even now the Kurds of the USSR are chiefly grouped south of Ganja. Many place-names composed with Kurd are found on both banks of the Kur ”
  4. ^ A b V. Minorsky: review of GH Darab translation of Makhzan al-Asrar. 1945 Minorsky, BSOAS 1948, xii / 2, pp. 441-445: “Whether Nizami was born in Qom or in Ganja is not quite clear. The verse (quoted on p. 14): 'I am lost as a pearl in the sea of ​​Ganja, yet I am from the Qohestan of the city of Qom', does not expressly mean that he was born in Qom. On the other hand, Nizami's mother was of Kurdish origin, and this might point to Ganja where the Kurdish dynasty of Shaddad ruled down to AH. 468; even now Kurds are found to the south of Ganja. "
  5. ↑ or "The Treasury ..."
  6. ↑ Jan Rypka, Otakar Klíma, Vĕra Kubíčkova u. a .: Iranian literary history. Harrassowitz, Leipzig 1959, p. 202 f.
  7. ↑ Jan Rypka, Otakar Klíma, Vĕra Kubíčkova u. a .: Iranian literary history. Harrassowitz, Leipzig 1959, p. 203.
  8. ↑ Jan Rypka, Otakar Klíma, Vĕra Kubíčkova u. a .: Iranian literary history. Harrassowitz, Leipzig 1959, p. 204.
  9. ↑ Jan Rypka, Otakar Klíma, Vĕra Kubíčkova u. a .: Iranian literary history. Harrassowitz, Leipzig 1959, p. 205.
  10. ↑ Hellmut Ritter: About the pictorial language of Nizami. de Gruyter, Berlin / Leipzig 1927, pp. 23-25.
  11. ↑ a b c Renate Würsch: Niẓāmīs treasury of secrets. An investigation into 'Maẖzan ul-asrār'. Reichert, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-89500-462-6 , pp. 25-29 and above all footnote 159.
  12. ^ The Convergence: European Enlightenment and Persian Poetry. Chapter 4 In: Shafiq Shamel: Goethe and Hafiz. Poetry and ‹West-Eastern Divan›. Peter Lang, Oxford a. a. 2013, ISBN 978-3-0343-0881-6 , pp. 129–157.
  13. ^ Nizami Ganjavi 'one of most prominent figures in Azerbaijani culture'. on: news.az , April 21, 2012.
  14. ↑ Jesus, Mary and Joseph! or The Persian Classics as a stroke of luck. In: FAZ . December 20, 2010, p. 26.
personal data
SURNAME Nezami
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nizami; Elyās ebn-e Yūsef; نظامی گنجوی; Nizami Gəncəvi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Persian poet
DATE OF BIRTH around 1141
PLACE OF BIRTH Gəncə
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1209