Sa'eb Tabrizi

Mīrzā Moḥammad 'Alī Sā'eb Tabrīzī Persian صائب تبریزی, DMG Ṣā'eb-e Tabrīzī , born around 1595 in Isfahan , died there in 1676, was a Persian poet of the Safavid period .

Life

Sā'eb was born in Isfahan into a rich family of traders who came from Tabriz and had been relocated by Shah Abbas I from their hometown, which was near the border, to the new capital Isfahan. His uncle Shamsuddīn "Shīrīn-qalam" was a famous calligrapher . In 1624/5 Sā'eb went to India , like many poets of his time. There he quickly found a patron in the governor of Kabul , Ẓafar Khān, whose poetry teacher he became. For seven years he accompanied him and his father Chwāja Abu l-Ḥasan, especially in the Deccan Wars . His father came to Agra himself to fetch him back, but did not return to Isfahan until 1632, after his patron became governor of Kashmir . There he became court poet and was heard and read in the coffee houses and by princes and merchants. Since he came from a wealthy family, he had no financial problems, lived in a large villa and had his own calligrapher for the reproduction of his books. Sā'eb died in Isfahan in 1676. A mausoleum was built over his grave in the 20th century and is one of the sights of Isfahan.

plant

His work is huge. At least 75,000 verses are definitely real, and almost everything is poetry, not epic. There is a little epic about the conquest of Qandahār by Shah Abbas II and about 50 Kassids . The rest are around 7000 ghasels . This makes his literary work overall larger than that of Rūmī (whose collection of poems “Dīvān-e Shams” has 35,000 verses and whose epic “Masnavī” has 25,700 verses). Approx. 20 of his ghazeles are in his mother tongue Azerbaijani . In addition, Sā'eb likes to play with the Isfahan colloquial language of the time in his poetry, so that his work is also a source for the slang of the Safavid capital of the time .

A good expert on all of Persian literature , Sā'eb has dealt with all classical subjects in his own style. Through his activities at court and among the educated middle classes of Isfahan, he was able to make observations from the most varied areas of life and, thanks to his poetic talent, to integrate them into his poetry. His poems deal with everyday matters as well as love and philosophical meditations. He is a good analyst of emotions and a good theoretician of his own poetry. Above all, you keep hearing advice on how to live well in this world without giving up ultimate values.

style

Sā'eb was considered a brilliant impromptu poet and inventor of new images and comparisons. He called this maʿnī-ye bīgāne ("foreign sense"). He claimed that the discovery of these references is based directly on divine inspiration ( feyż ) and is based on the unity of all being. He also wrote many "responses" to earlier poets, that is, versions of well-known earlier poems reformulated in his own style.

Many effects in his poems arise from the fact that he does not get straight to the point, but in a roundabout way, whereby an idea is illuminated from many sides, what he calls māʿnī-ye pīcīde , "complicated" or "tortuous sense". He boasts of his outstanding concettos ( mażmūn-e barjaste ). In particular, he is a master of the poetic “proverb quotation ” ( ersāl-e mas̱al ), in which an assertion in the first half-verse is substantiated by a proverb or a known fact in the second:

آدمی پیر جو شد ، حرس جوان میگردد
خواب در وقت سحرگاه گران میگردد

"When a person grows old, his greed becomes young:
sleep becomes deep at dawn."

The comparison of sleep and life is based on the well-known quote attributed to Ali ibn Abi Talib “People sleep; but when they die, they wake up. ”Here Sā'eb links this traditional comparison with another comparison of sleep and ignorance, thus creating a double metaphor.

Often Sā'eb's ideas are based on the simultaneous use of the literal and figurative meanings of a phrase:

جنان به فکر تو در خویشتن فرو رفتیم
 که خشک شد چو صبو دست زیر سر مارا

"We were so lost in thoughts of you
that the hand under our head fell asleep like a marmot"
(literally: "like a wine jug dried up")

"Asleep" or "dried out" is used here both literally and figuratively. In addition, the speaker himself looks like a wine jug with his arm supported.

Sā'eb also likes to work with the animation of abstract concepts:

معنی از لفظِ سبک روح فلک پرداز است
لفظه ی پرداخته بال و پر این شهباز است
عشق بالاتر از آ ن
اد شه

 “Meaning flies in the sky through the word of quick mind,
The wings of this hawk are well welded from words.
The love is too high for what description can catch,
Fate is a partridge that this hawk tears. "

Typical of Sā'eb here is less the deliberately far-fetched comparison of poetry with falconry, but that he argues with this image over two verses and comes to a conclusion. The comparison of fate with a partridge is not chosen arbitrarily, but is based on a poetic argument: the sky turning like a wheel ( charḫ ) produces fate through the planetary movements and is traditionally seen as relentlessly cruel. Tscharḫ is also the name of the saker falcon , an important bird of prey . So Sā'eb says that fate, which otherwise catches everything unerringly like a good hunting falcon, is as powerless as a partridge against his (!) Poetry, so that he can shape his life himself with the help of his poetry. And that was also the case.

Reception and expenses

Sā'eb was a first-rate poet until the middle of the 18th century. His divan was given away by the Safavids all over the Islamic world and was very much appreciated everywhere. Some of the surviving manuscripts of his poems were written by the poet himself, e.g. B. the one in Calcutta , probably for Ẓafar Khān. Later autographs are in the handwriting of his secretary ʿĀref, but edited by the poet himself . This makes the textual transmission of Ṣā'eb the most accurate of any Persian poet before 1900. Even its reading became part of poetry lessons, for a list of Ṣā'eb's favorite works by other poets ( bayāż ) circulated as far as Hyderabad in India. Ṣā'eb has also published anthologies of his work himself. At least the selection Merʿāt ol-jamāl ("mirror of beauty"), which contains poems about the human body, certainly came from him. With others, his authorship is uncertain, as with “The Wine House ” ( Meychāne ), “Candle and Butterfly ” ( Schamʿ -o parvāne ) or “The Morning Toilet ” ( Arāyesch-e negār ) over comb and mirror.

While the admiration for Sā'eb in Afghanistan and Tajikistan is unbroken, the movement of the "return" ( bāzgascht ) to the classics arose in Iran in the 1770s , which all poets after Jami ( i.e. after 1500) considered to be shabby because they classic unused simple language. As a result, Sā'eb was also reviled as incomprehensible and complicated. This judgment lasted until the 1950s. After that, more literary scholars began to study Sā'eb's work in context and to understand his style. At a congress on his work in Tehran in 1976 he was rehabilitated as one of the first Iranian baroque poets and has been widely read since then.

literature

• Paul E. Losensky, “ṢĀʾEB TABRIZI,” Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2003, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saeb-tabrizi (accessed on 20 September 2016).
• Diwan (complete edition) in six volumes, ed. Moḥammad Qahramān, Tehran 1985–1991,
• Diwan in two volumes, ed.Jahāngir Manṣur, Tehran 1995.
• Moḥammad Rasul Daryāgašt (ed.): Ṣāʾeb wa sabk-e hendi ("Sā'eb and the 'Indian Style'" - proceedings), Tehran 1976, 2nd ed. 1992.
• Moḥammad Ḥoseyn Moḥammadi: Bīgāne mesl-e maʿnā: naqd o taḥlīl-e sheʿr-e Ṣāʾeb va sabk-e hendī ("Strange as Sense: Critique and Analysis of the Poetry of Sā'eb and the Indian Style"), Tehran 1995.

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ Diwan , ed.Qahramān, Vol. IV, p. 1591
2. ↑ Ibid. Vol. I p. 288.
3. ↑ Ibid. Vol. II, p. 729
4. ↑ Ḥusāmuddīn Rāschedī, Taẕkere-ye schoʿarā-ye Kaschmīr , 2 vols., Karachi, 1967, II, p. 519.