February 11
The Seven Wise Princesses: A Medieval Persian Epic, Wafa' Tarnowska (2000)

This is an adaptation of Nizami's 12th century classic, Haft Paykar, rewritten as a children's story. I found it at the county library while looking for a translation of Haft Paykar. I'm aware of two editions which look to be academically respectable, one old (Wilson, 1924) and one new (Meisami, 1995). This book mentions a few more in the bibliography, though I'm not sure I'd trust them. Alas, neither the Oakland nor San Francisco public library carried any of them, and now up here I discover that neither Seattle nor King County has them either. But the Princesses book looked intriguing, so I checked it out anyway.

Not knowing the real Nizami text, I can't judge in detail, but from what little I do know, it was immediately apparent that Princesses is severely abridged and bowdlerized. Most (not quite all) of the sex and violence has been disguised. It's never actually mentioned that Shah Bahram has made the princesses his wives (though an older reader might guess). Various random characters who are casually put to death, a fairly common occurrence in medieval literature, both Eastern and Western, are allowed to be chastised without further examination of their fate. The second set of seven stories are omitted altogether.

Skimming through the book, I gleaned what research information I could within about 20 minutes. The rest I read out loud as bedtime stories for Karen over the next several days. One of our happy compatibilities is that I like to read stories aloud, and she likes to listen to them. For most of our year together -- with a two-month gap when I got my fill of story-reading with my niece Clarice instead -- our main book has been Boccaccio's Decameron, a favorite of mine which we're now about 80% through (an "Octameron", I suppose). But delightful as many of Boccaccio's stories are, it does have some dry spells, and I think Karen is less amused than I am by the cheerful celebration of adultery which pervades nearly all of the stories. So we took a time out from Decameron and read this one instead, finishing up over the phone late last night.

Like Decameron, (and Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights), Haft Paykar is made up of stories within stories. The outer story is a quasi-hagiography of Shah Bahram, an actual ruler who was a legendary (pre-Islamic) hero by Nizami's time. As a young prince, Bahram finds seven portraits of seven princesses hidden away in a secret room and becomes obsessed with them. Later, as Shah, he builds seven pavilions and invites the princesses, who come from seven distant lands, to each stay in a pavilion. Each one has an associated color, planet, and day. The Shah visits the princesses each on their day, and they each tell him a story.

I've seen the title variously translated -- "Seven Pavilions", "Seven Beauties", etc. Haft is seven. I'm honestly not certain what the paykar are, but I think it refers to the portraits. Perhaps it's ambiguous in a way that doesn't translate to English.

The reason I've been interested in Haft Paykar is that the fourth story, told on Tuesday in the red pavilion by the "Russian*" princess, is the ultimate origin of the story used by Puccini in his opera Turandot. It has been an ongoing project of mine has been to trace the path of the story from Nizami through Gozzi and on to Puccini, and this is one of the missing pieces. [*The storyteller is Russian in this book; I assume she's associated with some other steppe nation in the original. The Russian nation was in its infancy in Nizami's time and didn't exist at all in Bahram's. Other nations are similarly simplified: "Greek", "Chinese", "Moroccan".]

Given the unreliability of the source (the prefatory material describes it alternately as a "prose translation" or an "adaptation"), I can't draw too many conclusions yet. For instance, the Turandot character here has nothing of the ice-princess personality of Puccini's heroine. In fact, you might think her rather sweet and jolly, if it weren't for the fact that she has her unsuccessful suitors beheaded. Tarnowska's princess is smarter and more capable than everyone around her and merely wants to screen for someone worthy of her. That sounds like a whitewashing to me, particularly in light of the author's demonstrated interest (in the title, even) in creating positive role models for girls.

A few other things of note: The story does not take place in Peking. The "Russian" storyteller says it comes from "my home country". I already know from other sources that Nizami did not use the name "Turandot". Here, she is only known as "the princess of the fort". This princess has several other tests for her suitors to pass (including getting into the aforementioned fort) before they even get to the riddle part, but once a prince answers the riddles that's the end of it. The whole business about guessing the prince's name is completely absent. This doesn't surprise me, since it's a very European theme (eg, Lohengrin, Rumpelstiltskin, Julius Caesar's accounts of various German tribes he conquered).

In this story there are four riddles rather than three. The preoccupation with the triune is also a very Western motif, both within and without Christianity -- just as the recurrence of 40 (thieves, days and nights, etc.) is characteristically Middle Eastern. My guess is that most of this was introduced by Gozzi, who seems to be the real creator of the most essential parts of the Turandot story that we know, but I need more data.

The riddles themselves are thoroughly incomprehensible and not even worth recalling here. I assume they have some symbolic meaning in Sufi mysticism. Sufi is throughout the stories, and Tarnowska plays it up. My impression of Sufi has always been that it has much in common with pre-Christian pagan beliefs that have adapted and grafted themselves onto Christianity. Although God/Allah is invoked throughout the story, toward the end there is mention of Bahram lighting the fires in all the temples, which is an obvious reference to the earlier Persian religion.

The main symbolism revolves around the groups of seven, which link the colors, days, planets, and homes of the princesses. The association of days with planets matches our familiar English/Latin associations -- Sun-day, Moon-day, Mars-di, Mercre-di, Jove-di, Vener-di, Saturn-day. Do these come to Persia through the introduction of Hellenic culture under Alexander? or do East and West derive them from a common, older tradition? I don't know.

The colors, on the other hand, are more counter-intuitive than not. Starting the week with Saturday (so that it ends on Friday, the Muslim sabbath), they are black, yellow, green, red, blue, brown, and white. I understand that the sun is yellow and Mars is red, but Jupiter is brown? the moon is green? I say "brown", but in this book it's actually called "sandalwood", which is represented as if it that were the name of a color. My guess is that an artifice of the language which can't be translated -- sort of like how in many Romance languages the common word for brown is also "chestnut", or here in English the color "orange" is inseparable from the fruit of the same name.

The illustrations are delightful. An author's note claims that they deliberately mimic the style of illustrations on authentic medieval editions of Haft Paykar, and my inexpert eye gives me no reason to doubt it. (The earliest extant texts are from the 15th century, well after the poem was first written.) It's nice to see a reminder of the rich Persian tradition of depictive visual art. The larger stream of Islamic culture (ie, Sunni) was iconoclastic. That is, it took seriously the injunction against graven images and extended it to any depiction of the natural world. That's why so much of Islam's artistic energy was focused on intricate shapes and patterns instead (eg, rugs, calligraphy).

I think the cultural variety of the Islamic world is underappreciated in the West. The religion did bring a certain measure of cultural unity, particularly with regard to literature and philosophy, but with the more personal arts geography remained supreme. A good example of this is dress. The Qur'an instructs only that both women and men should dress "modestly", and that women should cover their hair -- a ruling that might as easily be applied to employees at Burger King or visitors to a public swimming pool. In regions of conservative culture, "modestly" has been interpreted severely, so that in fundamentalist Afghanistan women were clothed as if they were stashed in a giant burlap sack, whereas in liberal and tropical regions baring of bellies and bosoms remained commonplace. Even within Arabia, perceived (correctly) to be predominantly conservative culturally, there is the Hadhramaut where flamboyant attire is the norm. As with dress, so too with dance, music, and visual art.

The Christian iconoclast movement reached its peak right around the same time and place that the Christian world first encountered the young Muhammadan movement. It's a very interesting question whether the Muslims got their iconoclasm from the eastern Christians or vice versa. The threads are very tangled. I believe the only good answer is that there was some of each. I would argue furthermore that trying to disentangle the two cultural traditions requires unduly downplaying the extent to which at that time Islam was still perceived as a reform movement within Christianity rather than a competing religion.

6:40:00 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

I'm trying a serif type to more readily distinguish what is written by someone else and what is me. In the old Benzene I used to put the letter in italic, but I don't think I like that for the blog, and I don't think an indent is sufficient. As in the zeen, where will be some letters where I just hand the microphone to someone else with little to add of my own, and others where a few sentences from someone will launch me into a lengthy spiel.

It's set up as a style, so it should be easy to change later if I don't like how this looks. If it looks hideous on your browser, I'd like to know.

Jim again, in a follow-up:

Steve again, in a separate email. (He's responding to a short email response I gave him, which was more along the lines of what here follows, rather than the preceding.)

3:35:17 PM  [permalink]  comment []