Rostam is Iran’s greatest mythological hero, a Persian Hercules, magnificent
in strength and courage. As re-counted in the tenth-century
Book
of Kings (Shahnameh) by the poet Ferdowsi, he was an indomitable force in ancient Persia for five
hundred years, undergoing many trials of combat, cunning, and endurance. Although
Rostam served a series of often-fickle kings, he was always his own man, committed
to the greater good of Iran. His adventures are some of the best loved of all
Persian narratives and remain deeply resonant in Iranian culture.
Rostam: Tales of Love & War from Persia’s Book of Kings begins with
the birth of Rostam’s father Zal and ends with Rostam’s death. The
tales tell of the love between Zal and Rostam’s mother, the Kaboli princess
Rudabeh; of Rostam’s miraculous birth, aided by the magical bird Simorgh;
of Rostam’s youth and the selection of his trusty horse Rakhsh; of his
affair with Princess Tahmineh, the birth of their son Sohrab, and, after Sohrab
grows into a mighty warrior himself, the tragic confrontation between father
and son. The tales conclude with Rostam’s war against demons, his seven
trials, his rescue of Prince Bizhan, and finally his battle, both intellectual
and physical, with the ambitious and religiously driven prince Esfandyar.
Praise for the Shahanmeh translated by Dick Davis
Selected as one of the top 5 fiction books of 2006
Washington Post Book World, Michael Dirda
Grand . . . To imagine an equivalent to this
violent and beautiful work, think of an amalgam of Homer’s Iliad and
the ferocious Old Testament book of Judges. . . . Thanks to Davis’s
magnificent translation, Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh live
again in English. This marvelous translation of an ancient Persian classic
brings these stories alive for a new audience.
The
New York Times Book Review, Reza Aslan
The Shahnameh has much in common with the blood-soaked
epics of Homer and with Paradise Lost and The
Divine Comedy. . . . The poem is, in a sense, Iran’s national
scripture, and Ferdowsi Iran’s national poet. . . . Davis brings to
his translation a nuanced awareness of Ferdowsi’s subtle rhythms and
cadences. . . . His Shahnameh is rendered
in an exquisite blend of poetry and prose.
The
New Criterion, Russel Seitz
It takes Dick Davis’s delightful and animated translation
of Persia’s classic 623 pages to get around to banning wine-drinking,
a prohibition ended by royal decree two pages later, with 257 pages of music,
seduction, and polo matches left to go. All this action, myth, and history
fairly fly off the page, for Davis renders Ferdowsi’s 50,000 sesquipedalian
lines of poetry as a prose narrative that here and there erupts into sonnet-sized
snatches of verse. The scheme works brilliantly.… ‘That poetry
which is the most difficult,” wrote Irshad Ullah Khan, “has been
rendered into English … with the comparative strength of the inspirational
truth and elegance of the Persian. His work shall not die. It is hard
to vouch for any volume’s immortality, but this ranks among the best
Persian translations of the last thousand years.”
Khaled Hosseini,
author of The Kite Runner
Davis’s wonderful translation will show Western readers why
Ferdowsi’s masterpiece is one of the most revered and most beloved
classics in the Persian world.
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Introduction ix
The Tale Of Sam And The Simorgh 1
The Love Of Zal And Rudabeh 11
The Birth Of Rostam 53
Rostam And His Horse Rakhsh 61
Summary Of The Story Of Afrasyab & Nozar 65
Rostam And Kay Qobad 67
Kay Kavus’s War Against The Demons Of Mazanderan 77
The Seven Trials Of Rostam 89
The King Of Hamaveran, & His Daughter Sudabeh 115
The Tragedy Of Sohrab 131
Summary Of The Story Of Seyavash 163
The Akvan Div 165
Summary Of The Story Of Bizhan & Manizheh 172
Rostam Rescues Bizhan 175
Summary Of The Story Of King Khosrow 201
Rostam And Esfandyar 203
The Death Of Rostam 267
Index Of Headings 288
About The Illustrations 292
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FROM THE INTRODUCTION
Rostam is the greatest hero of pre-Islamic Persian
legend, and he and his exploits dominate the first half of our principal source
for such material, the Shahnameh, the magnificent compendium of verse narratives
concerned with pre-Islamic Iran that was written down by the poet Ferdowsi
at the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries c.e.
As befits an ancient hero he is a larger-than-life figure: he lives for over
five hundred years, he undergoes seven trials of strength, cunning, and endurance
that put him in the same company as Hercules and his labors, he defeats and kills
not only innumerable human enemies but also dragons and demons, he serves as
the pre-eminent champion of no less than five Persian monarchs and lives through
much of the reigns of two more. After his death, he is constantly evoked by those
who come after him as the epitome of magnanimity, manliness, heroism, and loyalty
to the Persian throne. The stories in which he figures are the best-known and
most loved narratives of the Shahnameh, and are among the most famous in Persian
culture.
But Rostam is not simply a paragon of heroic loyalty to the Persian throne mythologized
and writ large. Something that runs throughout all the narratives in which he
is involved is his insistence that he is his own man, that his service is given
voluntarily and cannot be constrained, and that he is at no one’s beck
and call, not even his king’s. If he is loyal it is because he chooses
to be, and sometimes he chooses not to be. There is something anarchic about
him, a contempt for boundaries and borders (both literal and metaphorical ones),
a stubbornness and eagerness to excel, which can remind a Western reader of Shakespearian
heroes like Coriolanus or Warwick (called, as Rostam is too, “the kingmaker”),
an overreaching that like theirs can lead directly to tragedy. Much of the glamour
of Rostam’s legend lies in the tension between this fierce independence,
which places him outside of authority, and his seemingly inexhaustible (until
it is in fact exhausted) service to the Persian monarchy and the country it controls.
If the Shahnameh is primarily, as its name (the “book of kings”)
implies, about monarchy, and so about a center of absolute or would-be absolute
power, Rostam is a figure from outside of that center of power; he is one who
lives, in all senses, at the edge.
We can see this “at the edge” quality clearly in his origins, which
indicate his tangential relationship both to the land of Iran and to humanity
in general. His parents are the Persian hero Zal and the Kaboli princess Rudabeh.
When Zal is born, his father exposes him on a mountainside to die because of
his white hair and mottled skin, and he is brought up by a fabulous magical bird,
the Simorgh. The implication is that there is something demonic about Zal’s
appearance, and
indeed there is only one other figure in the Shahnameh who is described as having
white hair and a mottled skin, the White Demon of Mazanderan, whom Rostam kills
in single combat, and who almost kills him. Once one has registered the similarity
in the descriptions of the demon’s appearance and that of Rostam’s
father, it is hard not to see this struggle as an Oedipal reversal of a common
motif in the Shahnameh, the death of sons through the actions of their fathers.
When Zal has returned to the human world the Simorgh remains his protector, and
she is later on (through Zal as an intermediary) the protector of his son Rostam;
in their ability to call on her magical aid in moments of extreme peril they
are given access to magical powers. The supernatural as part of Rostam’s
inheritance, again in somewhat demonic guise, is even more evident on his mother’s
side: Rudabeh’s father is Mehrab, the king of Kabol, who is descended from
the demon king Zahhak, from whose clutches Iran was freed by the noble king Feraydun.
Zal’s king, Manuchehr, at first opposes Zal’s marriage to Rudabeh
because this will mingle the demonic bloodline of Zahhak with that of the Persian
heroes (and Rostam is the result of just such a mingling). In human terms then,
Rostam is certainly “at the edge”: he can call on magic, he is descended
from a demon on his mother’s side, and his father’s strange upbringing
and appearance also bring with them an aura of the supernatural and perhaps the
demonic. Rostam is a great subduer of demons, but as with another Persian hero
(and king this time) Jamshid, whose authority over demons seems at times to come
as much from his participation in their world as his defeat of it, there is a
suggestion of “set a thief to catch a thief” about his prowess.
Geographically Rostam belongs in Sistan, his family’s appanage, granted
in perpetuity by the Persian kings for their loyalty to the throne. The area
may have been granted by the kings, but when Rostam is uneasy with the political
goings-on at the Persian court, it is to this area that he retreats, where he
is beyond the reach of the king unless he wishes to present himself of his own
free will. Like Achilles, Rostam is often contumacious and moody, and Sistan
is his equivalent of Achilles’s tent: it’s the place he goes to sulk,
to indicate that he has washed his hands of his people’s problems.
The modern Sistan, the southeastern province of Iran, does not correspond with
Zal’s and Rostam’s kingdom, which lies largely to the east of this
area, in what is now the province of Helmand in Afghanistan. The river Helmand
(called, in Ferdowsi’s time, the Hirmand) marks the northern border of
their territory. Rostam’s land is therefore on the eastern edge of the
Iranian world. His mother is from Kabol, and Rostam dies in Kabol, placing his
origin and death even further to the east; indeed, in the terms of the Shahnameh
placing them in India, as Kabol is seen as a part of India throughout the Shahnameh.
There are other indications of a strong Indian presence in Rostam’s identity:
the talismanic tiger skin he wears instead of armor, the babr-e bayan as it is
called in Persian, has been traced to an Indian origin by the scholar Djalal
Khaleghi-Motlagh, and another eminent scholar of the Shahnameh, Mehrdad Bahar,
has pointed out that some aspects of Rostam’s legend parallel and may derive
from those of the Hindu god Krishna. Sistan, Kabol, India—certainly, if
we take Iran as the center, Rostam hails geographically from the edge, and, significantly
enough, from the eastern edge. Significantly because the lands immediately to
the east of Iran are seen as the origin of magic in the Shahnameh, and this eastern
aspect of his identity further ties Rostam to that supernatural and chthonic
world his parentage implies.
Often Rostam’s heroism too has an “edgy,” unstraightforward
quality to it. The supernatural Simorgh, on whose help he can rely, as well as
the tiger skin he wears both suggest characteristics of the Trickster Hero, as
he is found in many cultures. Tricksters are often associated with magic, and
they have something of the shaman about them, one who is in touch with other
worlds, often through an animal intermediary, and is able to call the denizens
of these worlds to his and his people’s aid. Many tricksters are associated
with specific animals whose skins or feathers they wear in order to draw on the
animal’s characteristics for their own purposes. The animals so used are
usually known for their slyness, or they are birds. Rostam is protected by the
feathers of a fabulous bird, and he wears a tiger skin, and slyness is exactly
the quality associated with tigers in Indian lore (e.g., in Buddhist Jataka tales:
there is a distant echo of this in Kipling’s Shere Khan in The Jungle Book)...
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ABOLQASEM FERDOWSI was born in Khorasan in a village near Tus,
in 940. His great epic the Shahnameh, to which he devoted most of his adult
life, was originally composed for the Samanid princes of Khorasan, who were
the chief instigators of the revival of Persian cultural traditions after the
Arab conquest of the seventh century. During Ferdowsi’s lifetime this
dynasty was conquered by the Ghaznavid Turks, and there are various stories
in medieval texts describing the lack of interest shown by the new ruler of
Khorasan, Mahmud of Ghazni, in Ferdowsi and his lifework. Ferdowsi is said
to have died around 1020 in poverty and embittered by royal neglect, though
confident of his and his poem’s
ultimate fame.
DICK DAVIS was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945 and educated at King’s
College, Cambridge (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature), and at the University
of Manchester (Ph.D. in Medieval Persian Literature). He is currently professor
of Persian at Ohio State University. He lived for eight years in Iran (1970–78),
as well as for periods in Greece and Italy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature. His other translations from Persian include Shahnameh: The Persian
Book of Kings (three-volume color illustrated edition, Mage, 1998-2004; one-volume
edition, Viking, 2006; Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, 2007), Borrowed Ware:
Medieval Persian Epigrams (Anvil, 1996; Mage, 1997), My Uncle Napoleon (Mage,
1996; Modern Library, 2006), The Legend of Seyavash (Penguin Classics, 1992;
Mage, 2004), and with Afkham Darbandi, The Conference of the Birds (Penguin
Classics, 1984). His verse translation of Vis and Ramin will be published by
Mage in 2008.
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