The first time when the English people seriously began to learn Farsi and to get acquainted with the rich Persian literature, was during the colonization of India. As the late Professor Arberry relates; although the works of Persian authors were worthy by themselves to find their way into English hearts, but unfortunately you cannot reach the heart of the people of Europe, owing to their attachment to materialistic ends, except through profit and trade.

The Court language of the Mughal Kings in India was Farsi (Persian) and therefore the English agents who worked in the East India Company tried to learn Farsi in order to have a direct access to Indian grandees. So, as a result of this obligation to learn Farsi, they became acquainted, indirectly, with the literature of Iran and they began to enjoy reading Sa’adi, Omar Khayyam and Hafez.

After the victory of the Clive over Duplex in the battle of Plassy (1757), India fell into the hands of the English and the East India Co. As in this vast Empire, most of the people in all the provinces, spoke Persian, the governors of the East India Company, found it essential for their English staff to learn Persian.

So they imposed upon their staff the necessity of learning Farsi and soon a number of these English staff who learned Persian for official purposes came in contact with a very great and rich literature and started to study the language for its literary merits as well.

Sir William Jones translated the biography of Nadir Shah by Mirza Mehdi Khan Astarabadi from Farsi into English and has added to this translation notes on Persian history and Persian language. He also translated into English verse, one of the Ghazals of Hafez. In 1774 he issued his Latin commentaries on Asiatic poetry not as a philologist but as a man of taste, not as an interpreter but as a poet.

For the first time he opened to the classically educated circles of Western Europe the way to appreciate and understand the qualities of Iranian poetry. Before the end of the 18th century, Beckford published his Vathek that was on the same lines as Arabian Nights and it caught the popular imagination. Then appeared Thomas Moore’s “Lalla Rookh” in which he related Iranian tales like a Persian romancer. His stories included “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan” and “The Fire-Worshippers.”

Then came Mathew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustam” which was adopted from Shahnameh of Firdowsi. However, Professor Gibb believes that for France and England, the East continued to serve as little more than decorative background… The place of Orientalism compared to the greater poets is negligible. The East was treated as a color scheme and its claim to have contributed to the spiritual heritage of mankind impatiently waved aside.

However, we see a different picture when we read about those who made an effort to translate Persian poetry into English. According to the late Professor Arberry the translation of Persian verse into English had become a fashion early in the 19th century and the name of Hafez was in everybody’s mouth.

It was at this period that Joseph Champion, John Richardson, John Knot, John Hadley and Hindley, Walter Loaf and Richard Le Galienne translated Hafez, and Lady Gertrude Bell spent a great many years of her life to translate Hafez into English verse and finally published her work in 1897. Longfellow translated Sa’adi’s well-known poem that begins with this verse.

Bani Adam a’azaye yek-digarand

Ke dar Afarinesh ze yek goharand

in the following way:

All that inhabits this great earth, Whatever be their rank or worth,

Are kindred and allied by birth, And made by the same clay.

And this verse:

Chon ke gol raft-o golistan shod kharab, Bouye gol ra az ke jou’im az gollab.

which was rendered by Shelly as:

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead

Are heaped for the beloved’s bed,

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on…

One notices in these verses the use of the same meter and rhyme as is used in the Persian verse. Shelly became acquainted with Iranian literature by reading the works of Sir William Jones and therefore it is possible that when he brings his name into the last verse of the following poem:

Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind,

Than calm in waters seen.

he is imitating Hafez and other Iranian poets who must mention their names or their pen names in the last verse of each ghazal. George B. Walker reminds us that Browning, like Platen in Germany used Persian meter forms. (The Persian Pageant, p. 83) The late Prof. Arberry tells us the mystic tenets that are intermixed in the poems of Hafez, Ghazali, Jami and even Omar Khayyam is noticeable also in poems of Donn, Blake, Wordsworth and Shelly.

www.mihanfoundation.org/literature/17th.html

Part II Part IV