International Society for Iranian Studies

La description de la nature dans la poésie lyrique persane du xie siècle: inventaire et analysedes thèmes by C.-H. De FouchécourReview by: William L. Hanaway, Jr.Iranian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1972), pp. 49-52Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of International Society for Iranian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4310104 .

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whose market is the mind bears on the ideologies, myths, and values of the present regime, its sta- bility remains tenuous, and its power, problematic.

To which one may add that the appreciative student and as- sayer of Iranian culture and civilization knows that over the long centuries of their history, the significant and abiding Iranian contributions to humanity have emanated from the life of the mind, not that of political power.

La description de la nature dans la poesie lyrique persane du xie sidcle: inventaire et analyse des themes. By C.-H. de Fouch6cour. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1969. 262pp. (Travaux de l'Institute de'6tudes iraniennes de l'Universite de Paris, 4).

WILLIAM L. HANAWAY, JR.

The history of Persian literature is, by and large, known. What we must now study is its essence. As an in- creasing number of scholars become interested in the study of this literature, new paths are being sought to approach it. In C.-H. de Fouchecour's La description de la nature... we are shown an important and productive descriptive tech- nique.

One of the aims of the literary critic is to eva- luate literature esthetically and to discuss it in terms comprehensible to others. With the literatures of the Western world this is possible, to a large degree, but at this stage of our knowledge it is hardly possible with Persian literature. There is a Persian tradition of criticism which was and is still valid within the context

William L. Hanaway, Jr., is Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

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of Persian society and intellectual tradition. This tra- dition of criticism is based on a different set of intel- lectual and esthetic categories from Western literary criticism, and is expressed in a different kind of language, It thus remains inaccessible to the Western student of Persian literature except in its superficial or tangential aspects. The contemporary Persian literature which is writ- ten in Western forms or on the basis of Western models can be discussed in much the same way that Western critics dis- cuss their own literature, and therefore can be compared with Western literature. This modern literature cannot be discussed within the context of Persian culture in the same terms that the classical literature is discussed, hence the distress of many Persian intellectuals today. With modern literature firmly established and rapidly grow- ing, we must ask how the coming generations of Persians will solve this dilemma. The book under review may point the way to a solution.

Before embarking on a critical excursion, one must know what it is one is setting out to understand and evalu- ate. That is to say, literature must be first described, then evaluated. One must be able to grasp the piece as a whole, both in terms of its outward form and in terms of its inner structure and content. What the reader has in M. de Fouchecour's book is the first step in the direction of a careful analysis of one segment of Persian poetry, i.e., the first exhaustive, precise, and non-subjective attempt to describe this poetry. This is a book uf funda- mental importance for a number of reasons, the two princi- pal ones being as follows. First, it provides us with a method for the analysis of themes and motifs in classical Persian poetry, and second it provides us with the results of having applied this method to the description of nature in this poetry. The results are interesting and suggestive.

M. de Fouchecour analyzes intensively the divins of 'Unsurli Farrukhl, and Maniichihri in the first section of his*book. In the second section he gives a briefer analy- sis of the poetry of Qatran, Azraql, and Mucizz'i and in the third section an even more rapid treatment of Labibi, 'Asjadi, Ni4ir Khusraw, and Masciid-i Sacd-i Salman. The

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second and third sections are modelled on the very thorough analysis descrlbed in the first section.

After a statement about the forms of the description of nature in eleventh century poetry, he examines the fol- lowing categories: "The Principal Descriptions of Nature," "Time," "Places Which are Covered by Vegetation," "Vegeta- tion Described or Mentioned," "Natural Elements," "The Sky and the Stars," "Animals," and "The Poetic Perception of Nature [by these poets]." For each of the poets studied in Part I, he gives exact citations from their divans for each occurrence of a word or concept. This, in fact, forns the bulk of the book, with thousands of citations provided. In Parts II and III, fewer citations are given and much information is summarized. The results for individual po- ets are compared.

In the final section of his book, M. de Fouchecour draws a number of detailed conclusions which can be sum- marized only in the most general way. He is at pains to distinguish invention from convention among the poets which he discusses, a distinction hitherto almost impos- sible to make using the largely impressionistic criteria traditionally applied. Such a distinction is the essen- tial preliminary to an acceptable discussion of style in classical poetry. More specifically, he has studied the content of this poetry, and studied the form as it deter- mines the content. His statement "Une poesie a la re- cherche de la perfection formelle comme est la nttre, tendra necessairement a r6duire son contenu a ce qui est exprimable dans des formes parfaites. Dans la beaute for- melle seul doit finalement transparaitre la beaute de la nature," (p. 239) derives from the discernible change which he found in the poetry from Farrukhi to Labibi and Masctid-i SaCd.

The description of nature in this poetry can be seen as a process in which the descriptions become in- creasingly abstract, stylized, and economical. The fur- ther studies which he rightly suggests will determine how this process applies to other important themes such as wine, the beloved, and the prince. The task will be

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enormous, involving the use of a computer as the author undoubtedly did here. This quantification of poetic and other verbal data seems incompatible with the usual notions of literary criticism, but given the formal conventions of classical Persian poetry, such an approach can be useful for the basic task of describing the corpus.

At the end, the author sets his study in the larger context of comparative literature, and introduces observa- tions on medieval French and Chinese literature. Again the value of this book is immediately clear.

Often-repeated cliches usually remain unexamined and lead us to accept them as proven truths. As students of Persian literature, we should hope that this excellent book will move us to re-examine certain of our ideas about this literature, and look at it with a fresher and more analytical eye.

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