SIMIN BEHBAHAANI

Book Chapter

https://news.stanford.edu/2016/07/18/complex-view-islam-found-poetry-iran/

The Necklace of the Pleiades 24 Essays on Persian Literature, Culture and Religion , 2010

"The Necklace of the Pleiades is a volume on Persian literature, culture and religion by Persian scholars from around the world. This book reflects the state of the field of Persian literary studies and will be of substantial interest not only to scholars of Iranian culture, history and religions, but of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, as well. The topics of the 24 essays range from the Persian Alexander romance, to Ferdowsi’s Shahnama and other epics, the poetics and imagery of the ghazal and the qasida, Mughal court poetry, Sufism, Ismaili history, Baha’i literature, Iranian linguistics, the modern writer Sadeq Hedayat, and the reception of Salman Rushdie’s novel in Persian translation. In Persian literature the Necklace of the Pleiades is a metaphor for the six or seven stars (Parvin, or Sorayyâ, high up in the constellation Taurus) which the heavens bestow, like precious pearls, upon a poet in gratitude and reward for composing a beautiful poem. The poem itself is compared to a string of pearls, with its carefully chosen words bored like unique pearls and strung in perfect metrical proportion. As Hafiz puts it: You’ve sung a ghazal, pierced the pearls, come and sing it sweetly, Hafiz! The heavens strew the very Necklace of the Pleiades upon your verse. " This volume was presented as a Festschrift for Prof. Heshmat Moayyad of the University of Chicago on his 80th birthday. Originally published by (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers and West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2007) Publisher's Website: https://www.lup.nl/product/the-necklace-of-the-pleiades/

Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, ed. Leonard Lewisohn (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 251-78., 2010

Examines the literary topos of dawn, the "Alba," in Persian poetry in comparative perspective, first considering the Alba poem in medieval Provencal lyric in southern France and northern Italy, establishing how the theme of the parting of two lovers at dawn was a well-established trope in European poetry of the medieval and renaissance periods. A close parallel also appears in the Arabic poetry of Andalusia, perhaps with some interchange. In Persian there are also some examples of the "Alba" theme -- the ghazals of Sa`di but especially Sana'i. Although Hafiz' poems do not use the Alba theme in the same way, Hafiz does set many of his ghazals (perhaps 1/5 of all his ghazals) in the dawn or early morning. The article develops how Hafiz uses the topos of dawn and why it is integral to his mythopoetic vocabulary.

With the advent of growing Sufism in Persia and India the ghazal’s themes were centered to mysticism and devoted to the expression of the spiritual longing to be connected with the divinity and romanticism that includes human love and pain of separation along with the glorification of the beautiful nature— the birds, flowers and beyond. Ghazal is normally set to music to uphold the resonance and appealing allusion of the themes. And Nazrul introduced the lustrous ghazal-lyrics and songs in Bengali literature with his eloquent words and musical skills.