Dick Davis Review of Browne
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A Literary History of Persia by Edward G. BrowneThe Divan-i Hafiz by H. Wilberforce-ClarkeModern Persian Prose Literature by Hassan KamshadReview by: Dick DavisSource: Iranian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 585-588
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586
Reviews
ture can usually turn
with more profit to
the volumes by Bausani
and Safa,
or
those edited by Rypka and Yarshater.This is not at all to denigrateBrowne's
achievement,
which was
enormous and, given the
state of Persian
scholarship
during
his
lifetime, extraordinary.Nor is
it to denigrate his
subsequentinflu-
ence: most of the
best Britishwriters on
Persian
literatureof the twentieth
cen-
turywere
Browne's heirs, in
that they were either
trainedby him or by those
he
had
trained.If we see further
han Browne was able
to, it is
largely because we
stand on his
shoulders, and our
insights would not be
remotely
possible without
his
preliminary achievements.
However, we
indubitably do see further:
much
has been
discovered since he
wrote.
Particularlybut not
exclusively on the pre-
Islamic period, he
cheerfully and
openly allowed his
own prejudices for
and
againstcertain
types of poetryto color his
opinions,
and he made some
mistakes
(as who does not?). Further,the nature of writing on literaturehas become
immeasurably
more sophisticated since
Browne's time. It may
well be thought
that
much
of
this
sophistication
is
not
pure gain,
particularly
when
the
writing
degenerates
nto
the
self-regarding
and
incomprehensible,
or
gives itself
over
to
polemics
for
various
political
and social
agendas. Nevertheless our
increased
awareness
of, for example,
the
ways
authorialpersonae are
presented
in
litera-
ture, or of the
natureof literarygenres, or of
the
typologies
of
epic and
romance,
or of
the
ways comparativestudies
can
fruitfully
be
brought
to
bear
on Persian
literaryquestions, can
all at times make Browne's
approach
appeardated,
sim-
plistic,
and
only
minimally
useful.
The reissue contains an introductionby J.T.P. de Bruijn,which says some
very
nice things about
Browne, but
is
actually
ratherhard
put to come
up
with a
reason for
bringing
the
book
before the public's attention
again. Gibbon's
Decline and
Fall
of
the
Roman
Empire
is adducedas
a
work that was
pioneering
in its
field, has been superseded
by subsequent
scholarship,
but
which
is
still
read.This is
not a
very persuasive analogy. Gibbon
is
now
read
largely
for
aes-
thetic
rather than
scholarly
reasons:
he is
one
of
the
most
striking
writers
of
expository prose
in
English.
Browne's
prose
style
is
hardly
a
compelling
rec-
ommendation:
he
writes
very charmingly
at
times,
but
so
did
a
great
many
of
his
contemporaries.
Edwardian
English
belles lettres
is full
of
books
at
least
as
well
and often much better writtenthanA
LiteraryHistory
of
Persia.
A
price
of
$275
seems a bit steep for the occasional wry chuckle at a deftly turnedapercuor
witticism.
True,
the
volumes
are
quite
handsomely produced
and do
look
very
nice
on
the
bookshelf.
But if
how
one's
bookshelf
looks
is
not a
major
concern
the
money
would
perhaps
be
better
spent acquiring
Safa's, Rypka's
and
Yar-
shater's volumes,
and
one
might
still
have some
cash
in
hand
for
a few
good
editions
of Persian
poetry. (Bausani's
wonderfully
argumentative,
diosyncratic,
and
provocative Storia
della letteratura Persiana
[Milan
1960] cannot be
obtained
for
love
or
money,
which is a
scandal:
f a
publisher
wants to do schol-
arship
on
Persian literature
a real
service,
reissuingBausani,
or
commissioning
an
English
translation
of
Bausani,
would
be
of
much
more use than
reissuing
Browne.)
The
reissue of Wilberforce-Clarke's
The Divan-i
Hafiz (1895)
seems
equally problematic,
and
the
introduction
ustifying
its reissue is even less reas-
suring,
as
its
author
candidly
admits
that
he
finds little to admire
n
Wilberforce-
Clarke's work.
Indeed Michael Hillmann's introduction
s
largely
taken
up
with
tracing
the
history
of
the Persian
ghazal prior
to
Hafez,
and when
he comes to
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Reviews 587
the text in hand the
best he can offer
is readers
.. can
...
expect
a
sense
of
being
transported o a
poetic
world of
experience
not unlike
the
sense
which
Iranianreadersoften describe
as
their
experience
of Hafiz. This
is faint
praise
indeed,
and is
made even more faint
by
the fact that in the
previous
paragraphs
Hillmann
hasjust disassociated himself from
the
particular
sense which
Iranian
readers
often describe as their
experience
of
Hafez in
question,
a
disassociation
with which most other
scholars would
agree.
For
Wilberforce-Clarke,Hafiz's
text is a
labyrinth
of
Sufi
symbolism,
and
virtually
every
mundane
object
that
appears
n
the poems is to be
interpreted
s a
symbol
of
Sufi arcana.This is not
a
view of
Hafiz's
poetry,which now has much
scholarly
credibility.On the other
hand,
the
book is offered as
a
crib for
English
speaking
readers
attempting
to
read and
understandHafiz in
Persian,
and at this level it
does have its
uses,
as
long as the readerignores most of Wilberforce-Clarke'svoluminous and often
quite
batty
notes. To this end a
useful
table,
identifying
the
translated
poems
in
the
editions by Khanlari
and
Qazvini,
is
included. The life of
Hafiz
(by
Wilber-
force-Clarke)which
precedes the
translations contains
some
pretty anecdotes
but is
of
virtually
no
value as a
reliable
source: two
appendices
however,
one
listing the
historical
individuals
mentioned in the
Divan, and the
other
the fig-
ures of
speech
used
by
Hafiz
(with
examples)
are
helpful. Consulted with cau-
tion,
then,
this book can
be
of
real
assistance to someone
who has
acquired
a fair
amount of
Persian but not
enough
to read
the
poems
unaided.
However, read
by
someone
who has little or
no
knowledge of Persian
(and this seems
its
more
likely
audience)
it can
only
help
to
perpetuate
he
image of Hafiz as
yet another
writer of
inspirational,
sentimental,
goofy-Sufi
verse, who
had
not a
sensible
thought
in
his
quaintly
mystic
mind. On balance this
seems a
disservice-to
Hafez,
to Persian
culture,
and to
poetry.
After
considering
two
reprints
of
such dubious
value
it is a
pleasure
to turn
to one that can
be
greeted
with more or
less
unequivocal
enthusiasm,and
this is
Hassan
Kamshad's
Modern
Persian
Prose
Literature.
Now
almost forty
years
old,
the
book's
chosen areas of
emphasis,
and
its
judgments,
have in
general
held up
remarkably well.
Recent
scholars
of
Persian
have
perhaps
begun
to
develop
a more
nuanced
history
of Persian
prose than that
which lies
behind
Kamshad's
book
(which
might
be
crudely
paraphrased s
early
prose was sim-
ple and that was good, recent prose is simple and that is good: everything in
between was
ornate and
that was
bad ).
The
almost
hagiographic
portrait
of
Hedayat
with
which the book
ends also
seems to need a
little
more
shadingthan
Kamshad was
prepared
to
offer. For
example,
Hedayat's
unabashedly
racist
view of
Arab civilization
seems
hardly to
bother
Kamshad
at
all, and
this is
more than
slightly
embarrassing or a
contemporary
eader;an
indication of
how
our
sensitivities
on such
mattershave
shifted
since he
was
writing,
and
certainly
since
Hedayathimself was
writing.
Also, the
comparatively ittle
space
given
to
Al-e
Ahmad is at
first
sight
surprising,
given his
immense
posthumous
reputa-
tion and
influence,
and
thus the
way he looms so
large
for
us, but of course
there
was no
way
that
Kamshad
could
have foreseen
this. All
cavils aside,
the
book's
general thesis, the clarity and detail of its narrative, the persuasiveness of its
arguments,
ts
very welcome lack of
jargon,
and
its
generallyfair and
perspica-
cious
assessment of
well-knownfigures
such as
Dehkhoda,
Jamalzadeh,
Hejazi,
Afghani
and
Alavi,
as well as
its
advocacy of now
lesser-known
figures like
the
historical
novelists of the
early partof
the
twentieth
century,
together
make it
the
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