Nezami Ganjavi's sokhanee chand dar eshgh (A Few Words on Love)

Leyla: Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation. A Few Words on Love, an excerpt from the Romance of Khosrow and Shirin by Nezami of Ganjeh, introduction with Dr. Sahba Shayani.

Dr. Sahba Shayani, thank you so much for joining me today!

Sahba: Of course, my pleasure! Thank you so much for having me on Chai and Conversation, leylā jān!

Leyla: Yes, this is a long time coming, and, Dr. Shayani, I want you to introduce yourself and what you do before we get into what we're going to discuss specifically today.

Sahba: Sure, thank you! My name is Sahba Shayani, and I’m a lecturer at UCLA in Persian Language and Culture. My own field is Classical Persian Poetry, with a specific focus on the role of women in the romances of Khosrow and Shirin, vees ō rāmeen, and parts of the Shahnameh. And prior to moving back to LA to teach at UCLA, I taught at Oxford for 7 years as Senior Lecturer in Persian.

Leyla: Wonderful, and where did you grow up, and how did you become interested in this subject?

Sahba: So I grew up predominantly in the Bay Area in Northern California with a six-year stint in Tehran. I lived in Tehran from the age of four to ten, which was really the time that set the foundation for my love of the Persian language, of Persian culture, of Persian literature and poetry, and my relationship, really, with Iran, but yeah, predominantly in Northern California, in the Bay Area, in the East Bay. Then I moved to Los Angeles in 2006 for undergraduate, to start… to study at UCLA. I transferred from community college, so I had two years there for my undergraduate, until 2008. Then I continued at UCLA as a graduate student for Master's and then continued on for a PhD in Iranian Studies and the program of Iranian Studies, focusing on classical Persian literature. Then before having… even, in a way, having started part of my dissertation for the PhD, but not having been nearly anywhere close to done, I got a position at Oxford to teach Persian there. Then I moved and lived there for seven years, and really, thanks to the pandemic, because it’s really… it’s quite a feat to teach full time and also try to write a dissertation. During the years I was working on it, chipping away at it, but really during the pandemic, the pandemic sort of made my social life die and made me have to sit at home and just work. That really helped me to finally push through and finish my writing, and so I finished my PhD in 2020, actually, remotely, and then got this job at UCLA in 2022, really, but I started in winter of 2023, so I've been here for a little over two years now.

Leyla: That's such a dream, and I've been wanting to work with you for a long time because I've seen that you have these classes on the Shahnameh. You have these classes on, in UCLA, you teach this subject. I mean, you're living quite a dream life where you've gotten to study these at such a high level and then know them enough to teach them and and also be of both cultures. I mean, you're kind of a, a diamond in the… I mean, it's very hard to find someone like you where you understand both cultures so well, so you come from this perspective, and you can, you can translate it so well, too, to those of us who grew up in the diaspora or Western audience. It's very exciting to have found youm and I'm so honored to be able to do this with you!

Sahba: Thank you, the honor is mine! It's really an honor to be here with you on Chai and Conversation. Thank you for having me!

Leyla: Thank you so much, and we're going to do a long Growing Up Irooni interview with sahbā jān, and we're going to tell, give a very, very detailed background into how he grew up, his relationship with Iranian culture. I'm very curious to hear about this ages four to ten. If you see my shirt…

Sahba: I know, I noticed it!

Leyla: You probably have a lot of experience, you probably have a lot of experience with this! It's, for those of you watching, you can see, but those of you who are just listening, it's the cover of the first-grade book of Farsi that they studied in Iran. And this is, this the one that you studied while you were there?

Sahba: That's the one I studied, yeah, yeah! That's the one, yeah.

Leyla: Yeah, I don't know. My husband found this shirt somewhere. I'm not sure. It’s so cute! If we find it, we’ll link to it, but yeah. I'm so curious about that and how that shaped you. That's so exciting to hear, but that, that's for an hour-long podcast. For today, I asked that we study a poem that you really liked, and this was one that I saw you recite, and I thought it was a very, very exciting poem. We actually don't have any Nezami on our website, so at first, introduce what we're going to learn, and then let's go into Nezami and who he is!

Sahba: Okay, what we are going to learn is a portion from the introduction, from Nezami’s introduction to Khosrow and Shirin. Nezami is really known for, well, I should say, first of all, Nezami is a 12th-century poet, who composed predominantly in Persian, but who lived in, who was from the city of Ganjeh, which is in the modern day Republic of Azerbaijan, so Nezami today is very special both to the, I mean, he's special to all Persian-speakers everywhere, but of course, very special to the people of Iran and Afghanistan and Tajikistan, but also to the people of Azerbaijan, whose main language is Azeri or Azerbaijani but who hold Nizami in very high regard, in high esteem. Nezami is really known for his quintet, it's called in English, his khamsé. “khamsa,” if you speak Arabic or know in the Semitic languages, means just ‘five’. It's called his… this corpus is called the “khamsé” because it's made up of five poems, five masnavis, so longer poems. One of these poems is the Romance of Khosrow and Shirin. Another one is the romance of laylee ō majnoon, which I'm sure many listening or watching have heard of, and there's the four more that we will get into later, maybe. Nezami’s Khosrow-Shirin is really considered by many the height of the Persian romance, and whereas laylee ō majnoon comes from an Arab origin, Khosrow-Shirin has a very Iranian origin. Khosrow is the Sasanian King of Iran, and Shirin in Nizami’s Khosrow-Shirin is the princess and, later, queen of Armenia, or of Aran and Arman, rather, so it's a very important text to us, both culturally and literary. We chose, or I chose, this introduction to Khosrow-Shirin because it is, it's on the subject of love, and he focuses essentially on why love is what it is and its importance, in a way. I don't want to give it away, but we'll read through it together and you'll see. It actually has a deep philosophical meaning within it that we can talk about today, too, but it's one of my favorite parts. It's probably my favorite part of the entire introduction.

Leyla: Wow, okay!

Sahba: And my favorite parts of the poem in general.

Leyla: And just to put it in context… a lot of listeners probably have not heard of Nezami, especially if they're from a Western background. We've heard Rumi, we've heard Hafez, we've heard… maybe we've even heard Saadi, but where does Nezami kind of lie? It's the same time period. Somehow, all these guys were around the same time period, but where does he lie in those greats, for example? Or even Ferdowsi?

Sahba: Nezami, in some ways, you can say is closer to Ferdowsi in his style of writing. Hafez is known for his ghazals, Saadi is known for his ghazals, also his nasr ō mosaja', his ornate prose that includes some poetry. Ferdowsi is known obviously for the Shahnameh, which is also a masnavi, but… in the form of masnavi, but Ferdowsi’s masnavi is predominantly, it's an epic. It has elements of romance in it, but Nezami is known as the king of the masnavi writers in the romantic genre, writing romance, as opposed to where a lot of Ferdowsi’s writings are about war and battles and the clash of empires and so on and so forth. Nizami’s, although it includes parts of that, is predominantly about love and the love relation. A lot of scholars, predominantly Julie Scott Meisami, have worked on this, the importance of romances because romance literature, actually, as opposed to epic literature, gives us a direct view into the character that, the minds and the spirits of the characters that we learn about, whereas epic literature is sort of more general. We get glimpses of the inner workings of the character. Romances go much more in depth, so at the end of a romance, we really feel like the characters inside and out.

Leyla: Interesting, and then is it the same kind of love? I guess you said that you were going to talk about the philosophical, but a lot of these poets wrote about love. Rumi wrote about love, Hafez wrote about love, and this is more of what you said, like a narrative story. Is that right?

Sahba: This is more of a narrative story, but it also has elements of, I would argue, even mysticism in it. It has elements of romantic relationships and the working of a romantic relationship in it, so it's like I was saying. It's not, it is definitely a narrative, but it really goes deep into the psyche of the character, psychology of that.

Leyla: Got it, and are these poems similar to Rumi and Hafez? Would people memorize these as well? In Iran, do people have these memorized?  

Sahba: These poems are really long. Yes, they would definitely have portions of them memorized. I don't know if anyone would have the whole thing memorized by heart, but there are definitely portions of them that would be memorized. As a whole, the Shahnameh has a tradition of naghālee where they would perform these and they would recite them from memory in a performative act, which we have, for example, we have the first female naghālee here in Los Angeles today, Gordafarid, I don't know if you've seen, you must have seen her work. Yeah, that's a very Shahnameh-related tradition. The romances, from my understanding at least, aren't really in that tradition. They don't really act them out as much.

Leyla: Got it.

Sahba: But definitely, there would be elements of them that would be memorized by people for sure.

Leyla: And then what age do you think you start getting introduced to these stories? Are these stories that you can start telling children, or is it kind of something that you learn as you get older?

Sahba: I mean, I think traditionally, maybe, in Iranian culture, there hasn't been this sort of Western concept of what do you introduce children to and what do you not, so some people might have used stories of the Shahnameh, which I don't think are really child-appropriate necessarily, but may have used them to tell children, definitely. Same with the stories, like the romances too. Yes, definitely, I mean, they're stories that in the past, traditionally, children would have also been to some extent familiar with, but they're definitely stories that you might create much more of a bond with if you read as a young adult, as someone who's experiencing romance and these sorts of things.

Leyla: Got it, okay. Well, exciting! I think that's a good starting point, gives us a little bit of context. You've provided us an excerpt of the poem, so can you kind of contextualize where we are in the story with this selection?

Sahba: So like I was saying, this is in the introduction to the poem, and every one of these stories, when you begin them, has a long introduction. You have… the opening is always in praise of God and the praise of the Creator, and then you have a section in the praise of the Prophet Muhammad usually, and then you have a section in praise of the king, usually, so it's always praise God, you praise the Prophet, and then you praise the King, who has basically paid for this, who is essentially…

Leyla: The patron, the money.

Sahba: Exactly, the patron, yeah, exactly. They've been the patron behind this, and then this section comes later, obviously, in this, in this poem. Later on in the introduction, I think, it comes, if I'm not mistaken, after a portion where he starts talking about the importance of Khosrow-Shirin as a love story. Then he focuses on love and what love is and why love is actually an all-encompassing energy.

Leyla: Interesting, okay, and this is your own translation.

Sahba: This is my own translation, yes.

Leyla: That you provided for us.

Sahba: Yes.

Leyla: Wonderful! Sahba is going to read us the Persian, and I'm going to read his own translation right after him, so we're going to read one line at a time, and you can listen along. Afterwards, we're going to go through it again and go through the deeper meanings and go through each of the, each of the phrases. As always with these poems, the way it works is that we will provide the introduction in this episode, and then in subsequent episodes, I'll go over it two lines at a time and go over every single word, every single phrase, so that we can learn how to use those in modern conversation. Again, it's amazing that we can use a 12th-century poem in Persian to learn how to speak correctly now. It's amazing that we can even understand it, so I always like to point that out.

Sahba: Truly, truly! I should also point out that my translation does take some liberal… what is it? Liberalities with translation…

Leyla: Liberties, yes!

Sahba: Liberties, thank you, yes, some liberties with the translation, so it's good that then we go through it together word by word so that listeners and then viewers can see the actual literal meaning of specific words too.

Leyla: Absolutely. There's some parts of these that are just… I've read through this poem, there's some parts that are just so playful and so fun in Persian, and it's so hard to get that into an English translation. It's so fun to go through it and really go through those, those type of words, so… wonderful!

Sahba: Wonderful! Okay, so first line, let's begin:

marā k'az eshgh beh nāyad sho'āree.

mabādā tā zeeyam joz eshgh kāree!

Leyla: No greater practice exists than the practice of love. God forbid that I undertake any work save that of love’s!

Sahba: falak joz eshgh mehrābee nadārad.

jahān bee khāké eshgh ābee nadārad.

Leyla: The universe has no axis save that of love’s. Without the soil of love the earth has no seas.

Sahba: gholāmé eshgh shō k'andeeshé een ast!

hamé sāhebdelān-rā peeshé een ast.

Leyla: Tend wholly to love, for wisdom lies in this. This has forever been the work of the enlightened.

Sahba: jahān eshgh-ast ō deegar zargh-sāzee.

hamé bāzee-st elā eshgh-bāzee.

Leyla: The world IS love, all else a deceptive charade. It is all child's play save for the game of love.

Sahba: agar bee eshgh boodee jāné ālam

ké boodee zendé dar dowrāné ālam?

Leyla: If the world's existence was bereft of love, how would any have lived throughout all of the world’s cycles?

Sahba: kasee k'az eshgh khālee shod fesord-ast.

garash sad jān bovad bee eshgh mord-ast.

Leyla: He who is devoid of love is hardhearted. Even if he has a hundred lives, without love, he is dead.

Sahba: narooyad tokhmé kas bee dānéyé eshgh.

kas eeman neest joz dar khānéyé eshgh.

Leyla: The fruit of no one's loins grows sans the seed of love. No one is safe and secure save in the abode of love.

Sahba: zé soozé eshgh behtar dar jahān chee-st?

ké bee oo gol nakhandeed, abr negree-st.

Leyla: In all the world what can compare to the burning flame of love? For without it neither the rose would blossom in smiles, nor the cloud shed its life-giving tears.

Sahba: tabāyé' joz keshesh kāree nadānand.

hakeemān een keshesh-rā eshgh khānand.

Leyla: The elements know naught save attraction one to another, and the wise know this attraction to be love (its very self).

Sahba: gar andeeshé konee az rāhé beenesh

bé eshgh ast eestādé āfareenesh.

Leyla: If you ponder through the path of true enlightenment, you would see that the very essence of all creation stands upon love.

Sahba: gar az eshgh āsemān āzād boodee

kojā hargez zameen ābād boodee?

Leyla: If the sky was free of love, how could the earth ever be so verdant and lush?

All right, it's wonderful! I love that smile on your face; that says it all! It is really beautiful, and can I just say my first impression? This was, I mean, I glanced through it before, but this is the first time I've come across this. To me, it just really reminded me of… I was very, very close with my grandfather, and when he died in 2012, and he kind of gave me my love of poetry, too, interestingly, but when he died in 2012, I remember that there's this period of time when someone you love dies, when you're just so open and so… you're kind of in the in-between. During that period, I kept thinking that I was like “oh my God!” It hit me so hard. I was like “the only point of all of this is just love, pure love. Nothing else matters. That's all.” If there's just one thing I wanted to write over and over, it was just “eshgh, eshgh, eshgh, eshgh,” ‘love, love, love, love’. That's it. That's all that matters, so this poem, I think, really says that there's so many… in so many words, you know?

Sahba: Yes. Yeah.

Leyla: It’s really beautiful.

Sahba: I think that's really important. It's like that Rumi poem that they, I know it in translation, the original doesn't come to me, but that it's through the cracks that the light finds its way to us. It's in these moments of difficulty that we really somehow, all those veils that have, that, on the daily, are burnt, and we suddenly see the reality of… just like you're saying, that's all that matters. That's all that stays. It's the love.

Leyla: Yes.

Sahba: You know?

Leyla: That's it, that is all, yeah. What does it mean to you? What do you love so much about this poem?

Sahba: I mean, what I love about this poem is it's twofold. One is exactly like what you were saying, that at the end of the day, nothing remains but love, but also the fact that the way we understand love in many ways is sometimes skewed also. I think we think of love as this desire for something or this sometimes lusting over something, but actually, what he's telling us, and this is the philosophical element of this, is that the whole world is based off of love. It's set up on love, so we, our very existence, yours and mine, and then all of ours, comes from love because it comes from the attraction of two people together that then procreate. Literally everything in the world comes from love, all atoms, this attraction that atoms have to one another, that then holds the world together. That's love, and actually, I was speaking yesterday to a graduate student in our program, Joshua Hall, who was working on his PhD in Avicenna, Abu Ali Sina, and Hafez. He was saying that the elements that you see here, really, of the Abyssinian philosophy of love, is very visible also. It's just that all of creation works through love, and then God, the Creator or that high energy, creates us out of love but out of love for himself, too. Everything is… it's, I know my own beauty and I love it, and therefore I create so it can be adored. It’s sort of, they call it arc of ascent, an arc of descent. All of creation tries to reach a sort of perfection in many ways, and this attempt to reach a sort of perfection is all in praise of the Creator. Then it returns, love then returns as the arc of descent back to the creation, so it continues as the… so the entire thing, everything, the entire universe, is based off of this energy that is love. I think that's the beauty of it to me, is that it's even beyond our comprehensions of love, of just being between two people or being from us towards something or… it's beyond that. Everything we know is based off of love. That's how our world was created, and this is… we'll get to it, but this is why he says:

tabāyé' joz keshesh kāree nadānand.

hakeemān een keshesh-rā eshgh khānand.

‘The elements know nothing, save this attraction’. This is all they know, is this sense, this ability to attract to another, and ‘the philosophers’, ‘the ones who know’, ‘the “hakeemān” call this attraction love’.

Leyla: Right, right. So then this, similar to those other great Sufi poets, it's working on all these different levels. Is that what you're saying?

Sahba: Yes. Absolutely.

Leyla: It's working on the physical level, but it's also working on the celestial level and the divine level and everything.

Sahba: I think something really important to always point out with Persian poetry is this, is that, and my former advisor, Professor Hossein Ziai, would always say this: Philosophy is to the Greeks as poetry is to the Persians.

Leyla: Interesting, yeah!

Sahba: Our relationship with our poetry is not just a relationship of beautiful words that having been strung together and something for us to sing and be merry about, not at all! It's the exact same relationship that there is between Greek and philosophy, and the world, because we're so Western-oriented and Western-focused, knows that about Greeks and philosophy but doesn't know it as much about Persians and our poetry, but this is… literally, our poets are philosophers. They're not just stringers of words together, so all of our poetry, even when it's love poetry, often has multiple layers that are teaching you something about life to a greater extent.

Leyla: Yeah, that's exactly what my grandfather would say, too. He loved physics beyond everything else, but in the later years of his life, he would just, he would write these poems, and he was like “all of life's answers are in these poems!”

Sahba: Exactly.

Leyla: It was amazing!

Sahba: Yeah, that's very telling. Also, is that someone who's in the sciences…? I think often in the Western psyche, we think of sciences and the arts as separate things, but someone who really understands the sciences then knows that poetry or that the arts are just the other elements. It’s like the yin and the yang, and they mirror one another.

Leyla: So one thing I was a little worried about when we, when you chose this poem also was I wasn't sure how to present it to our students. Why should you learn this poem? What if you're not in love right now and you're not dating? What we think of in the Western sense of “oh, you're not dating someone” or “you haven't had that experience,” why should you care about this poem?

Sahba: Yeah, I mean, it's not about that. I think it's about life, and life is, if you're here, this matters to you. You're here because there's love, but you're here because you were, you were created out of love. You exist through love. You exude love in everything that you do. There's actually a part of this poem, I should have included it in here, but I didn't, but I'll tell you about it, where he says it's better to live and to show love to a cat than to never be in love, so yeah, that's it. I think Western culture really understands us because we're obsessed with animals!

Leyla: Yeah!

Sahba: To the detriment of our humans, but this is true! He's saying it's even better to live and show love to a cat than to live and not experience love, and so you don't have to be in love. Your existence is love. Your daily activities can exude and do exude love in many ways.

Leyla: Right! Well, let's go through it line by line and go through a little bit more of these juicy elements in this poem!

Sahba: Let's go, yes, okay!

marā k'az eshgh beh nāyad sho'āree.

Right off the bat, we are punched in the face with a very classical use of a term that we use on a daily basis. I'm sure you've talked to your students about “-rā,” which is the specific direct object marker grammatically.

Leyla: Yes, right!

Sahba: But “-rā,” in its classical form, can also act as an indirect object marker, too, as opposed to how we use it today. When he says “marā k'az,” in modern-day Persian, you would say “bé man” or “barāyé man,” ‘to me’. He's saying “marā k'az eshgh," so ‘to me’, “man-rā,” and then “k’az” is “ké az,” yeah, ‘to me’… that is literally “ké az,” “eshgh,” ‘love’, and then “beh.” “beh” is our word for ‘better’. It's actually where you then get “behtar” and “behtareen” from, so ‘to me from love better’ “nāyad,” ya'nee “na āyad,” 'it doesn't come, it becomes' “sho’āree.” 'It doesn't come any message', so ‘no message’, ‘no practice’, ‘no’…

Leyla: In modern-day poetry, sorry, in modern day Persian, “sho’ār” means ‘slogan’. ‘Slogan’, right?

Sahba: Yeah, so “sho’ār dādan,” the, the act of reciting a slogan, yeah, exactly. In a…

Leyla: Standing on a pedestal and saying a “sho’ār.”

Sahba: Yes, exactly so, but in the classical poetry, “sho’ār” here has more a meaning… it doesn't have the meaning of ‘slogan’ but rather the meaning of a ‘practice’ or an ‘act’ that you do. ‘He says to me, there is no greater practice, no greater act, save the act of love’. Then we have “mabādā,” and this is something we use in modern day Persian too, ‘may you not’ or ‘do not’. We use it as a word of warning, like “mabādā bé harfāsh gush bedee,” 'don't listen to his words!', so it's a cautionary word, almost like ‘may it not be!’.

Leyla: 'Don't!', 'don't you!', yeah, yeah.

Sahba: Yeah, so “mabādā,” ‘may it not be’, “tā,” ‘as long as’, “tā zeeyam,” and then “zee” is the present stem of the verb “zeestan,” “zeestan,” which is the simple verb for the compound verb “zendegee kardan,” so ‘may it not be that as long as I live…’ “zeeyam,” ‘I live’, “joz,” “bejoz,” ‘other than’, “eshgh,” ‘other than love’, “kāree,” ‘an act’, so ‘may I not do any act as long as I live other than love!’.

Leyla: And I want to point out, let's remember that “eshgh kāree,” ‘the work of love’ or ‘act of love’…

Sahba: Yes.

Leyla: …because that will come back in a bit in an exciting way!

Sahba: “falak joz eshgh mehrābee nadārad.” “falak” ya'nee ‘the spinning heavens’. We have it in the modern-day word for ‘ferris wheel’, “charkhé falak,” no? ‘Spinning wheel'. “falak” is ‘the heavens’, essentially, so “falak,” ‘the heavens’, “joz,” again, ‘other than’, “eshgh,” ‘love’, “mehrāb.” “mehrāb” is the place where, in a mosque, traditionally, you face to say your obligatory prayers, and it's the point in the mosque that points towards the “ka’bé.” It points towards Mecca, so it's saying that ‘the heavens, save for love, has no point of adoration, has no place to turn to prayer and devotion, save love’. Love is its focal point, its pivot. “jahān bee khāké eshgh ābee nadārad,” 'the world'… “bee” as a prefix means ‘without’. “jahān bee khāké eshgh,” ‘without the soil of love’, “ābee nadārad,” ‘has no water’, so ‘the world, without the soil of love, water does not have’.

Leyla: That's right.

Sahba: “gholāmé eshgh shō!” This is in the imperative, “beshō!” ‘become!’. ‘Become the slave of love!’. “gholām” ya'nee ‘slave, servant’. ‘Become a servant to love, a slave to love!’. “k’andeeshé” is just a combining of “ké” and “andeeshé”, ‘that’, “andeeshé” ya'nee “fekr,” ‘thought’, ‘that thought’, “een ast,” ‘is this’, so ‘become a slave to love for the right thought, the right way of thinking is this!’. “hamé sāhebdelān-rā peeshé een ast,” ‘all of the’ “sāhebdel,” and then “-ān.” “-ān” is your plural marker for animate beings, “sāheb” meaning ‘owner’, and “del” meaning ‘heart’, so ‘all those who own a heart’, but literally means ‘all those who are enlightened’, not just ‘have a heart’. ‘All of those who are enlightened, whose heart is right, it reflects the reality and the truth’. “hamé sāhebdelān-rā peeshé een ast,” and then again, “-rā” here is a classical use of “-rā” again because it's acting as a possessive.

Leyla: Got it.

Sahba: So ‘to all the enlightened ones’, “peeshé,” ‘work', ‘is this’, so ‘to all the enlightened ones, the real work is this, the work that is worth doing is this’.

Leyla: Just to pause, let's kind of focus on “sāhebdelān.” You're saying that “sāheb” means ‘the owner of a heart’? Okay, and is that something…? “sāhebdelān,” is that something we would say in present conversation?

Sahba: Not really, no!

Leyla: Okay, that's such a beautiful way to think of it!

Sahba: It is a beautiful word, yeah, it is a beautiful word.

Leyla: “sāhebdelān,” ‘the enlightened’, okay.

Sahba: Yeah, yeah, and then “peeshé” is a good word. It's basically your ‘profession’. It's your ‘métier’, yeah. It's a little different from “kār” because “kār” can be your ‘work’, but “peeshé” is the profession you choose. That's why I'm saying ‘this is the profession of those who are enlightened’, as in, this is what they devote their life to, is love. Then here's the “shāh bayt.”

Leyla: Okay, explain to us what a “shāh bayt” is!

Sahba: “shāh bayt” is essentially the best verse of the poem, the verse that takes the cake and is most renowned throughout time.

Leyla: So, kind of the mic drop?

Sahba: Exactly like the mic drop, I like that, yeah! Just so that the listeners know, “shāh,” obviously we all know as ‘king’, and “bayt” is a verse of poetry, so it's the ‘king verse’, literally.

Leyla: Okay, okay, let's do it!

Sahba: “jahān eshgh-ast ō deegar zargh-sāzee,” “jahān,” ‘the world’, “eshgh-ast,” ‘the world is love’, “ō deegar,” ‘and other’, meaning ‘everything else’, “zargh-sāzee.” “zargh,” we use this in modern day Persian, too, but it's something that shines. “zargh” means that it's deceptive. It's like the thing that shines but isn't actually gold.

Leyla: Yes, so the others are just shiny objects, which we say in English as well.

Sahba: Yeah. It's kind of the idea of everything that shines is not gold, yeah? It's like gold is love. The rest of it is just fake shiny objects, so the world is love and everything else, I translated, I think, as ‘a deceptive charade’, but it's a game.

Leyla: Yeah, and this is why that line is a good example of why you should know the Persian, yeah, and this next line, too. Go ahead!

Sahba: Yeah, exactly, “hamé bāzee-st,” ‘all of it is’ “bāzee,” ‘all of it is a game’. “hamé bāzee-st,” 'it's all a game', “elā,” ‘except’, “bejoz,” “joz.” There's a good synonym for “joz”! “elā eshgh-bāzee," ‘except for the game of love’.

Leyla: Beautiful!

Sahba: Yeah, yeah!

Leyla: I love that!

Sahba: You can read “eshgh-bāzee” in different ways. In modern-day language, “eshgh-bāzee” doesn't have the best connotation because it became a very physical love. Here, he's using it in a much more deeper sense. It's ‘the game of love’, but he's also playing with it because this is, remember, it's a romance that he's writing, too. Actually, this entire section is really important to the text, too, just to contextualize it, because people were or would have criticized him for writing a romance because they'd be like “oh, what is this? It's just all about romantic love, and it's cheap!”

Leyla: Yeah, right, exactly my reaction the first I heard of it!

Sahba: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of like how we think of romance novels today, the ones you buy in the supermarket, right? That's what they would have thought of it. “Oh, this is cheap!” and he's saying, “No, it's actually not only not cheap, this is what the whole world is based off of!”

Leyla: Yes, and I love, I love the, that juxtaposition, “hamé bāzee-st elā eshgh-bāzee.” It's making that “eshgh-bāzee," something that we think of as frivolous, into something serious. Everything else is unserious except for this. This is serious!

Sahba: Exactly, yeah, so he's showing like this is not, what I'm doing is not cheap in any way. This romance that I'm creating is actually… like you said, it's the mic drop moment. This is it! This is what it's about, actually.

Leyla: I want to contrast that with that first line that I said, that I pointed out, “joz eshgh kāree,” and now we have “elā.” You said “joz” is a contrast to that “elā.” Now, it's saying “elā eshgh-bāzee." We have “joz eshgh kāree,” we went from that, ‘the work of love’, and then now, we're doing “elā eshgh-bāzee,” ‘the play of love’. I love those two contrasted together!

Sahba: Yeah, yeah, it's beautiful, and Nezami is a master of… in Persian literature, I would argue, master of the playing with words. This is why translating him is often impossible, because you can't capture that.

Leyla: Right, exactly, yeah! Okay, so that's the shāh bayt, and I will also point out, Sahba, I don't know if you know, but this… after our students listen to the poem, they have to memorize it and send us a video of them reciting the poem. I'm excited to see them, to see their expressions, when they're reciting this shāh bayt line here.

Sahba: Yeah, absolutely! We're looking forward to seeing them, too. I hope I can see some of them.

Leyla: Oh, you will, you will! All right…

Sahba: “agar bee eshgh boodee jāné ālam,” ‘if without’, there's that “bee” again, yeah, the prefix “bee.” ‘If without love’, “boodee,” ‘was’, and this is just “bood,” and that “yé” is sort of like an archaic “yé.” It emphasizes, ‘if it were without love’. “jāné ālam,” “jān,” you all know, ‘the soul or the life of the world’. ‘If the lights of the world or the soul of the world was without love’, “ké boodee zendé dar dowrāné ālam?” “ké” eenjā is “kee,” ‘who?’, ‘who’, “boodee,” ‘was, would be’, “zendé,” ‘would be alive’, “dar,” ‘in’, “dowrāné ālam,” ‘in the cycles of the world’. ‘Whoever in the, in all the cycles of the world would have ever been alive if love didn’t exist in this world?’.

Leyla: ‘In this’, like you're saying, could just be literally ‘we are born of love. We are born of this act of love’.

Sahba: Yeah, you can take it very literally, but on a whole level, the atoms that form our body again are made of love, too. Yes, it's the coming of two people together, but also then everything that shapes, takes form, you know, everything that happens, the entire process, is based off of this attraction of things together, this love. “kasee k'az eshgh khālee shod fesord-ast,” “kasee,” ‘a person’, “k’az,” there it is again! “ké az,” ‘the person who from’ “eshgh,” ‘love’, “khālee shod,” ‘became empty’, “fesord-ast”. “fesordé,” as in 'it's dipped down', ‘they’re dipped down', 'they're depressed', 'they're down'. How did I translate this one “fesord-ast” specifically?

Leyla: ‘Is bereft of love’.

Sahba: Yeah, ‘is bereft’, exactly, yeah. 'They're bereft of', essentially, “fesordé” means… You have it in modern-day Persian, too, where we use it for ‘depressed’.

Leyla: It’s like “afsordé.”

Sahba: Right, yeah, “afsordé.” It's just, “fesordé” is just “afsordé.” They've dropped the alef because it rhymes better in the thing, so it means that, but it's actually a beautiful juxtaposition, not juxtaposition, but it’s a beautiful image. The person who's bereft of love is depressed. We could look at it like that, too. “garash sad jān bovad bee eshgh mord-ast.” This is interesting. “garash,” “gar,” “agar,” and then “-ash” here is the pronominal suffix ‘to him or her’. ‘Even if to him or her’ “sad jān bovad,” ‘even if to him or her, a hundred lives there may be, there were’, “bee eshgh,” ‘without love’, “mord-ast,” 'he's dead'.

Leyla: That's amazing. That's beautiful.

Sahba: Yeah, it's really beautiful, so even if you have 100 lives, if you don't love, then it's as if you've never lived.

Leyla: I love it, and that reminds me still of those other two lines of the “hamé bāzee-st elā eshgh-bāzee.” It's all kind of like the same. It's taking something and contrasting it, like being alive, having 100 lives, so what's the opposite of being dead is having 100 lives, but without love is dead. It’s very nice!

Sahba: Exactly, exactly. “narooyad tokhmé kas bee dānéyé eshgh,” “narooyad,” the negative of “rooyad.” “rooyeedan,” “rooyeedan” ya'nee ‘to grow’, “narooyad,” 'it won't grow, it doesn't grow', “tokhmé kas,” “tokhm” means ‘seed’, which we know in words like “tokhmé morgh,” ‘the seed of the chicken’, or ‘the seed of the bird’, rather, which becomes, then, ‘egg’. “tokhm” here again is ‘seed’, so “narooyad tokhmé kas,” ‘the seed of’ “kas,” ‘one’, ‘the seed of someone’, “narooyad,” ‘does not grow’, “bee dānéyé eshgh,” ‘without the seed of love’. Here, he's very clearly playing with the human procreation, actually, because “tokhm” can also have the connotation of the… well, they both can in a way, “tokhm” and “dāné.” Not really, but “tokhm” can have the connotation of the ‘egg’, actually. Here, I would argue that it's actually more in relationship to the sperm, actually, and then “dāné” acting as the, as the egg. Without the two coming together, no one grows.

narooyad tokhmé kas bee dānéyé eshgh.

kas eeman neest joz dar khānéyé eshgh.

“kas,” again, ‘anyone’. “eeman,” like “amn ō eeman,” “amn,” “amān,” sorry. We say “amn ō eeman” often. They're the same root as this. “eeman” means safe, and we know it. For example, people might know it in the context of “kamarbandé eemanee,” your ‘seatbelt’. “kas eeman neest,” ‘no one is safe, is protected’, “joz dar khānéyé eshgh,” ‘except in the home of love, in the abode of love’, as in, ‘love is your only shelter’, essentially.

“zé soozé eshgh behtar dar jahān chee-st?” “zé” is just a shorted form of “az.” “soozé eshgh,” ‘the burning’, coming from “sookhtan,” ‘from the burning of love’, “behtar,” ‘better’, “dar jahān”, ‘in the world’, “chee-st?” ‘what is there?’. 'What's there better in the world than the pain of love?', ya'nee he’s saying even the pain of love is good, “ké bee oo gol nakhandeed, abr nagreest." “ké bee oo,” ‘for’. Here, “ké” is ‘for, because’, like “chon ké,” ‘because’. “bee oo,” ‘without it’, meaning the “sooz,” ‘without that burning sensation’, “gol nakhandeed,” ‘the rose does not smile’, and “abr nagreest,” and ‘the cloud does not cry’. Now, “sooz” has multiple meanings, and here, he's also talking about this “sooz” in the context of weather becomes the burning cold. It's not actually the burning of a flower.

Leyla: Okay.

Sahba: So he's saying… yeah, you were kind of, I could tell you were like “what’s that?”!

Leyla: Yeah, I was like, the flower, does it not…? I don't know!

Sahba: You don't have to burn a flower for it to grow!

Leyla: Right. Oh, yes, “soozé…”! Yes, “soozé bād” is like ‘cold’.

Sahba: It’s “soozé sarmā.” He's saying without the pain of love, without that cold bitterness, bitter cold of love, the flower doesn't blossom and the clouds don't cry. Then, obviously, you need the clouds to cry for the flower to blossom too, so it's kind of a juxtaposition.

Leyla: That makes sense, yes, yeah, yeah. All right!

Sahba: Yeah. This is my other, this is my favorite line of it, too. This is my personal shāh bayt, too. “tabāyé' joz keshesh kāree nadānand,” “tabāyé'” ya'nee ‘the elements’, “tabāyé' joz keshesh,” “joz” is the reoccurring word in this, so ‘the elements other than’ “keshesh,” which is coming from “kesheedan,” the present stem “kesh-,” ‘the draw to pull’. “keshesh” ya'nee ‘pull’, this ‘drawing’ towards one another, so ‘the elements other than this attraction’ “kāree nadānand,” 'they don't know any other work, any other deed'. They can't do anything but being attracted to one another. "hakeemān een keshesh-rā eshgh khānand…"

Leyla: Oh wow!

Sahba: The “hakeem”s, the ‘wise men’, the ‘knowers’, the ‘philosophers’, the ‘scholars’, you see, “hakeem,” plus the suffix “-ān," which is a plural animate suffix marker: “hakeemān,” ‘the philosophers’, “een keshesh-rā,” ‘this attraction’, “eshgh khānand,” ‘they refer to as love’, so ‘the philosophers call this attraction love’.

Leyla: And this is where you're getting the atoms from, so it's saying these are the elements of the earth, this is science, but then the wise people call this attraction ‘love’!

Sahba: This is where I'm saying, this is where he's directly referencing philosophers such as Abu Ali Sina who talk about this. Going back to what your grandfather said, and going back to what I was saying before, this shows you that Persian poets are not just stringing words together. These are themselves scholars who are familiar with the philosophy, with the sciences. Oftentimes, these people are mathematicians. They’re not just random word stringers, you know.

Leyla: Right, right. That's incredible!

Sahba: They’re scholars; they're astronomers, often. They are, so these poets know a lot. They have a vast array of knowledge. They know a lot of things, and so here, he's showing you, and Nezami does this all very subtly throughout his texts, beautifully so. He shows you his knowledge of botany. He shows you his knowledge of astronomy. He shows you his knowledge of philosophy, you know.

Leyla: Right! Okay, let's read that line again!

Sahba: Okay.

tabāyé' joz keshesh kāree nadānand.

hakeemān een keshesh-rā eshgh khānand.

Leyla: I love it, and that difference between “nadānand” and “khānand”! “nadānand,” so ‘the elements know nothing besides’ that. They just don't know, but then the “hakeemān,” the ‘wise people’, it doesn't use that same word of 'they don't know', but it says ‘they sing this praise of love’… Is that right?

Sahba: Yeah, ‘they call it love’.

Leyla: ‘Call it’, okay!

Sahba: Exactly, “khāndan” in classical Persian often also has the connotation of ‘to call someone something’, so “kasee-rā khāndan” would be like ‘to call you forward’, has that exact same, yeah, ‘they call it love’.

Leyla: Beautiful!

Sahba: I love it! “gar andeeshé konee az rāhé beenesh,” “gar,” again, “agar,” “andeeshé konee,” “andeeshé” is the Persian word. “fekr” comes from Arabic. “gar andeeshé konee,” ‘if you think’, “az rāhé,” ‘from the path of’ “beenesh,” ‘from the path of seeing', “been” coming from “deedan,” ‘if you think through the path of insight’, essentially, ‘if you think wisely, if you think through the path of insight’, “bé eshgh ast eestādé āfareenesh,” ‘to love is’ “eestādé,” ‘standing', “āfareenesh,” ‘creation’, so 'if you think clearly, you'll see that all of creation stands upon love. It's all based on love'. “bé eshgh ast eestādé āfareenesh,” ‘to love is standing all of creation. Upon love stands all of creation’. You see it here as the energy that's holding everything together and up. And our last bayt: “gar az eshgh āsemān āzād boodee,” ‘if, from love, the skies or the heavens were freed, were liberated, were bereft’, in this case, “kojā hargez zameen ābād boodee?” Here, “kojā” means ‘how?’, ‘how?’, or you can even read it as ‘when?’, but it's ‘how?’. “hargez,” ‘ever’, “zameen,” ‘the earth’, “ābād,” ‘verdant, lush,’ “boodee,” ‘would be’. ‘How would the earth ever have been green if the sky was bereft of love because even their skies’ rain upon the earth is out of love?'.

Leyla: I love it!

Sahba: Yeah, pun intended!

Leyla: Oh, geez. yeah! Well, we were talking a bit about, before this call, we were talking about climate change and just the, the applicability of these 12th-century poems to current things. That's kind of what I'm thinking of, just these last few lines that we were reading. I was thinking, these poems do kind of have all the answers, even to current day problems. What is it that could, that could solve this problem, is our love for one another, our love for the earth, our love for the sky, our love for all of these things. That is really the answer.

Sahba: Absolutely, absolutely, and I think, going back to what we were talking about earlier on, too, I think this poem even, in a way, shows you that all of this, the world, is based off of love. I think our only answer to creating a better world is returning to that, to our nature, to what is natural to us, and that is love, actually, love for one another, for the planet that we live in, and understanding that all of this is based off of that. It's all based off of this coming together of things, and if you look at it that way, then you can even read love as unity also, and that it's only our only way forward and the only way of creating a better world is together, actually. Is that what you…?

Leyla: Right, and is Nezami also in that Sufi tradition as well?

Sahba: Nezami is not traditionally, what do you say, identified as a Sufi poet, but yes, Nezami definitely has elements of mysticism in his poetry. As we see in, the peak of Nezami’s mysticism, I would say, is in laylee ō majnoon. laylee ō majnoon is a story that often is seen with having heavy mystical undertones, but all of his works, haft paykār, even khosrō-sheereen, they have mystical elements to them, so I don't want to say he's not a Sufi poet because I think Sufism or spiritual, or “erfān,” ‘gnosticism’, finds a way into his poetry. He's definitely aware of it, but he's not like Rumi the way we think of… or even Hafez in that way.

Leyla: Right, but in general, it has those very strong elements of what you're saying, like the unity and using love to get back to the source and the essence.

Sahba: As does most Persian poetry. I mean, that's the backdrop of all of this, is that spirituality, that unity, that oneness, that mysticism, whatever you want to call it, yeah.

Leyla: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is a beautiful poem; thank you so much for choosing this, and I'm excited to hear all the students really go through it! As I always say, whenever you memorize these poems is when they really become a part of you. Do you have this selection memorized?

Sahba: I don't, unfortunately, but I really should, yeah. I should do one with the students memorized!

Leyla: With our bootcamp, yeah, that's right! Once you memorize these, these really do become a part of your bones, and you're… you think about them all the time as you're walking around. We ask people to recite it in a beautiful location, and I think that this poem has clues as to how to find that beautiful location.

Sahba: Yes, definitely, definitely!

Leyla: That's going to be very exciting! Is there any last thoughts that you have as the students go to memorize it?

Sahba: I think no. I think what you said, leylā jān, is key. Memorizing it really makes it… in Persian, we say “az bār kardan,” ‘to make it of your chest’, essentially!

Leyla: Oh, interesting, okay; I didn’t know that!

Sahba: It's like you hack it into your heart, and you remember it then forever, and it becomes a part of you. You remember every single verse of it.

tabāyé' joz keshesh kāree nadānand.

hakeemān een keshesh-rā eshgh khānand.

Everything we do, every act we do comes, is born out of love.

Leyla: Wonderful, and is there… is there a selection in Khosrow and Shirin where they're arguing with one another? Am I remembering correctly?

Sahba: There are multiple selections in khosrō-sheereen where they go back and forth!

Leyla: Okay, I believe that my cousins have that memorized, and they would recite that, and it was a lot of fun, so maybe we'll have you back on for one of the famous arguments of Khosrow and Shirin!

Sahba: Yes, gladly, gladly!

Leyla: Because here, here, it's all fun and games, but there's not… it's not without conflict ever, is it?

Sahba: No, of course, even that conflict is love in some ways, too!

Leyla: Wonderful. Well, thank you, sahbā jān! This was super fun, and, and like I said, there's going to be follow up episodes to this one where we'll go over word by word, phrase by phrase. If you watch this episode, you'll have seen all the words that we've learned, all the phrases that we've learned, on the screen. If you listen to it, then that's wonderful, too. Thank you, everyone, for being with us, and we'll be back with Part Two next time. Dr. Sahba, or Dr. Shayani, thank you so much!

Sahba: No, Sahba, Sahba!

Leyla: All right, and until next time, khodāhāfez!

Sahba: khodāhāfez!