Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Tag: Persian

  • Studies on classical Persian poetry

    Bürgel, Johann Christoph. 2013. Nachtigallen an Gottes Thron: Studien zur persischen Dichtung. Edited by Mehr Ali Newid and Peter-Arnold Mumm. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
    To date, only a few pioneers have made classical Persian poetry and philosophy accessible to the occidental eye. During the 17th and 18th centuries, influential travellers brought goods, travelogues and translations back from Persia. Around 1800, enthusiasm for the oriental brought about more translations as well as more systematic research. In 1812, Joseph v. Hammer(-Purgstall) translated the Dīvān of Ḥāfeẓ. It is with him that Friedrich Rückert studied Persian and went on to set new standards in oriental philology and translation. Despite the tremendous contributions of the chairs in Iranian Studies which were subsequently founded in Europe, the wealth of Persian literature has hardly been exhausted.

    Johann Christoph Bürgel was born in Silesia in 1931, received his doctorate in Göttingen in 1960 and was director of the Institute of Islamic Studies in Bern from 1970 to 1995. With his research method, characterised by scientific accuracy and a creative gift for language, he continued the tradition of Rückert and laid cornerstones for today’s Iranian Studies. He received numerous awards for his research as well as his translations.

    This volume combines selected papers by distinguished orientalists from 1978 to 2008, dealing with Neẓāmī, ʿAṭṭār, Ḥāfeẓ, Rūmī, Sanāʾī and other Persian mystics and poets, as well as their European reception.

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  • The Kurdish Šāhnāma

    Chaman Ara, Behrooz. The Kurdish Šāhnāma and Its Literary and Religious Implications. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.

    The Kurdish Shanama and its Literary and Religious Implications, as the result of a long-time fieldwork in the cultural spans of Zagros, focuses on the newly survived epic-heroic narratives known as Razm-nama, Jang-nama or Shanama. In this work, author draws attention to the existence of an unexpectedly rich epic-heroic tradition in literary Gurani (a composite idiom used in the Zagros regions) and strongly suggest that this tradition is largely independent of the Ferdowsi’s Shahnama but has many common features with other works of the Sistani cycle of epics and the Persian Naqqali tradition. This work addresses the structural and contextual similarities and differences between this tradition and its counterparts in Persian literature, and subsequently proposes a new understanding of the term Shahnama and the term Xwadaynamag. In this work, Chaman Ara, challenges the common understandings of the concept of Gurani, and presents analysis and descriptions of some linguistic features of the theory of Gurani literary language.
    See here for the ToC and the Preface to this volume.
    Behrooz Chaman Ara received his PhD in 2014 from the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Georg-August University of Göttingen. His research focuses on the Kurdish languages, literature and cultures.

  • Wine culture in Iran and neighbouring countries

    Fragner, Bert G., Ralph Kauz & Florian Schwarz (eds.). 2014. Wine culture in Iran and beyond (Sitzungsberichte der phil.-hist. Klasse. Veröffentlichungen zur Iranistik 75). Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
    Starting from important new archaeological findings and insights that have led to a rethinking of the history of viticulture in Iran and its wider Asian context, this volume explores various aspects of the cultural, social and political significance of grape wine in the Iranian cultural sphere. It assembles specialized studies and interpretative essays ranging from the question of the origins of viticulture and winemaking and the trade of wine between the Iranian plateau and China to viticulture and wine consumption in 20th-century Kafiristan, from the place of intoxicating beverages in hadith to the nature and function of wine in classical Persian poetry and Iranian architecture, from the ambiguities of alcohol in pre-modern Persia to the challenges of modernity and colonial encounters.
    Table of Contents (ToC):
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  • The Humorous in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Narrative

    Brookshaw, Dominic Parviz, ed. Ruse and Wit: The Humorous in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Narrative. Ilex Foundation Series 8. Boston, Mass: Ilex Foundation ; Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012.
    The essays in Ruse and Wit examine in detail a wide range of texts (from nonsensical prose, to ribald poetry, titillating anecdotes, edifying plays, and journalistic satire) that span the best part of a millennium of humorous and satirical writing in the Islamic world, from classical Arabic to medieval and modern Persian, and Ottoman Turkish (and by extension Modern Greek). While acknowledging significant elements of continuity in the humorous across distinct languages, divergent time periods, and disparate geographical regions, the authors have not shied away from the particular and the specific. When viewed collectively, the findings presented in the essays collected here underscore the belief that humor as evidenced in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish narrative is a culturally modulated phenomenon, one that demands to be examined with reference to its historical framework and one that, in turn, communicates as much about those who produced humor as it does about those who enjoyed it.
    Table of Contents
    – Introduction / Dominic Parviz Brookshaw
    – Amphigory and other nonsense in classical Arabic literature / Geert Jan van Gelder
    – Persian Humor in the International Context / Ulrich Marzolph
    – Have you heard the one about the man from Qazvin? Regionalist humor in the works of Ubayd-i Zakani / Dominic Parviz Brookshaw
    – Bawdy anecdotes in religious settings: examples from medieval Persian literature / Olga M. Davidson
    – Playful figures of script in Persian and Chinese / Paul Sprachman
    – Despots of the world unite! satire in the iranian constitutional press: the Majalla-yi istibdad, 1907-1908 / Ali Gheissari
    – Humor for in-betweeners: Sadiq Hidayat’s myth of creation as a cross-cultural phenomenon / Marta Simidchieva
    – Ottoman Karagöz and Greek shadow theater: communicational shifts and variants in a multi-ethnic and ethnic context / Anna Stavrakopoulou.

     

    About the Editor:

    Dominic Parviz Brookshaw is Associate Professor of Persian Literature and Senior Research Fellow in Persian at Wadham College. Among his recent publications see:

    “Mytho-Political Remakings of Ferdowsi’s Jamshid in the Lyric Poetry of Injuid and Mozaffarid Shiraz,” Iranian Studies, 48:3 (2015), 463-487.

  • A grammar of early Judaeo-Persian

    Paul, Ludwig. 2013. A grammar of early Judaeo-Persian. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag.
    Early Judaeo-Persian (EJP) is the form of Persian that was spoken by Jews, and written in Hebrew script, in ca. the 8th-12th centuries C.E. Most EJP manuscripts have been found in the Cairo Geniza from the late 19th century onwards. Since the dialectal basis of EJP is different from the Early New Persian (written in Arabic script) that was spoken in north-east Iran at the same time, the study of EJP is essential for an understanding of the development of New Persian. So far, only isolated grammatical features of EJP have been studied. The present work is the first attempt at a comprehensive description of EJP grammar in its own right, based on the study of the most important EJP texts, published and unpublished.
    For more information, see the ToC and the preface to this vollume. You can also download and read a sample chapter of this book.
     About the Editor:
    Ludwig Paul is professor of Iranian Studies at the Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg. He is a scholar of Iranian Linguistic, dialektology as well as Iranian modern history.