SOURCE: An introduction to The Legend of Seyavash, by Ferdowsi, translated by Dick Davis, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. ix-xxvii.

[In the following essay, Davis studies the plot and themes of the Shah-Nama, focusing in particular on the Sasanian bias of the later portions of the text, including the story of Seyavash. Davis observes that the authority of God and King in the text are of major importance, but are exceeded in significance by the authority of the father over the son.]

The Legend of Seyavash is a section of The Shahnameh, written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi (c. 940-c. 1020). The Shahnameh bears approximately the same relation to Persian culture as the works of Homer do to ancient Greek culture. Coming at the virtual beginning of the recorded literature, it is seen as a massive and masterly work and, in some sense, as a touchstone for everything subsequent to it. It is also considered a uniquely accurate icon of the culture that it defines and, by influencing the notion of self-identity it bequeaths to its people, that it moulds. As Alessandro Bausani has written, Ferdowsi has been regarded by modern Persians as ‘the symbol of Persianness, the father of his country’,¹ and, though this may be less generally true since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the remark still has a broad validity to it.

As with Homer's work, the style of the poem indicates a long oral tradition behind the written version we now read (however, Ferdowsi's relation to his sources is more clearly spelt out than Homer's, and we know that the majority of them were written, though many of these, particularly those related to the earlier sections of the poem, must ultimately have been based on the oral tradition); as with Homer's works, the subject matter is largely the heroic history of the people celebrated in the poem.

We are dealing, then, with a national epic. But it is a national epic far vaster in scope than any of its Western equivalents, concerned as it is with the history of Iran² from the creation of the world to the Arab/Islamic conquest of the country in the seventh century ad. Perhaps the only works of comparable scope in world literature are the Indian epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana. In sheer size, if nothing else, Ferdowsi's achievement is extraordinary, and it has been estimated that The Shahnameh is probably the longest poem (some 50,000 lines—very long lines at that, approximately equal to the length of a heroic couplet in English) known to have been substantially completed by one man.³ The Seyavash episode translated here is a little over 2,500 lines, and it therefore represents only a small portion of the poem, though it is certainly one of its best-known and best-written episodes.

It is usual to divide The Shahnameh (for convenience's sake: these are divisions made by modern commentators, not by the poet himself) into three sections—the mythological section, with which the poem opens, the legendary section, and the quasi-historical section, with which it closes. The mythological section is in many ways more like a cosmogony than an epic, recalling, for a Western reader, Hesiod rather than Homer: it details the creation of the world and of the first man, the origin of evil and of human strife, and the discovery/invention of the arts of civilization. The first man is also the first king of the world—a Persian Adam called Keyumars—and it is significant that, though Ferdowsi was undoubtedly a sincere Muslim, he begins his poem in this way (with a king and a figure from Persian myth), rather than by drawing on the version of the world's and man's creation offered in the Koran.

The middle, legendary section of the poem (from which our story is taken) is the one that corresponds most closely to Western notions of epic poetry. More or less constant warfare between Iran and its northern neighbour Turan is described;⁴ and the overt values the poem promotes are those typical of epic poetry the world over—fierce loyalty to tribe and king, bravery, military prowess and the ability to trick the enemy (the epithet of one of the heroes is the equivalent of Odysseus' ‘guileful’). In this section Ferdowsi inherits an amalgamation of two quite separate epic traditions—that of the Iranians and that of the inhabitants of Sistan (approximately south-western Afghanistan). The family that rules Sistan is nominally subject to the Iranian royal family and provides them with their main champions; there is, however, a constant and subtle rivalry between the two clans and it is this rivalry which generates many of the best-known stories of the poem. The great hero of Sistan is Rostam (made famous in the West by Matthew Arnold's version of the story of Sohrab and Rostam, in which Rostam inadvertently kills his son)⁵ and Rostam is seen as the counsellor, champion and saviour of the Iranian kings. Some of these kings can act with extraordinary foolishness (e.g. Kavus, who is the king during the Seyavash episode) or malevolence (e.g. Goshtasp, who tries to have Rostam enslaved), and when there is such a conflict the reader's sympathy is always directed towards Rostam rather than towards his nominal overlord. The overt value of loyalty to the king come what may still prevails, but much of the poem's human interest arises from the poet's/audience's perception of how difficult it can be to maintain such loyalty, given the nature of some of the kings who demand it. Late on in the poem a king asks his advisor, ‘Who is the most desperate of men?’, and the answer is, ‘A good man whose king is a fool’, the remark neatly encapsulating the problem many of the poem's heroes face, including our hero Seyavash.

It is in this legendary section of the poem that we realize that our modern Western perception of Iran/Persia differs radically from the one offered by Ferdowsi. The poet is utilizing the ethnic inheritance of the Iranian people, originally a tribe or tribes inhabiting central Asia who descended on to the Iranian plateau and into modern Persia at some time before the beginning of recorded history. The landscape of much of The Shahnameh is the grassy steppe of central Asia, not the arid desert of central Persia, and almost all the place-names mentioned in the first two thirds of the poem are not now within the confines of Iran. In the section here translated we read of Merv (now in southern Russia) and Balkh (now in northern Afghanistan), and the border between ‘Iran’ and ‘Turan’ is the river Oxus, now deep within Russian territory. The place-names we associate with Persia—Fars, Shiraz (or its old name Estakhr), Hamadan, Esfahan, Yazd—are virtually absent until the last third of the poem and only appear with any frequency in the last section. In the first two thirds the centre of Persian civilization and influence is seen as what is now the extreme north-eastern corner of the country, Khorasan, where the poet was born, which then extended deep into Russian and Afghan territory. Fars (Pars, from which we derive the word Persia), which the West, as a result of the ancient Greek obsession with the Achaemenid empire, has always seen as the cradle of Persian civilization, does not appear in the poem except as a distant province until just before the advent of Alexander the Great.

The ‘historical’ section of the poem does not correspond very closely to the West's notions of Persian history either. The Achaemenids are virtually absent; Alexander (Eskandar) is half-Persian, having been born from a Greek princess and a Persian royal father; the Seleucids and Parthians, who between them ruled Iran for about five hundred years, are hardly mentioned. The vast majority of the lines dealing with the history of Iran after the conquest by Eskandar are concerned with the Sasanians, the dynasty destroyed by the Arab invasion in the 640s, and via whom Ferdowsi must have received most of his sources. The great heroic figure of the closing section of the poem is the Sasanian king Anushirvan the Just, who is balanced, in the legendary portion of the poem, by the exemplary king Khosrow (the son of Seyavash).

The Sasanian bias of the later portions of the poem has also radically affected the way in which the mythological and legendary sections are presented. In a way, it is the Sasanian version of the Iranian identity and history which Ferdowsi inherits and to a large extent transmits. This is especially noticeable in two areas—religion and politics. The Sasanian religion was a modified form of Zoroastrianism, a faith deriving from the prophet Zoroaster, who probably lived in Iran at some time in the seventh century bc, though a date much earlier than this is claimed by some, notably by the distinguished scholar of ancient Iranian religions, Mary Boyce. For our purposes the most important aspect of Zoroastrianism is its dualism: the universe is a battleground between the forces of good and evil, both being represented by a divine principle—Ahura Mazda for the good (and light) and Ahreman for the evil (and darkness). The soul of man is a microcosm of the universal battlefield and each man must choose between the contending forces. A Zoroastrian heretic, Mani, gave the West the Manichean religion, which developed the Zoroastrian dualism into a system that ended by rejecting the physical world as belonging to the realm of Ahreman, the realm of the spirit being that of Ahura Mazda.

Though such an extreme rejection of physical reality is not part of the original Zoroastrian message, a suspicion of appearances and physical reality as being somehow less ‘good’ (even less ‘true’) than the spiritual realm left its legacy to later Zoroastrianism and, via his Sasanian sources, on Ferdowsi's poem. Ferdowsi's poem has, in contrast with almost all other epics, an urgently ethical cast to it, and this derives in large part from the notion that the true battle, of which all other battles are, as it were, emblems in transient physical reality, is that being waged between good and evil. As important as the physical battles with swords and spears in Ferdowsi's work are the inward ones that take place in the souls of the heroes, and this is particularly true in what are probably the two finest stories of the poem—those of Seyavash and Esfandyar. This inwardness at the poem's high points is something that sharply demarcates it from the notion of the heroic we derive from Homer: Erich Auerbach's famous remarks about ‘clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated men and things [that] stand out in a realm where everything is visible’ characterizing Homeric epic are quite beside the point for Ferdowsi's poem. In the poem's greatest episodes we feel that Ferdowsi is interested primarily in moral, inward and often hidden, rather than physical heroism, and one of his favourite verbs is a word describing mental ‘writhing’, the torments of conscience and regret. The overwhelming duty of the poem's heroes is to do what is right, and this rightness is not necessarily consonant with the victory of one's own side in battle or the survival of one's own people, as is the case in a more straightforward heroic poem. Further, failure in the ‘real’ physical world is not incompatible with triumph in the moral and spiritual world—as is the case with Seyavash, who triumphs spiritually only to be destroyed physically. Again we are far removed from the world of Homer, where failure is failure pure and simple, or even that of so ethical a poet as Virgil, for whom Aeneas' spiritual triumph must also mean literal physical triumph.

The second significant legacy of the Sasanian world-view to the poem is the central importance given to the notion of kingship, a legacy passed on to much of subsequent Persian culture, arguably largely by means of The Shahnameh itself. This notion of the central importance of the ‘Great King’ we know to have been important to the Achaemenids too—it was largely how the Greeks defined their difference from the Persians, and in writers like Herodotus and Xenophon we can see the kind of appalled fascination with which the Greeks regarded this Persian phenomenon. But it was with the Sasanians, who derived from the old Achaemenid centre of Iran, Fars, and who seem consciously to have revived Achaemenid claims to imperial glory, that it entered into its most complex and theologically sanctioned development. The Great King was the representative of Ahura Mazda on earth; he ruled by divine right and possessed a glory unique to kings (the royal farr) conferred on him by God. The Sasanian kings ruled in seclusion from their people, surrounded by an aura of divine power. To rebel was to rebel against God. The very survival of the country was dependent on the survival of the king and his family and when a new king acceded to the throne the world itself was seen as renewed. All this The Shahnameh faithfully reflects, and the very name of the poem (which means ‘King-Book’) indicates the centrality of this concept to the work.

The weight of such authority, both secular and spiritual, might be thought to have a monolithic and deadening effect on the values of the poem. But in reality almost the contrary is true. The demands on a subject's allegiance are indeed overwhelming, but they are often split between contradictory claims. What the king demands and what God or the conscience (or even simple common sense) demand should theoretically be one and the same thing, but they are frequently at variance, and this delemma of loyalty is faced at one time or another by most of the poem's heroes.

The claims of God and king are shadowed by a third source of authority, that of the father over the son. It is a striking fact that in the three best-known stories of the legendary section of the poem—those of Sohrab, Seyavash and Esfandyar—a son is killed as a direct result of his father's actions. Rostam kills his son Sohrab in ignorance and with his own hands; Kavus and Goshtasp (the fathers of Seyavash and Esfandyar respectively) make demands on their sons which they cannot in all conscience fulfil. Seyavash rejects his father's demand and throws himself on the mercy of his country's traditional enemies who ultimately kill him; Esfandyar reluctantly attempts to fulfil his father's order that he enslave Rostam and is killed in the process. The fact that Rostam does not know it is his own son whom he kills in combat (on the orders of king Kavus) is what enables him to kill him at all; but the message that the episode conveys, that the father kills the son, is one that is then repeated in the stories of Seyavash and Esfandyar, whose fathers are ultimately responsible for their deaths even though they are not their immediate cause. In the Farsnameh of Ebn Balkhi, a prose work written in the twelfth century and reproducing some of the same material as Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, Seyavash's father, Kavus, exclaims after his son's death, ‘It was I who killed the pure-souled Seyavash, not Afrasyab’, and though Ferdowsi's Kavus is too unaware of his own folly to say such a thing, the audience draws the same conclusion. When Esfandyar is slain in The Shahnameh, his dying words blame his father, and not the actual opponent in combat who has dealt him the death-blow (Rostam), for his death, and his whole family unite with him in ascribing the blame to Goshtasp.

Seyavash and Esfandyar are presented almost entirely as victims of others' machinations, and Sohrab too is Rostam's victim albeit an unintended one. Similarly many of the kings' champions—and this is especially true of the poem's greatest champion, Rostam—are presented as the victims of their kings' machinations and/or foolishness, and, indeed, Rostam's family is finally wiped out by the Iranian royal family. Beside the weight of authority demanding absolute obedience (the authority of God, king and father), a different ethic emerges, which centres on a sympathy for the victims of such authority. We cannot doubt that we are meant to sympathize with Seyavash in his conflict with his king and father Kavus, and with Rostam in his conflict with the king Goshtasp, who tries to enslave him. The poem's depiction of authority is profoundly ambiguous: it is seen as a prerequisite of organized human life in general, and of the survival of the Iranian nation in particular, but it is also considered the cause of human tragedy and suffering, and the various embodiments of authority in the poem are among its least attractive characters. This questioning seems, in a baffled way, even to extend to the authority of God/Fate itself—and Ferdowsi's comments in propria persona at various points in his poem where he has to record the tragic death of a character he admires hint at this; one of the most striking of these comments occurs after Seyavash is killed, when the poet says in effect that he can't imagine what God can be thinking of by arranging matters thus.

Ferdowsi finished The Shahnameh in 1010 and claimed to have spent most of his adult life working on the poem—a claim which, given its vast length, is entirely believable. This means that the poem was written in the latter half of the tenth century and the opening years of the eleventh and though, dealing as it does with prehistoric and quasi-historic material, its roots extend into the distant past, it is also a product specifically of its own time.

Since the Arab/Muslim conquest of Iran in the mid seventh century the country had been part of the Islamic caliphate ruled first from Damascus, under the Umayyads (661-750), and then from Baghdad, under the Abbasids. The Abbasid revolt against Umayyad rule drew particular strength from Khorasan, and many Persians were involved in the movement. Nevertheless, though it is true that Persians were no longer the wholly peripheral people they had been under the Umayyads and that they had great influence at the Abbasid court (for example through the Barmecide family of civil servants), Iran was at first still seen as a group of provinces subject to an Arab, and therefore alien, family's rule. During the later Abbasid period, within which Ferdowsi's lifetime fell, the eastern provinces especially began to achieve something like de facto independence of Baghdad, though they were still nominally subject to the caliph there. Under the Samanids—client kings of the Abbasid caliphate—in particular, who ruled in the north-east, a Persian cultural renaissance began to take place. The language of the court became Persian rather than Arabic, and, most importantly, Persian became the language of court poetry. The Samanid princes prided themselves on their Persian identity and encouraged a local and national antiquarianism that emphasized the length and uniqueness of the Persian past. Ferdowsi belonged to the dehqan (small landed gentry) class, which was seen as a repository of local tradition and legend and he records during the course of his poem how he conscientiously collected the stories of his country's past, how a particular history that had been recently commissioned was given to him as a major source, and how he sought out those who could pass on oral traditions to him. One reason that Khorasan (rather than the Fars of the Achaemenids) is the cradle of Persian civilization in The Shahnameh is that the poem was written there and drew on local tradition.

The Shahnameh was a direct product of the reappearance of a sense of Persian ethnic identity and, as with most epics, the people celebrated are defined as being in conflict with their neighbours, with whom they do not share ethnicity. The first act of human evil in the poem is carried out by an Arab, who seizes power from the Persian king, Jamshid, and the poem ends with the conquest of Iran by the victorious Arab armies of Islam. But if the poem is framed by an ambiguous hostility to Arab civilization (ambiguous because though it destroyed Persian independence it also brought Islam, considered by virtually all of Ferdowsi's contemporary fellow-countrymen as the true religion, to the country), most of it is taken up with the rivalry between Iran and its northern neighbour, Turan, whose inhabitants are Turks. Unfortunately for Ferdowsi the Samanid renaissance of independent Persian culture was short-lived, and eastern Iran was conquered during the poet's lifetime by Mahmud of Ghazni (in Afghanistan), an ethnic Turk. The prestige of Persian culture had spread to Mahmud's court and he was an assiduous patron of Persian poetry; nevertheless, it is difficult to see how he could have been particularly interested in a poem like The Shahnameh, which celebrated countless Persian victories over the Turks and which usually cast the Turks as evil and their kings as representatives of the evil principle of the universe, Ahreman. And, indeed, the legends concerning Ferdowsi's presentation of his poem to his new ruler record that Mahmud was singularly unimpressed by it and that Ferdowsi retired to his village in Khorasan a neglected and embittered man. Some manuscripts of The Shahnameh include a satire, which may or may not be genuine, on Mahmud and his stinginess toward the poet. All the manuscripts contain passages in which Ferdowsi proclaims his pride in his achievement, and all include passages lamenting his lack of reward for his life's work.

Though the Seyavash story is a more or less self-contained narrative, framed by comments from the poet in propria persona (Ferdowsi's normal way of showing when an episode begins and ends), it is also a section of the continuing narrative of the poem as a whole, and a brief summary of the events in The Shahnameh prior to the opening of the Seyavash episode will make parts of the story plainer.

The poem opens with praise of God, wisdom, the prophet Muhammad, the caliph Ali and Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, from whom Ferdowsi clearly hoped for patronage, together with a short section on how he came by his main written source, and one on his predecessor, the poet Daqiqi. We then pass to the creation of the world, to the first king, Keyumars, and his struggle against the forces of evil represented by demons. This struggle is carried on by his descendants Hushang, Tahmoures and Jamshid. Jamshid is a Promethean figure who introduces the arts of civilization to mankind and who thinks that his power rivals God's. His hubris is punished by the arrival of the Arab demon-king Zahhak, who kills Jamshid and sets up a reign of great rapacity and cruelty; snakes grow from his shoulders and the only food they will accept is the brains of young Persians. Zahhak is overthrown by a popular uprising led by the blacksmith Kaveh, and Kaveh's blacksmith's apron becomes the banner of the legendary Persian kings. Kaveh is joined by the prince Faridun, who rules the world with justice. Faridun divides his inheritance between his three sons, Tur, Salm and Iraj. Tur is given Asia, Salm the West, and the youngest, Iraj, is given the land of Iran. Tur and Salm plot against their brother, who is represented as a naive and well-meaning innocent, and kill him. Manuchehr, a grandson of Iraj, avenges his grandfather's murder and rules in Iran. From this time on Iran and Turan (ruled by Tur and his descendants, in particular the king Afrasyab, who is king of Turan during the Seyavash episode) are more or less perpetually at war. During the reign of the weak and corrupt Persian king Nozar, Afrasyab invades and pillages Iran, and Nozar is killed. There is an interregnum during which Rostam and his father Zal more or less run the country; finally they invite Qobad to be king. Qobad restores the country's fortunes, driving out Afrasyab and his forces and ruling justly and well. However, Qobad's son is the incompetent and rash king Kavus, who is Seyavash's father and the king of Iran when our story opens.

Ferdowsi devotes more space to the reign of Kavus than to that of any other monarch, with the possible exception of Anushirvan the Just.⁶ That he should give such a flawed and unsatisfactory king such prominence in his poem is a strong indication that we should not consider it a work written wholly in praise of kings and the notion of kingship, as it has often been regarded. Indeed, the most interesting and aesthetically telling episodes of the poem⁷ virtually all deal with weak, evil or corrupt kings, and the Seyavash story is no exception.

The irascible instability of Kavus's character has already been demonstrated at least four times before the opening of the Seyavash episode. Contrary to the advice of his ministers he attacks Mazanderan, the home of demons under their leader the Div-e Sepid (‘The White Demon’). The Div-e Sepid captures Kavus, and Rostam has to be sent to rescue him. Kavus also goes courting, and is imprisoned by his new father-in-law, the king of Hamaveran. Again, Rostam has to be sent to rescue him. Kavus then decides to build himself a flying machine, drawn aloft by eagles—this crashes in enemy territory and again Rostam is sent to bring the hapless king home. Rostam has a further reason to resent Kavus's authority: when Rostam had inadvertently mortally wounded his own son Sohrab, Kavus was in possession of a drug that could have saved the boy; he refused to give it to Rostam partly because he was afraid of Sohrab's prowess if he lived, but partly in order to punish Rostam for what Kavus considered the hero's insufficiently humble demeanour. By the time the Seyavash story opens Kavus has been firmly established in the audience's mind as foolish and short-tempered, often well-meaning but equally often vindictive, alternately vacillating and headstrong.

The Seyavash story is constructed with great symmetry and economy: there are two tests of the prince's integrity, both of which he passes successfully, and there are two plots against his life—the first fails and the second succeeds. The first test is against his sexual integrity, when his stepmother queen Sudabeh⁸ attempts to seduce him. His resistance to Sudabeh's wiles and her subsequent fury against him remind a Western reader of the Hippolytus/Phaedra story and, as with Hippolytus, his integrity has something of an anguished adolescent flight from sexuality about it.⁹ Having passed unscathed through the metaphorical fire of Sudabeh's passion for him, he is then required to pass through a literal mountain of fire in order to prove his innocence, which of course he is able to do. In order to get away from the corrupt atmosphere of the court he asks permission to lead the Persian armies against the invading forces of Turan, whom he defeats with the help of Rostam. He concludes a treaty with the king of Turan, Afrasyab, and takes hostages as a token of Afrasyab's good conduct. The second and far more important test of his integrity comes when his king and father, Kavus, orders him to send the hostages to the Persian court where they will be killed. Seyavash feels unable to do this in good conscience and throws himself on the mercy of his country's enemies. Afrasyab welcomes him, and marries him first to the daughter of his chief minister and then to his own daughter. But the plot by Sudabeh against Seyavash at the Persian court is paralleled by a plot by Afrasyab's brother against Seyavash at the Turanian court. Sexually unsuccessful with Seyavash, Sudabeh accuses him of sexual treachery; Afrasyab's brother was the commander of the armies of Turan defeated by Seyavash and, militarily unsuccessful against Seyavash, he accuses him of military treachery, of planning a military coup. Seyavash is unable to refute the calumny, largely because of his innocent trust in those who have plotted against him, and is killed. His second wife, the daughter of Afrasyab, is pregnant with the future king. Kay Khosrow, and is saved by Afrasyab's minister, Piran. Kay Khosrow is brought up in secret, escapes to Iran and eventually returns to avenge his father's murder. The story sounds and is fairly complex, but one is never aware of strain as one reads—the poet keeps the various characters in play with an ease which is so practised and elegant as to seem instinctive, and in the unfolding of events he is able to embody with force and emotional conviction the ethical preoccupations that run through so much of his poem.

In a work of the length of The Shahnameh it is only natural that one should feel that the poet's interest is quickened more by some episodes than by others. As Ferdowsi's sources no longer exist it is often difficult to guess whether a particularly strong delineation is the result of his own interest or whether it is something he has inherited. However, there are histories¹⁰ roughly contemporary with Ferdowsi's poem which deal with much the same material, and when we compare their treatment of particular incidents with Ferdowsi's we do notice a difference. The poet is clearly more interested in stories that emphasize moral heroism than are the historians, and a concomitant of this is that he lavishes attention on episodes that deal with inward conflict—whether it be conflict within Iran itself between different sources of power, within the royal family, or within a given hero's soul and conscience. He is also far more interested in something that approaches the Western notion of tragedy—the notion of noble souls ineluctably destroyed partly by flaws in their own characters and partly by external events over which they have no control. The tragic and ethical aspects of episodes are, in the writings of his historian near-contemporaries, firmly subordinated to dynastic and national concerns. In Ferdowsi's work, however, they often seem completely to take over the foreground of the poet's—and thus his audience's—consciousness, and the dynastic concerns, while always present as a ground bass, become temporarily subordinate. In the Seyavash story the hero chooses to side with his country's enemy and his conscience rather than with his own country and what he sees as evil; his notion of the right is supranational, and while he does figure in the work of the historians it is only in Ferdowsi's poem, among extant texts, that the ethical, tragic and quasi-mystical implications of his decisions are explored with such earnestness and in such depth.

It is not normally to epic, among literary genres, that we look for psychological truth: the characters of epic tend to be types, icons, rather than individuals, and while we may feel that we ‘know’ Odysseus or Hector we do not expect the same psychological subtlety and intensity from their delineations as we do from the creations of, say, Henry James or Proust. In Ferdowsi too we can see a broad, rather than detailed, portrayal of character in most cases, and often the demands of plot will mean that a character's implied inward nature will shift slightly from episode to episode. A good example of this is the character of Sudabeh, Seyavash's stepmother: in the first episode in which she appears (when Kavus goes to her country in order to court her) she is portrayed as a loving, loyal consort; in the Seyavash episode she is a scheming hypocrite. It might be possible to construct a satisfactory psychological profile for her (e.g. her propensity to deceit is there from the beginning, as she deceives her father to save her husband), but it would probably be a wasted effort; her ‘character’ shifts as the course of the episodes in which she figures demands. Another example from our current story is the character of the king of Turan, Afrasyab: nowhere in the poem is he presented as ethically attractive; however, in the Seyavash episode he is much less unattractive than elsewhere in the poem and his attentive concern for Seyavash's safety is presented as genuine. This is clearly in order to contrast him with his brother Garsivaz and with king Kavus, who are the real villains of the piece.

But one way of recognizing Ferdowsi's particular interest in a character is, I would suggest, the way that he does in fact give him or her a psychological depth and reality beyond that which we expect from the personages of epic. We have already seen how the complex character of Kavus is treated with considerable consistency throughout the many episodes in which he figures. Arguably the same is true of the poem's most famous hero, Rostam, and Seyavash's is a startlingly plausible psychological portrait—as is perhaps appropriate for a character whose outward acts are so governed by inward, ethical preoccupations.

Seyavash's psychological reality is related to the theme of filicide and fatherly oppression that runs through the poem, in that he is presented as a character simultaneously in search of and in flight from his father. He is not brought up by his real father, Kavus, but by a surrogate father, Rostam; when he returns to Kavus's court he is not familiar with his father's true character (as the audience by this time is) and mistakenly trusts him when advised to visit Sudabeh in the harem. When his conscience does rebel against his true father's advice (that the hostages from Turan be sent to the Persian court where they will be murdered), his instinct is to turn to his surrogate father, Rostam. But Rostam has been relieved of his command and is not available to the prince. Seyavash turns instead to Piran, the counsellor of Afrasyab, who advises him repeatedly to think of Afrasyab as a father, and Piran too is described as his father. Seyavash's progress can be seen as a turning from father-figure to father-figure (Kavus, Rostam, Piran, Afrasyab); as he is betrayed by his Iranian father Kavus, so he is betrayed by his Turanian ‘father’ Afrasyab; as the Iranian ‘father’ Rostam is absent when most needed, so the Turanian ‘father’ Piran is absent when most needed. His search for an adequate father who will both protect him and support him ethically is reflected in the overriding claims of his anguished superego, which demands absolute ethical integrity from him and finally leads him to trust the most potent but also most absent father of all, God—who, like his earthly fathers, proves unwilling or unable to prevent his death. If all this sounds far too twentieth-century and Western an interpretation, we should remember that Freud claimed to have discovered nothing new and that everything he had to offer was present in the works of the poets before him. Indeed it may well be that one of the characteristics of a great narrative poet is exactly this intuitive ability to reproduce and reveal psychologically compelling behaviour that appears to transcend cultural and temporal boundaries.

By the time one reaches the end of the Seyavash story, however, it is not perhaps the psychological aspect of it that has proved the most compelling. The story begins with the stuff of romance—a foreign girl of royal blood is found as a fugitive and is introduced into the king's harem. From this story-book beginning the tale turns realistic, particularly with the introduction of Sudabeh. She too, as a scheming stepmother, could be considered a figure from fairy-tale and romance, but her portrait has a fierce plausibility about it, largely because of the words she is given to speak, which establish her in the audience's mind as a potent, menacing reality. Seyavash's reactions to her and to his various ‘fathers’ continue this vein of realism, but it begins to dissolve with his trial by fire, and by the time he reaches Turan a strong supernatural element has taken over the tale. The emphasis shifts from the psychological to the ‘spiritual’ and supernatural, and this is particularly noticeable as soon as Seyavash has become established in Turan. He knows he is going to be killed unjustly, he prophesies the manner of his death and its results and he claims knowledge of the future and of God's will. The story becomes mythical rather than realistic, spiritual rather than psychological.

This mythical, spiritual side to the story was clearly a component from the beginning, or at least considerably preceded Ferdowsi's version. It is known that laments for the martyrdom of Seyavash were sung in central Asia before Ferdowsi ever put pen to paper, and such memorials have been performed up to the twentieth century in various parts of Iran. To an outsider the episode has strong similarities with the story of the martyrdom of Hosayn which is such a prominent feature of the beliefs of Shia Islam; in both cases a young and noble leader who is the hope of his people is cut down in his prime as a result of evil machinations against him; in both cases the victim is a symbol of triumph by martyrdom in that the future will vindicate the rights of the deceased. The shared emotional atmosphere of the two stories is a prominent feature of the Persian cultural experience and has had a lasting effect on Persian artistic expression.

A clue as to the possible mythical origins of the story may be found in the imagery Ferdowsi employs in his version. Like many epic writers, Ferdowsi is not a poet who particularly delights in startling or original imagery, and most of his tropes are formulae distributed apparently haphazardly throughout the poem as a whole. But the Seyavash episode is something of an exception to this rule, unified as it is by a series of images that run throughout the whole tale and which are rare elsewhere in the poem. The images are those of fire and water and, in particular, of fire and water as challenges to the hero. The most famous episode of the story, and the one that most attracted the miniaturists who embellished later manuscripts of The Shahnameh, is Seyavash's trial by fire after Sudabeh accuses him of the attempt on her chastity. But the trope occurs with some regularity throughout the whole tale; shortly before his death Seyavash dreams of being caught between fire and water; when Piran dreams of the birth of Kay Khosrow, Seyavash's son, the image is of a candle being lit from the sun; when Garsivaz deceitfully promises to help Seyavash he says he will put out the king's fire of wrath by the water of his advice. The reader will notice other examples of the image. Most interesting is the way the two elements are often associated, even when this can only be done by some contortion. A telling example of this is the description given of Seyavash's clothes when he emerges from the trial by fire unscathed: it is said that if the fire he had passed through had been water, his clothes would not have been wet. It may be that this rather peculiar image is a trace indicating that there were—at some point in the preliterate development of the story—two trials, one by fire and one by water. There is in any case a passage through water later in the poem: in the same way that Seyavash passes through fire after the attempt on his sexual integrity by Sudabeh, he passes through water (when he crosses the Oxus to enter the territory of Turan) after the attempt on his military integrity by his father (when ordered to hand over the hostages to their deaths). The story appears in origin to be one involving rites of passage, symbolized by passing through fire and water, to a higher spiritual state, culminating in the destruction of the body and the triumph of the spirit, the latter symbolized by the new generation as embodied in the hero's son, the unworldly Khosrow. The importance of fire and water in the beliefs of Zoroastrianism cannot be discounted here, but the story seems to refer back to an even more ‘universal’, perhaps shamanistic, period in which heroes representing the growth of the human soul in spiritual awareness are put to ritual spiritual and physical tests.

The Shahnameh has been known to the West, at least by name, since the seventeenth century, but it was only with the late-eighteenth-century orientalist Sir William Jones¹¹ that the poem was seriously read and studied in the West. Jones translated parts of the poem into Latin and planned a tragedy based on the Sohrab and Rostam episode. A verse translation of some episodes (into heroic couplets) was made by Joseph Champion in the late eighteenth century, and another into the same medium by James Atkinson in the early nineteenth (Atkinson also produced a shortened prose version of the entire mythological and legendary sections of the poem, ending with the appearance of Eskandar). Editions were produced first in Calcutta (where Jones had been a judge) and then in Leyden, and the first attempt at a complete translation into a European language was that by the German orientalist, Mohl. Mohl was an acquaintance of the Goncourt brothers and was resident in Paris in the middle years of the nineteenth century.¹² His (prose) translation was into French and was printed en face with his edition of the poem, which was not superseded until well into this century. Though modern scholarship has considerably revised Mohl's view of the text, and though a few errors can be found in his translation, his work is a quite remarkable monument of scholarship considering the limited materials at his disposal. His translation, which is vigorous and frequently provides very persuasive solutions to difficult parts of the text, can still be consulted with great profit.

A complete verse translation into Italian was made by Pizzi in the late nineteenth century. Pizzi's version was in ‘versi sciolti’, unrhymed hendecasyllabics, the Italian equivalent of blank verse, and in the Edwardian period a blank verse translation of the whole poem into English was begun by George and Edmond Warner, to be finally completed in 1925. It is perhaps unfortunate that this version can legitimately be called a ‘Warner Brothers’ epic, as it well lives up to the negative connotations the phrase suggests, though there are fine compensating moments in among the Edwardian Wardour Street diction. The most recent (prose) translation which covers the whole poem (though only by omitting considerable portions of it, including more than half of the Seyavash episode) is that by Reuben Levy, first published in 1967. Levy's view of the poem seems to have been that it was essentially a work about military prowess and kingly glory and, from the point of view of the themes prominent in the Seyavash episode, his translation has little to recommend it. Its advantage, however, is that it does take the reader from The Shahnameh's beginning to its end, but Levy had an almost unerring instinct for missing out the most interesting parts of the poem. The most recent, and easily the most attractive, verse translation of any part of the poem is Jerome Clinton's version of the Sohrab and Rostam story (1987).

Atkinson's and Champion's verse versions are in heroic couplets, the Warners' and Clinton's in blank verse. After some hesitation I have chosen blank verse as the medium for the translation which follows. My hesitation came from the fact that The Shahnameh in the original is written in couplets that correspond fairly closely in length to the English heroic couplet, which would therefore seem to be an obvious form to use for the translation of the poem. Another perhaps irrelevant but nevertheless beguiling consideration was the fact that out of all Western authors, Ferdowsi most often sounds like Racine. It is true that there are vast differences—the compactness and relentless focus of Racine are largely absent from Ferdowsi—but Ferdowsi's interest in anguished conflicts of duty and passion and his brilliant handling of the rhetorical tirade can feel extremely Racinian to a Western reader. It was tempting to imagine Sudabeh's or Afrasyab's speeches in some kind of English equivalent of the Racinian couplet. I was swayed, however, by the fact that the relatively little heroic verse there is in English is usually in blank verse and that the heroic couplet has, in this language, traditionally been reserved for romance, social comment or satire—it has become for us a homely and immediate, or comforting and charming, medium. Despite the great rhymed versions by Pope and Dryden of Homer and Virgil, attempts at the spaciousness and sublimity of epic have traditionally been made in blank verse, and it is perhaps worth remembering that blank verse was expressly invented—by Surrey—for the translation of epic into English. (The numbering of the lines does not correspond to the Persian original text; it is simply intended to help the reader refer to parts of the poem more easily. The subheadings were probably inserted by early copyists and not by Ferdowsi, which may explain why they do not appear consistently throughout the text.)

In preparing this translation my main authority has been the recent edition of the text of the story edited by Mojtaba Minovi (Tehran, 1984); I have also on occasion consulted the Moscow edition of the complete poem (eds. Bertel's et al., Moscow, 1966-71) and Mohl's edition (reprinted Paris, 1976). My translation was unfortunately completed before I was able to consult the new edition of the Seyavash portion of the text edited by Khaleghi-Motlagh. Of previous translations I have found the most useful to be Mohl's, followed by that of George and Edmond Warner, though the texts used by both often differ considerably from recent recensions. I have also at times had reference to the Arabic translation of the poem by Bondari. As this translation precedes by over a hundred years all extant Persian language manuscripts of the poem and seems to be based on a very conservative text, it has often been used by scholars as an arbiter between rival versions in Persian manuscripts. …

Notes

1. ‘i Persiani attuali lo considerano il simbolo dell'iranismo, il padre della patria’ (Letteratura persiana, Milan, 1960, p. 589)

2. Whether the name ‘Iran’ or ‘Persia’ should be used is a question that can arouse considerable anger. The Western usage of Iran stems from the decree by Reza Shah in 1935 that this (the name of the country in Persian) was how the country was to be known: until then, the English name had always been Persia. The egregious ignorance demonstrated by this attempt to tell other people how to speak their own languages (‘Persia’ is a word in the English language just as ‘Alman’ [Germany] and ‘Lahestan’ [Poland] are words in the Persian language) may have been deplorable, nevertheless it has had its effect and ‘Iran’ is now almost universally used. In the translation of Seyavash I have on the whole used ‘Iran’ and ‘Iranian’ though occasionally I give ‘Persia’ and ‘Persian’ (as a translator of Homer might use both ‘Hellas/Hellenic’ and ‘Greece/Greek’).

3. Some one thousand lines are by Ferdowsi's predecessor Daqiqi: Ferdowsi took over the task of writing the poem when Daqiqi was murdered by a slave. Daqiqi had begun in medias res (with the advent of Zoroastrianism), but Ferdowsi begins at the beginning, with the creation of the world. Daqiqi's portion is therefore an episode embedded in the middle of what is overwhelmingly Ferdowsi's poem.

4. If this name looks vaguely familiar to a Western reader, it is probably because of Puccini's Turandot, a word which is a corruption of the Persian ‘turandokht’, meaning ‘girl (princess) of Turan’, Turan being central Asia.

5. Perhaps because of Arnold's poem this has been the most frequently translated episode of The Shahnameh. The best English translation is that by Jerome Clinton (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1987).

6. Kavus is succeeded by his grandson Khosrow. However, for most of Khosrow's ‘reign’ Kavus is still alive and Khosrow refers back to him as the ultimate authority. When Kavus dies Khosrow is crowned again, as if confirming that it is only then that he does really become king, and a couple of lines later he announces his intention to abdicate. If we count Kavus's reign as lasting till his death, Ferdowsi gives him more space than any other king; if we count it only until Khosrow becomes regent, he is still one of the most extensively treated kings of the poem.

7. e.g. the stories of Zahhak and Kaveh; Kavus, Rostam and Sohrab; Goshtasp, Rostam and Esfandyar.

8. It is unfortunate for a modern audience that the only significant female character in the Seyavash episode is Sudabeh, who is a lustful, scheming and vindictive stepmother. Though The Shahnameh, as an epic poem, records a primarily male world, it does, in fact, include very sympathetic portraits of women—in particular Manizheh and Gordiyeh, both of whom display loyalty and heroism when the menfolk who might be expected to display such virtues fail. The Turanian princess Manizheh defies Afrasyab to protect her Iranian lover Bizhan, keeping him alive when Afrasyab has him thrown into a dark well, and she has become for Persian myth the archetype of loyalty in adversity. Gordiyeh opposes her brother Bahram Chubineh in his attempt to wrest the Iranian throne from the legitimate heir Khosrow Parviz, and her spirited speeches in defence of the poem's epic values are among the most moving and eloquent in the whole work.

9. A closer parallel for Ferdowsi and his original Islamic audience would be the story of Yusuf and Zuleikha from the Koran (Joseph and Potiphar's wife in the Bible); again an attempt is made on the chastity of a young man seen as a spiritual hero/victim, and when her overtures are rejected the scorned woman accuses the young man before her husband of having tried to seduce/rape her. Interestingly enough, there is an eleventh-century Persian poem on the Yusuf and Zuleikha story which used to be ascribed to Ferdowsi, though scholars now reject the attribution: it may be that it was its broad similarity to parts of Ferdowsi's treatment of the Seyavash story that led to the ascription in the first place.

10. Specifically the Histories of Tabari (about a century before Ferdowsi's work, and therefore available to him as a source) and of Tha'alebi (about fifty years after Ferdowsi's work).

11. ‘Persian Jones’, as he was called, author of the first Persian grammar in English (1771) and the first man to suggest the existence of the Indo-European family of languages including Latin, Greek, Persian and Sanskrit—the intuition that such a relationship existed is said to have come to him while reading The Shahnameh.

12. It was largely from Mohl's French version that Matthew Arnold learnt of the Sohrab and Rostam story, though he seems also to have known Atkinson's version.