Persian poet enters English
The first English-language edition and translation of the work of Rudaki, known as the father of Persian poetry, will appear with Purdue University Press this spring under the title Father of Songs: Rudaki and his Poetry. It is the work of Dr. Sassan Tabatabai, a scholar of medieval Persian literature who began teaching First-Year Persian in MLCL in 2007–2008 and is also a longtime faculty member in the CAS Humanities Core Curriculum.
Abu ‘Abdollāh Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki, who lived from about 880 CE to 941 CE, was a court poet for the Samanid regime that ruled much of Khorāsān (northeastern Persia). As the first major poet to write in New Persian, his work was central to the re-emergence of Persian as a literary language following the Arab conquest, which in the seventh and eighth centuries had installed Islam as the official religion and Arabic as the chief literary language in Persian-speaking lands.
In Rudaki’s tenth century, the gradual weakening of the Caliphate provided a hospitable atmosphere for a renaissance of Persian literature. Persian poetry—now written in the Arabic alphabet—flourished under the patronage of amirs who drew literary talent to their court. As a court poet, Rudaki wrote panegyric poetry, praising the qualities and characteristics of his patrons. As the founder and innovator of a new poetic aesthetic, Rudaki has had a great impact on subsequent generations of Persian poets. Rudaki is credited with being the first poet to write in the rubāi form made familiar to English-language readers through Fitzgerald’s versions of Omar Khayyām; and much of the imagery we first encounter in Rudaki’s lines has remained central to Persian poetry.
Sassan Tabatabai is a writer, poet, translator and editor whose work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Literary Imagination, The Republic of Letters, Seneca Review and Leviathan Quarterly. He is Senior Editor of The Republic of Letters and acts as faculty advisor for the Core Journal, the annual literary journal of the Core Curriculum.
Congratulations to Sassan on this major accomplishment.