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The Hierarchy of the Arts in Buf-e Kur

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael Beard
Michael Beard*
Affiliation:
The University of North Dakota
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Extract

In recent years we have begun to see more of Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) as a political writer. An anonymously printed pamphlet of four previously unpublished works, including an excerpt from his political satire, Tup-e Morvari [The Pearl Cannon] (1947), appeared in Berkeley in 1973, giving us a glimpse of the other Hedayat, even at the height of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi's power. In 1978 it became possible after many years to buy Haji Aqa (1945); and briefly in 1979 an edition of The Pearl Cannon was available. As we see more of Hedayat as an engaged political presence, and the Hedayat who spent two months in Uzbekistan in 1945 as a guest of the Soviet Government becomes less of an anomaly for us, Buf-e Kur [The Blind Owl] (1937, 1941) becomes more of a problem. It is patently his greatest work; and yet it is the work in which his referentiality is most in question.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1-4: Literature and Society in Iran , 1982 , pp. 53 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1982

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References

Notes

*This article is adapted from a work in progress to be entitled At the Sign of the Owl, a study of The Blind Owl in its extensive Western contexts.

1. Ahmad, Jalal Al-e, “Hedayat-e Buf-e Kur” in ‘Aqayed-o Afkar darbareh-ye Sadeq-e Hedayat pas az Marg, ed. anon. (n.p. Tehran: Bahr-e Khazar, 1967), pp. 79–91, 87.Google Scholar An English version by Ali A. Eftekhary is in Hillmann, Michael C., ed., Hedayat's ‘The Blind Owl’ Forty Years After (Austin: UT Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1978), pp. 27–42.Google Scholar This translation, however, is my own.

2. Frank, Joseph, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1963), pp. 3–25.Google Scholar

3. ‘The Blind Owl’ Forty Years After, pp. 31, 149, and 165.

4. Quotations from Buf-e Kur refer first to D. P. Costello's English translation, The Blind Owl (New York: Grove, 1978)Google Scholar, after the slash to Buf-e Kur (Tehran: Parastu, 1965), eleventh printing.

5. Bashiri, Iraj, Hedayat's Ivory Tower: Structural Analysis of The Blind Owl (Minneapolis: Manor House, 1974), p. xii.Google Scholar

6. He may have used vav to render the e as it is sometimes used to render the e muet in transcribing French words (though the e in bégum is obviously not an e muet), or to avoid orthographic confusion (begam and begâm both being possible units of meaning in Persian). The transformation of the second vowel is more easily accounted for. The 1875 Littré notes, “nous devrions écrire bégam, qui est la véritable orthographie; bégum étant la transcription anglaise du mot indigène où le son muet de l'a est rendu par l'u anglais.” Hedayat may have learned the Urdu pronunciation in India, or he may have read it in Littré.

7. Grimal, Pierre, ed., Larousse World Mythology, trans. Beardsworth, Patricia (London: Hamlyn, 1973), p. 233.Google Scholar

Jung refers to the anima in much the same terms as an Indian goddess: “The East calls it the ‘Spinning Woman‘--Maya, who creates illusion by her dancing.” (Phenomenology of the Self,” The Portable Jung, ed. Campbell, Joseph [New York: Viking, 1971], p. 148).Google Scholar

8. Kermode, Frank, The Romantic Image (New York: Vintage, 1964), p. 53.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 73.

10. Ibid., p. 76.

11. Joris Karl Huysmans, À Rebours (Paris: Sasquelle, n.d. [1955], p. 84. The English translation cited below is Against Nature, trans. Baldick, Robert (London: Penguin, 1959).Google Scholar

12. Ibid., p. 64.

13. Ibid., p. 66.

14. The translators are perhaps less in agreement here than anywhere else in the text. Costello's “morning glory” would, strictly speaking, have been nilufar-e pich in Persian, but “morning glory” like capucine (English nasturtium) could describe the flowers in the border in Hedayat's sketch of the goldan (the headpiece to the Bombay edition). Iraj Bashiri translates “black lily”; D. S. Komissarov's Russian translation gives the word for lotus. Nilufar comes from Sanskrit nil utpala, “blue lotus,” and is a cognate of the French word nenuphar (water lily). Nilufar-e abi (“blue nilufar”) is the usual word for lotus, nilufar alone being the term for “water lily.” Another English solution might be the word “nenuphar.”

15. Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony, trans. Davidson, Angus (Oxford: Oxford University, 1970), 2nd edition, pp. 305–20.Google Scholar

16. Flaubert, Gustave, Trois Contes (Paris: Garnier, 1967), p. 197.Google Scholar