Fakhraddin Gorgani's Vis and Ramin (tr. by Dick Davis)

And may there be no love at all unless

It's like this love, and brings such happiness.

How fortunate the lover whose sweet fate

It is to live in such a favoured state--

Truly, this is the way that love should be,

Good fortune, followed by simplicity!

How many days I've loved and never seen

A joy like that of Vis and her Ramin... 

Vis and Ramin is a poetic romance written by Fakhraddin Gorgani in Persian around 1050 CE, commissioned by the commander of Isfahan. It's the earliest surviving version of a story that takes place at some point in Persia under the Parthian empire (247 BCE - 220 CE).

King Mobad is the ruler of all Persia; he meets Shahru, wife of Qaren, a minor king and mother of two sons. She's beautiful and he woos her, but she says, my lord, I'm married with two boys, this is inappropriate. But if ever I were to have a daughter, I promise her to you.

Vis was that daughter. 

Years later and Vis is now of marriageable age and at least as beautiful as her mother. Shahru ignores her promise (or maybe thinks it doesn't matter anymore) and Vis is married off to her brother Viru. 

The introduction assures us that sibling marriage was fairly common among Parthian royal families (as it was in Pharaonic Egypt for that matter). At any rate, the story doesn't treat it as icky as it is for us, or would be to the Muslim Gorgani for that matter.

But King Mobad hasn't forgotten that promise. Before the marriage with Viru is even consummated, he's launched a war against Qaren. Qaren is killed. Vis was happy enough to be pledged to Viru, but she has no interest in that 'old man' and writes to him:

And if Viru weren't mine, this doesn't mean

I'd love you or consent to be your queen.

You killed my father, he's in heaven now;

My self, my being, are from him so how

Could you become my husband or my friend? 

Vis tells her mother off for promising her away even before she was born. Viru manages a successful counterattack for a while, but it can't last: in the end she's married to Mobad. She's sent off to Marv, Mobad's capital.

She brings her nurse. Who happens to know a magic spell or two. And when Vis is no more impressed with Mobad upon seeing him, the nurse whips up a spell that makes Mobad impotent, and Vis' second marriage is also never consummated. 

Though well-done the nurse is a fairly stock figure in this sort of romance--Davis in his introduction mentions the nurse from Romeo and Juliet--and she's out to get Vis interested in and involved with somebody:

You've never truly slept with any man.

You've had no joy of men, you've never known

A man whom you could really call your own...

What use is beauty if it doesn't bless

Your life with pleasure and love's happiness?

You're innocent, you're in the dark about it,

You don't know how forlorn life is without it.

You'll have to decide just what it is.

 

Who's available? Turns out Mobad has a very much younger (and very much better-looking) brother named Ramin and he happens to have fallen in love with Vis as soon as he's seen her:

Half of my body burns, half of it freezes.

Has God created, and can heaven show,

An angel made like me from fire and snow?

Fire does not melt my snow, and who has seen

Snow coexist with fire, as in Ramin?

Ramin approaches the nurse to see what can be done and pretty soon Vis and Ramin are finding ways to meet in private.

 

Mobad is a king; he has responsibilities and has to leave town occasionally. Mobad goes hunting and Ramin falls ill; Mobad goes to war against the Romans, and Ramin, a prominent member of court and an important warrior in his own right, falls ill. Eventually Mobad catches on--a bit after everyone else in the kingdom--and leaves Vis behind in a locked castle on a mountain top with a guard outside the door. He comes back to discover that the well-guarded Vis has been enjoying herself with Ramin. Mobad is aghast. All these restraints and guards are like a belt:

A pretty belt's of no significance

Unless it's holding up some kind of pants!

Buckle your belt as tight as you can make it,

But with no pants to wear you're still stark naked!

The story quite often proceeds by speeches and similes; though it has a different tone and subject matter, think of something like the Iliad. Where the Iliad might compare its warriors to lions or boars, Vis and Ramin compares the lovers to cypresses or moonlight. The art is generally in the details of the comparison. About two thirds through Ramin and Vis break up, both half deciding this is the wiser course, each convinced by an adviser of dubious value--the nurse for Vis, a 'philosopher' for Ramin--but that doesn't last long, and pretty soon they're working their way back together. But it takes a hundred pages first of letters, then in-person speeches, full of recriminations and lament, self-justification and imprecations, and not much event. But it reads well in place, with lots of fun rhetorical flourishes.

But I am still the lover whom you knew

Whose like has never yet been seen by you;

My brightness has not dimmed, my musky hair

Has not turned camphor white yet with despair,

My clustering curls are still as black and tight,

My shining pearl-like teeth as strong and white,

My silver breasts as firm and opulent,

My cypress stature has not yet been bent.

My face was once the moon, it's now the sun

Admired throughout the world, by everyone!...

I never saw a man who didn't prize me,

So why should you reject me and despise me? 

Actually, in typing that out, it rather reminds me of The Song of Solomon.

 

The translation, by Dick Davis, is done in heroic couplets. He writes in the introduction that the original Persian is in couplets, and that the line length is close to that of iambic pentameter. The rhymes are mostly quite tame, and so don't draw attention to themselves, but he is capable of more extravagant rhymes, as in the comic outburst of Mobad quoted above. (significance/some kind of pants!) I'd earlier read Davis' translation Faces of Love, of three Shirazi poets, and quite liked it. This is different, and by design less showy at times, but still a lot of fun.

 

Given all that buildup I was prepared for a tragic ending. The story is compared to Tristan and Yseult, and is sometimes considered a source for it, and I thought it could very well end with them dying in each other's arms in some foreign country. But it doesn't. Vis and Ramin live long and happy lives and produce two sons. (Though it does end less well for some of the other characters.)  How they get to their happiness, I'll leave as an exercise for readers...😉But it does mean it's a suitably seasonable book for a post, except I hadn't quite finished it yesterday.

This is a post about Ramin and Vis,

The ancient Persian epic, blogged by Reese,

A romance written in ten thousand lines,

With love and danger for your Valentine's.

A book off my Classics Club list.