Persian scholarly treatises and the hermeneutics of Persian poetry

Abstract

The textualization of knowledge has produced numerous texts in Persian. These scholarly treatises (on astronomy and algebra, pharmacology and plant science, Suf teachings and the art of poetry, etc.) are undoubtedly among the most revealing testimonies regarding the medieval culture of Iran. The problem of their inclusion in the domain of literature is under discussion in the frst part of the article. From the point of view of their main function those works mostly fall into the category of informational and directive texts and thus (when viewed from a modern Western perspective) can be only considered as non-literature. In authoritative “histories of Persian literature” some treatises are discussed in the “Prose of the period” sections, with a focus on the content of the given book and its status, and without any special mention of its generic features. However, the tradition of composing treatises eventually developed a set of characteristics and conventions of textualization which could be considered as literary (elaborate and in some cases embellished language; narrative interpolations, stories, anecdotes, poems; rhetorical techniques of discourse; compositional structure in relation to a certain topic). When seen in the pre-modern Iranian perspective, the “expository” treatises, regardless of their literary merits, are a part of classical Adabīyyāt and form the very basis of refned education (adab). The topics exposed in treatises provided “educated” Persian poetry with clusters of “technical” imagery, and the patterns of scholarly reasoning found their counterpart in the poetic argumentation. In the second part of the article the hermeneutical use of the treatises is discussed. Popular calligraphic imagery serves as a good example here, since many poetic circumlocutions fnd their explanation in treatises on calligraphy. The expository texts are by no means detached from high literature; moreover, they prove important for attaining a better understanding of “presentational” genres of poetry and prose. An appendix to the article includes a translation of a small textbook on calligraphy by Halil Tabrizi (16th century).