Leyli and Majnun:

part 4

Majnun’s selfless love and the way he had lost himself in the beloved was particularly attractive to the mystics. Majnun provided mystics with a palpable example of ‘annihilation’ (fana?) in the Beloved. Majnun’s famous saying, “I am Leyli and Leyli is [I],” corresponded to ?allaj’s mystical aphorism (sha??): “I am he whom I love; whom I love is [I].” A?mad ?azali uses two anecdotes in his Savane?. Several commentaries on this short treatise have used at least one anecdote about Majnun. Mystics had several other pairs of lovers such as Ma?mud and Ayaz, Farhad and SHirin, Wameq and?Adra to explicate one aspect of love, but the story of Leyli and Majnun remained one of the most popular for mystic poets. The Arabic a?bar provided a rich source of anecdotes for the mystic poets.

Manuscripts, editions and translations. A large number of manuscripts of Nezami’s narrative poems are scattered in many libraries around the world. These manuscripts usually contain Nezami’s ?amsa. The oldest extant manuscript dates from 718/1318 and is preserved in the Central Library of Tehran University (no. 5179). There are numerous editions of the romance from many countries, in a variety of forms. An enormous body of lithographed publications appeared in India, and these need to be examined not only for their texts but also for their illustrations. Critical editions of the romance appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century in Persia. The Persian scholar Wa?id Dastgerdi made a critical edition containing 66 chapters and 3,657 lines: he omits 1,007 couplets as interpolations, but he admits that some of these are by Nezami. According to Dastgerdi, the interpolations must have taken place between 780/1349 and 800/1398. Under the supervision of Evgeni? E`duardovich Bertel’s, A. A. Alizada prepared another edition (Moscow, 1965) which consists of 66 chapters and 4,559 couplets. Behruz ?arvatian’s edition has 63 chapters and 4, 553 verses, while the most recent critical edition of the poem, edited by Barat Zanjani, has 67 chapters and 4,583 verses.

Sir William Jones (1746-94) introduced Nezami to the English world in several of his publications. He did not translate any of Nezami’s romances, but did publish a Persian edition of Hatefi’s (d. 1520) Leyli o Majnun in 1788. This version of the romance became a source of inspiration for Isaac D’Israeli (1766-1848), who made an adaptation in English. D’Israeli’s work was later put into the opera Kais, or Love in the Deserts: An Opera in Four Acts by William Reeve, which was performed in London at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Louis Aragon (1897-1982), one of the leading representatives of the Surrealist movement, bemoaned his love for his beloved in Le Fou d’Elsa (1963). Aragon’s version was based on Jami’s Leyli and Majnun, again an imitation of Nezami’s version. The first translation of the romance was an abridged verse rendition by James Atkinson published in 1836; this has been reprinted several times (1894, 1915). In recent decades, several translations, adaptations and performances of this romance have appeared in English, of which those by Rudolf Gelpke (originally in German) and Colin Turner should be mentioned.