I should have known that for my "Rose of Bengal" project I would probably need to consult the groundbreaking work ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kouredios has done on fanfiction and its precursors in classical literature. According to the Translator's Preface, not only is Nizami's "Layla and Majnun" a medieval equivalent of RPF/historical fiction - there seems to have been an actual Majnun in Arabia who lived 500 years before the composition of the Nizami poem in 1188 - according to the Nizami editor Dastgerdi there are over 1000 imitations of Nizami's poem.
The poem was commissioned by a Transcaucasian chieftain named Shervenshah. The Translator's Preface goes on to talk about how Nizami Persianized the original ascetic Arabic sources with rich glorious language and imagery.
"... the three elements of the traditional Majnun - his love, his insanity and his poetical genius - as three aspects of one, indivisable unity...Has the tragic ambiguity of the artist's position in the world, the paradox of unbounded desire in a iimited body, ever been described more aptly?"
The closing paragraphs mention the difficulty of translating the description of the starry sky under which Majnun prays, which is a pity because many of my readers would be interested in the astrological and astronomical references which had to be left out of the Gepke translation.
kouredios has done on fanfiction and its precursors in classical literature. According to the Translator's Preface, not only is Nizami's "Layla and Majnun" a medieval equivalent of RPF/historical fiction - there seems to have been an actual Majnun in Arabia who lived 500 years before the composition of the Nizami poem in 1188 - according to the Nizami editor Dastgerdi there are over 1000 imitations of Nizami's poem.The poem was commissioned by a Transcaucasian chieftain named Shervenshah. The Translator's Preface goes on to talk about how Nizami Persianized the original ascetic Arabic sources with rich glorious language and imagery.
"... the three elements of the traditional Majnun - his love, his insanity and his poetical genius - as three aspects of one, indivisable unity...Has the tragic ambiguity of the artist's position in the world, the paradox of unbounded desire in a iimited body, ever been described more aptly?"
The closing paragraphs mention the difficulty of translating the description of the starry sky under which Majnun prays, which is a pity because many of my readers would be interested in the astrological and astronomical references which had to be left out of the Gepke translation.
