The Tales of Marzuban

256 Pages·1959·6.225 MB·English

by  Reuben Levy, tr

The Tales of Marzuban
Translated from the Persian by
REUBEN LEVY
THAMES AND HUDSON
London
UNESCO COLLECTION OF REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
PERSIAN SERIES
This book has been accepted in the Persian Translations
Series of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization ( UNEsco)
@ THAMES AND HUDSON 1959
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY THE NORTHUMBERLAND PRESS LTD
GATESHEAD ON TYNE
CONTENTS
Preface
7
THE BOOK OF MARZUBAN
II THE REIGN OF NIKBAKHT THE FELICITOUS
AND THE INJUNCTIONS WHICH HE LAID
UPON HIS SONS AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH 35
III KING ARDASHIR
AND THE SAGE MIHRAN-BIH
IV THE DEMON OX-FOOT
AND THE SAGE DINI 79
V DAD AMA AND DAST AN 99
VI ZIRAK AND ZARUY 129
VII THE LION
AND THE KING OF THE ELEPHANTS 173
VIII THE CAMEL
AND THE GOD-FEARING LION

PREFACE
T
H I S is a collection of fables, anecdotes and apologues in
which the principal characters are portrayed as animals,
birds, fishes or, occasionally, as peris or human beings.
The narrator is a prince who has been accused by the vizier of
his brother, the king of Tabaristan, of plotting to secure the
throne for himself and in the course of his defence brings them
in to display his knowledge of the high principles requisite in
a ruler. Some of the characters encountered in them are familiar
from La Fontaine, but they are garbed in Oriental dress and
their behaviour is not quite the same as that of their western
counterparts. Like the Greek fables of Aesop and the Indian
apologues contained in the Pilpai ' Kalilah and Dimna ' series,
these Persian tales provide moral doctrine combined with
shrewd practical wisdom, the whole wrapped in entertaining
material to make it palatable to hearers who must by modern
standards be regarded as unsophisticated.
The compiler and editor of the Tales, one Sa'd al-Waraw1n1,
who appears to have flourished in Azarbaijan in the reign of
the Atabeg Sultan Uzbek ibn Muhammad ibn Ildigiz, i.e.
between the years A.D. 1210 and 1225, declares that they were
originally composed in the old Persian tongue and the cognate
language spoken in Tabaristan, which is the mountainous
region lying along the southern shores of the Caspian Sea and
'"Jntaining the Elburz range. Its inhabitants, living in remote
settlements difficult of access, held out against the Muham
madan Arab invaders longer than their fellow-countrymen in
the rest of Persia and retained their national characteristics
largely untainted by foreign influence~.
7
8 TALES OF MARZUBAN
It is to one of their rulers (known as Sipahbads or 'Army
Chiefs '), Marzuban ibn Shirwin, that the compiler gives the
credit for having originally committed the tales to writing. But
according to the author of the Qabus-nama, 1 Kai Ka'us ibn
Iskandar, prince of the Caspian province of Guran, it was his
own ancestor Marzuban ibn Rustam who composed the work.
However, that original work, whatever its authorship, is now
lost, although some translations of it in modern Persian exist.
The glimpses of daily life which occur in the Tales support
the statement that Tabaristan was their homeland. According
to the tenth-century Arab geographer Maqdisi, the territory, in
consequence of its high rainfall, in his day comprised great
stretches of fenland and forest and abounded in water-fowl and
fish, while later geographers say that its gardens were noted
for their crops of dates, oranges, lemons, nuts and other fruits.
The argument for a Persian, as opposed to an Indian, origin is
supported by the pre-eminence accorded to the lion, who plays
a great part in the stories and is a creature held in high esteem in
Persia, where he forms part of the national emblem; whereas
the elephant is portrayed as a foreign foe whom the lion ulti
mately overthrows.
Sa'd al-Din, the Azarbaijani compiler, was by no means con
tent merely to translate the tales into the Persian idiom of his
day. As they stood, he regarded them as too simple and monoto
nous in style, reminding him of an orchard which, however
pleasant in itself, produced only one kind of fruit, or a flower
garden where, although the nostrils might be delighted, only
one variety of blossom was visible to the eye. The noble
thoughts contained in the work were worthy to be clothed in
better style and language. As it was, 'its subtle themes resembled
pearls set in rusty iron or a rosary dropped in a dung-heap '. That
kind of thing could not be expected to satisfy persons of taste
such beauty must be adorned; and so he had introduced
numerous literary decorations and produced something which
could be likened to a garden filled with a great variety of
1 See A Mirror for Princes, by R. Levy (London, 1951), p. 3.
PREFACE 9
flowers (of ideas), herbs (of phraseology) and fruits (of subtle
allusion).
This desirable end he achieved by the lavish use of highly
coloured synonyms, the insertion of numerous Arabic proverbs
and the citation of verses at every step, some Arabic, some
Persian. In proof of his originality of treatment he claims that
he has never stooped to employ Arabic words or phrases which
are strange and out of the way, so as to cause the hearing to
reject them, and that the verses he cites, whether Arabic or
Persian, are new to this work, occurring in no other collection
of stories. Further, he prides himself on handling each separate
theme in such fashion that although approaching it from a
variety of angles he uses no word twice, ' save as it pleased
Allah'.
The view which Edward Gibbon held concerning the Indian
Fables of Pilpai, a work of similar character, was that' the com
position is intricate, the narrative prolix and the precept obvious
and barren '. Not for him were flowers of language and elaborate
imagery. As a child of the rationalist eighteenth century he
sought for ' nakedness of truth ' and ' harshness of instruction '.
Nevertheless, he did not disdain the artifices of style in order to
heighten the effect of his own narrative in The Decline and
Fall. Like Gibbon, the author of our Marzuban-nama was the
child of his own age and clime and therefore catered for dif
ferent conditions and a different taste. To him, elaborate
imagery and embroidered speech were the means of attracting
and holding the attention not of readers, but of listeners;
because the tales were recited by rhapsodists to audiences who
were enthralled as much by the music of the heaped-up
epithets and gracefully involved periods in which the tales were
told as by the narratives themselves.
Further, the less instructed members of audiences who heard
these fables enjoyed the edifying discourses with which the
stories were garnished for the purpose of mingling something
of spiritual value with the er.tertainment provided. Some
where, either obviously or subtly, a moral was introduced and