Bozorg Alavi’s Portmanteau
- Bozorg Alavi’s Portmanteau
Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies, University College, University of Toronto; editor of Avicenna: Scientist and Philosopher (1952)
NOTES
1. It is interesting, even somewhat startling, to note that, especially in the present century, North and South America have produced Arabic-speaking men of letters no less eminent than those of Cairo and Alexandria, Beirut and Damascus, Baghdad, and the North African cities. Cf. the series of articles on this subject by Sir Hamilton Gibb, published in the University of London’s Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies in the years 1923, 1929, and 1933. For some samples of modern poetry culled, rather thinly, from all over the Arabic-speaking world and translated by A. J. Arberry, see Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology with English Verse Translations (“Cambridge Oriental Series,” No. 1; London, 1950). Of prose works a few items by Tāhā Husain and Taufīq Hakīm represent virtually all that has been translated into English so far, and only a little more is available in French.
2. I may, perhaps, draw attention to my suggestion of at least one fundamental reason for this phenomenon: see my article on “Religion” in A. J. Arberry, ed., The Legacy of Persia, (Oxford, 1953), p. 154, n. 1; and my article on “The Persian Conception of Artistic Unity and Its Implications in Other Fields,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, XIV (1952), 239–44.
3. A shrewd and informative little survey of the field in general, albeit spoilt somewhat by haste and inaccuracy, has been made by my former pupil and recent successor at the University of Cambridge P. W. Avery, in “Developments in Modern Persian Prose,” Muslim World, XLV (1955), 313–23.
4. P. W. Avery’s article (see note 3 above) has a few remarks on Alavi (p. 322), which, as far as they go, are in general agreement with my own observations. He adds, however, the information that Alavi is particularly interested in “Virginia Woolf, Henry James and Proust.”
5. The word chamadān is an interesting example of the “back-borrowing” process that often occurs between Persian on the one hand and Arabic and Turkish on the other; here, exceptionally, the other language involved is Russian, which normally serves only as the transmitter to Persian of French and other European terms (cf. pāltō in the title of the last story discussed, and a word like belīt for “ticket”). Jāmeh-dān is a Persian compound meaning literally “clothes-holder,” and it is still in use in Persian in the sense of “clothes-cupboard or “wardrobe”; it was borrowed into Russian as chemo(a)dān and is nowadays a common word in that language for “suitcase, trunk, etc.” In this sense, and with approximately the same pronunciation, it has returned to Persian. P. W. Avery’s reference to the title as The Suitcase (see note 3 above) seems rather to miss the point of Alavi’s double use of the word here.
6. Given the limitations of space on the present article and the sense of my remarks in the introductory section, it is, I hope, unnecessary to offer any lengthy explanation for the decision to try and display the essential features of modern Persian literature through one writer and one genre, in a single book and that his earliest.
7. No. 37 in the latest standard edition, that of Muhammad Qazvīnī and Qāsim Ghanī, Tehran 1320 solar (i.e. 1941 a.d.).
8. Presumably “Die Frau des Weisen,” first published 1896.
