Penguins on Parade: The Shahnameh!

Some Penguin Classics, as I’ve noted before here at Stevereads, feel like they’re a long time in the making, and the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi more than most and in two different ways. Not only has this sprawling tenth century Persian epic waited a long time for an attractive, affordable paperback edition in English, but this particular text, a prose translation by Dick Davis that Viking brought out ten years ago, has waited a long time to become a Penguin Classic.

This Penguin Classic is an expanded edition of that Viking hardcover (which was mighty pretty in its own right), and it’s also a slightly larger size than the standard Penguin trade paperback. It’s got the black spine with the elegant white script title along it – a graceful new Penguin Classic of a book not enough Western readers know anything about. I remember vividly when it first arrived at the bookstore where I was working; I was stunned and immediately took a hardcover copy to the store’s two most veteran and wide-ranging readers – and neither of them had ever heard of it. Over the next few weeks, I tried hard to interest my most literary regular customers in the book, to no avail. When the unsold copies were returned to the publisher (nobody bought one – not even me, since the hardcover cost what was then a full day’s pay for me), I was the only one in the store who noticed or cared.

I don’t expect things are any better here in 2016, but at least I no longer have a ringside seat! I’m free to enjoy this Penguin edition in a peace and quiet broken only by the gentle, arrhythmic snoring of a basset hound.

Of course, the Shahnameh is a big book in many more important ways than its thousand-page length. The action spans hundreds of years; the cast encompasses hundreds of characters; this is a national epic on the grandest scale, closer in tenor to The Tale of the Heike (also a beautiful Penguin Classic) than to Homer’s Iliad. The frequent action scenes read like the headiest possible combination of The Mahabharata and the Old Testament:

With his heart freed from this anxiety, Ardeshir paused at the fire-temple of Ram-Khorad; there he prayed earnestly for God to guide him, to give him victory in all his undertakings, and to allow the tree of greatness to flourish for him. Then he returned to his pavilion, where his officers and men awaited him. He distributed cash to his troops, invoking God as he did so. His army was now like a valiant leopard, and he advanced against Bahman, the son of Ardavan, to give battle.

As the two armies approached one another, each side formed ranks ready for battle, with lances and Indian swords grasped in their hands. Then they fell on one another like warring lions, and blood was spilled in rivers. So they fought until the sun turned pale, and the air was filled with dust, the ground with corpses.

As you can see, the translation is smooth and vivid, and I can attest that the reading of it over hundreds and hundreds of pages is almost uniformly gripping. It’s true that in this case I could have done without some of the more condescending comments in Davis’s Introduction:

My aim is translating the Shahnameh was not to produce a text for scholars, but to make it available to a wide non-specialist audience. I hesitate to say a popular audience: perhaps no medieval literary artifact, from any culture, can have a truly popular existence now. We prefer our medievalism to be derivative and ersatz; The Lord of the Rings rather the Beowulf, Camelot rather than Malory or Chretien de Troyes. Nevertheless there is still a world of readers, especially relatively young readers, who are not scholars, who might try Beowulf or Malory, and it was them I aimed to reach with my translation. I translated not for scholars, who after all have access to the original text, now in relatively good editions, but for that radically endangered species, the general reader.

… but despite the drippiness of that “derivative and ersatz,” Davis has most certainly produced a translation for the general reader. I’m hoping copies of this particular Penguin Classic end up in classrooms all over the country.

Originally published at Open Letters Monthly, August 2016