Rereading the Past: Poor Esfandiyar! An Excerpt from Bichareh Esfandiyar

Extract

The Esfandiyar of the title is the hero of a cycle of stories in the Iranian national epic, the Shahnameh of Abolqasem Ferdowsi, and Bichareh Esfandiyar is Sacidi Sirjani's lengthy and impassioned interpretation of that cycle. The book has the form of lecture notes. That is, the author retells the story of Esfandiyar from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, paraphrasing it at times, quoting from it at others, and commenting on the events and personalities of the story whenever he proceeds through it. This form of discourse, one which is relatively common in Iranian scholarly writing, has closer affinities to the tradition of the coffeehouse reciter or naqqal than it does to the scholarly essay, and Sacidi Sirjani says explicitly that he views himself as a naqqal not a scholar, a somewhat disingenuous claim inasmuch as he has spent a long and productive professional life as a scholar, editor, and professor of literature.