Ferdowsi

Depuis le XIXe siècle, plusieurs auteurs ont envisagé une influence iranienne sur les romans de chevalerie de l’Europe médiévale, mais dans des études qui cèdent souvent aux spéculations et aux fantasmes. Le sujet est pourtant prometteur, et cet article se donne pour objectif d’illustrer par une comparaison précise, fondée sur des textes, entre les destins parallèles du chevalier Perceval, héros de plusieurs textes médiévaux (le Conte du Graal de Chrétien de Troyes, le Parzival de Wolfram von Eschenbach, la Troisième Continuation du Conte du Graal de Manessier, le Haut Livre du Graal), et du roi iranien Key Khosrow, figure majeure de la partie centrale du Livre des rois de Ferdowsi, achevé au début du XIe siècle. Les ressemblances frappantes entre les moments clés de leur existence racontée (leur lignage, leur jeunesse orpheline loin du monde, leurs qualités spirituelles et royales, les épreuves qu’ils traversent, leur consécration, leur relation au sacré) suggèrent, sinon des influences partielles des traditions iraniennes sur la littérature européenne médiévale, du moins l’origine commune – indo-européenne – de la culture sous-jacente à ces récits épiques.

Reading and reciting the Shahnameh in Persian was popular not only in Persianate lands, like some parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia, but in Ottoman empire as well. Furthermore, some of the stories of the Shahnameh were known through oral tradition. Copying and making illuminated manuscripts of the Shahnameh was another method of spreading the fame of Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi, like many other poets of Iran, had considerable influence on the Ottoman literature. The present article examines translations and imitations of the Shahnameh in Turkish Lands.

In “Ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh” by Mehdi Akhavān Sāles (1929-1990), one of the foremost representatives of “New Poetry” in Iran, a fictive orality is staged: The poem becomes decipherable only to a reader attuned to the tradition of epic storytelling. This paper examines the relationship between language, perception, self, time, and world created through the fiction of storytelling. Drawing on theories of perception, narrative time, and epic performance, our discussion touches upon the nature of “I” and “we”, the shifting narrative grounds and identities enacted by the narration, the imbrication of past and present in the figure of the storyteller, and the memory spaces that are created both in and through the text. The imaginary speech act of the storyteller casts the reader as audience, while at the same time, the epic past is overlayed by a tumble-down present. Language itself becomes incommensurable with what it describes. Rather than a nostalgic invocation of a lost age of epic heroes, as has often been claimed, ĀKHAR-E SHĀHNĀMEH emerges as the profoundly modern diagnosis of a split consciousness that affects the individual in a society that can no longer return to epic naïveté.