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What do we mean when we say that classical Persianate poetry is highly conventional? Can we find traces of classical poets’ encounters with the real world in their beautiful but cliché-filled descriptions of ruby wine, idol-beloveds, and the multicolored silk garments of springtime? Through a few short case studies drawn from the most famous verse of Rūdakī, Farrukhī, and Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib, I will suggest some ways that the material history of the Silk Road and the ecological study of seasonal cycles might help us to reconsider the mimetic functions and the operations of vaṣf, or literary description, in the 9th-mid-11th centuries, when the conventions of Persianate verse took shape.
Samuel Hodgkin is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University. His work deals with classical Persianate poetry and its afterlives in modern literature and literary institutions across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. His research engages with theories of representation, translation, and world poetics, and with the history of literary institutions. His first book, forthcoming from Cambridge, is entitled A Poetics of Eastern Internationalism: Persianate Verse and World Communism. He is a co-organizer of the “Cultures of World Socialism” working group. His articles have appeared in Iranian Studies, Cahiers de Studia Iranica, Cahiers d’Asie centrale, and in edited volumes, and he is guest editor of an upcoming special issue of Comparative Literature Studies.