The Transmission of Early Persian Ghazals (with Special Reference to the Dīvān of Sanā’ī)

Summary

It is still difficult to say exactly when the Persian ghazal came into being. There can be no doubt that, from the very beginning, love poetry was an important element of the Persian tradition. The term “ghazal” itself, a borrowing from Arabic poetry, was in use as early as the Samanid period, though it is not quite clear whether it denoted a specific type of poetry or merely the erotic genre in general. Rūdakī, the great minstrel poet of the fourth/tenth century, was regarded as a specialist in the ghazal. The dīvāns of some of the poets at the Ghaznavid court in the early fifth/eleventh century contain examples of fine love poetry incorporated in qaṣīdas; there are also a few short pieces of a similar nature which, however, are suspected of being actually fragments of qaṣīdas, the panegyrical sections of which have not been preserved.

In spite of these early references to the ghazal, the number of specimens preserved as independent poems from the earliest period (i.e. up to about 1100A.D.) remains very small indeed. When the evident popularity of love poetry at the courts of both the Samanids and the Ghaznavids is taken into consideration, the virtual absence of ghazals from the recorded literature seems hard to explain. It is true, of course, that the works of the early poets have not been handed down to us in full. The remnants of Samanid poetry which were reassembled by modern scholarship are too few to allow for any certain conclusions as far as the ghazal poetry of the fourth/tenth century is concerned. Even the dīvāns of early Ghaznavid poets such as ʿUnṣurī, Farruxī and Manūchihrī are known to us only in comparatively late and probably recast forms, no older than the tenth/sixteenth or the eleventh/seventeenth century. However, these unfortunate philological circumstances do not provide a sufficient explanation for the fact that we do have a fair number of qaṣīdas, stanzaic poems and mathnavīs from this period, but hardly any ghazals.