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Some Gorānī lyric verse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

D. N. MacKenzie
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Extract

Since its début in 1881, when Charles Rieu's brief but masterly grammatical sketch appeared, the Gorānī koinĒ has become one of the Cinderellas of Iranian studies, literary and linguistic. Apart from a notice by E. B. Soane, of which more below, its only real outing has been in Professor Minorsky's compendious article on ‘The Gūrān’, containing an illustrated survey of all the epic, lyric, and religious verse then known in Gorānī. The surviving manuscripts acquired by Professor Minorsky he has since donated to the Leningrad branch of the Oriental Institute (Institut Narodov Azii AN), where they remain unpublished.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , June 1965 , pp. 255 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1965

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References

1 Catalogue of the Persian manuscripts in the British Museum, II, London, 1881, 728–34.Google Scholar

2 ‘A short anthology of Guran poetry’, JRAS, 1921, 57–81.Google Scholar

3 BSOAS, XI, 1, 1943, 75–103.Google Scholar

4 By courtesy of the Directors of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, and the Institut für Orientforschung of the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin I have at my disposition Mann's unpublished manuscript notes. The Gorānī MSS he obtained were apparently taken into the Staatsbibliothek as ‘ace. mss. 1904, nos. 37–83’.

5 ‘Cinquante-deux versets de Cheikh Amīr en dialecte Gūrānī’, JA, CCXLIV, 4, 1956, 391–422.Google Scholar In a recent article, ‘L'Armenie dans le folklore kurde', Revue des Études Arméniennes, NS, I, 1964, 347–76, Mokri mentions critical texts which he has made of a number of romantic epics in Gorānī.Google Scholar

6 Les dialectes d'Awromān et de Pāwā, Copenhagen, 1921,Google Scholar and ‘Some new AwromanI material’, BSOAS, VIII, 2–3, 1936, 467–76.Google Scholar

7 Mundarten der Gûrân, Berlin, 1930.Google Scholar

8 See my ‘Bājalānī’, BSOAS, XVIII, 3,1956,418–35, and The dialect of Awromān, Copenhagen, due in 1965.Google Scholar

9 Fols. 38 and 39 have been reversed and should be read in the order 38b, a, 39b, a.

10 Reproduced in ‘The Gūrān’, 93.

11 Omitted by Topalian.

12 See example III below.

13 Soane's ‘final letter of the rhyme’ is impossible as all the poems are in rhymed couplets, aa bb cc, etc.

14 The imperfect list printed in ‘The Giiran‘ has been incorporated in a longer list of ‘Kurdish’ (including Gorānī) poets in ‘Ala'uddīn Sajjādī's Mežū-y adab-ī kurdī, Baghdad, 1952 (a ‘History of Kurdish literature’ in Kurdish).

15 The spelling Taxtī (in contrast to Dawīsaī) lends support to Minorsky's deduction that the Šayx was a native of Awrāmān-i Taxt. Šayx Muḥammad Mardū Kurdistānī, however, in his Tārīx-i Mardūx, Tehran, n.d., II, 23, mentions a Ḥāj šayx Muṣṭafā of the village of Taxta (951–1047/1544–1637), father of Šayx Aḥmad-i 'allāma (1016–1114/1607–1702). Sajjadī (op. cit., 537) lists ‘Šex Aḥmad-Ī Taxiaī, c. 1640–1720’ (obviously taking the birth date from Minorsky's ‘lived towards A.D. 1640’) and (p. 364) mentions another Šex Aḥmad, descended from Šex Muṣṭafā-y Taxta, as being the father of the Kurdish poet Sālim-ī Sina (1845–1909). Taxta, he says, is a village 24 miles south of Sina (in fact 11 miles south-west ?).

16 The ‘Shaykh Aḥmad Mō'Ī (?)’, no. 24 of Topalian's list, is a ghost issuing from a rubric (f. 49b) in which Šayx Aḥmad Taxtī, mentioned for the second time on the page, is called ‘abovementioned’

17 The father of Šayx Aḥmad (v. above, n. 15), who is called (f. 49b) .

18 Fol. 37b has a poem of Maḥzūnī dar suāl answered by Yūsuf Yāska dar javāb, which is scarcely reconcilable with the dates quoted by Minorsky, viz. Yūsuf Yāska executed before 1636 (according to Dr. Sa'id-khan), Maḥzūnī fl. c. 1780 (Soane, 75).

19 Though the introduction of occasional NP forms does not make for consistency in this matter.

20 Otherwise uniform with the phonemic system used in my Dialect of Awromān (v. p. 255, n. 8).

21 Soane, 61, ‘Specimen 1’. Ignoring this plain heading, he attributes the poem to Aḥmad Taxtī, whose name heads the preceding poem on the page.

22 Soane, 63, ‘Specimen 2, by the same author as 1’, is inadvertently right.

23 Soane, 65,‘Specimen 3’. A poem in the preceding column is by Muḥammad QullSulaymān, but this poem is again Maḥzūnī's.

24 MS but there is no other evidence for Soane's (p. 67) ‘pakhm pāra, “torn and rent”. Palchm … is in daily use among the Jaf nomads of the frontier’, even in his own several Kurdish vocabularies.

25 ‘With this pain’, as Soane translates (p. 68), would be p-i dard, cf. below, example VII, 1. 6, p-i tawr.

26 Meaning ‘the “purest musk” which, from their scent, must surely be concealed in your locks’ ?

27 Soane, 68, ‘Specimen 4’. The preceding poem, by Maḥzūnī, begins ‘ …’.

28 Soane, 78, ‘Specimen 6’.

29 An excellent Kurdish periodical published in Baghdad in the 1940's, v. C. J. Edmonds, ‘A bibliography of Southern Kurdish, 1937–1944’, JBCAS, XXXII, 2, 1945, 186, 189.Google Scholar

30 See ‘The Gūrān’, p. 93, no. 29, and Sajjādī, op. cit., 180–8. Sajjādj gives his dates as 1052–1113/1641–1702, which alone separates him from his namesake Šayx Muṣṭafā by about a century.

31 ‘The Gūrān’, p. 93, no. 30; ‘xwēm for the Gūrānī wēm’.

32 Properly rewin corresponds to NP ‘rhubarb’, but the editor glosses here ‘ (basil), a girl's name’.

83 He appears in Minorsky's list, from Dr. Sa'id-khan, ‘The Guran’, p. 93, no. 31, in the guise ‘Mollā Raḥīm Tayjowzī‘.

34 See Edmonds, ‘Bibliography’, p. 189, item II, 12.

35 op. cit., 247–76, including a Kurdish paraphrase of the poem below.

36 ‘The Gūrān’, 96–103, and example XVI below.

37 Sajjādī paraphrases: ‘So, musician of Time, bring about some other entertainment, for I have no remedy. Cup-bearer of the firmament, give the cup of death into my hand, for my friend is expecting me’. He comments: ‘If we say that Mawlawi's lament for Khatun Amber is far superior to that of Dante … for his friend Beatrice, who died young, let it not be thought that we depart from the truth, or bring nationality into the question’.

38 Benedictsen-Christensen, op. cit., 110–13.

39 Prom Minorsky's phonetic text, from Dr. Sa'id-khan, with the substitution of Gorānī for a number of Kurdish forms. Professor Minorsky's translation scarcely needs changing. An article by M. Mokri on this poem, in Mād (Tehran), I, 1945, has unfortunately not been available to me.