Iranian Literature and its impact on Europe....(I)

The study of the influence of Iranian literature on the literature of the West deserves a more serious attention. Unfortunately, the inquiry over wide areas of this subject has been greatly obscured by the tendency that historians have adopted in ascribing to the Arabs the authorship of literary works of Iranians, merely because they happen to be in the Arabic language.

As the late H.G. Wells in his "Outline of History" remarks:

the modern world learned science from the Arabs. It was the books written in Arabic that changed the current of European thought...

But one should never forget that, as we have already seen, the Arabs were Persianized before they spread their Arabic civilization to the East and West. Therefore when we consider what Europe received through Arabs, we should not forget the great role which Iran played in this transaction.

The fable was the earliest literary form handed to Europe by Islam. This reached Europe half a century after the capture of Toledo by the Arabs. These fables were mainly translations from "Pahlavi" books. The most well-known of these is "Kalileh and Demna."

The second great wave of influence came through Crusades, which opened to the West the floodgates of Eastern poetry and romance.

The crusaders were largely French and, France was therefore the first to learn and to lead. France colonized the Levant. French missionaries, soldiers, travelers, merchants and others moved between France and the Holy-Land and brought home the legends of the East and new ideas, new legends, and exciting new verse forms were introduced.

The fable with the animal motif were adopted and the popular tales in the forms of fabliaux and contes, etc. began to appear. In the rest of Europe a similar infiltration occurred. The troubadours and throwers who popularized the love-lyric, the jongleurs and writers of fabliaux and contes, the poets of the chansons and romans that were commencing their popularity, spreading all over Europe, all had Eastern inspiration.

In their career, Persian poems and romances played a considerable part. Iranian literature unlocked an imaginative treasury for the West and with this romanticism came the Age of Chivalry. It was the East which made the gallant knights of Europe and the Iranian models as it appeared in Shah-Nameh and elsewhere, helped to give it a very vivid exemplars. (George B. Walker, Pageant of Persia)

Tales and stories began to pour into Europe by different routes from the East. Some possibly by way of the Caspian-Baltic trade penetrated even into Ireland and Scandinavia, others were brought back by merchants and minstrels from the crusading States in Syria and other parts of the Levant.

It was probably from oral sources that Boccaccio derived the Oriental tales which he inserted in his Decamerone. Chaucer's Squire’s Tale is  according to Professor H.A.R. Gibb, an Arabian Nights story which was probably brought to Europe by Italian merchants from the Black Sea, since the scene is laid at the Court of the Mongol Khan on the Volga, at Sarry in the land of Tartarye. (The Legacy of Islam, pp. 193-194)

Among the popular fairy tales of Iran that were orally disseminated in Europe one can mention the tale of "the Goat with a Bell on his Legs" that appeared in Russia and other Slav literature along with Germany where Grimm brothers embellished it. Also, "the Errant Nightingale" which appeared in German, French, English and Irish languages, appears in Farsi (Persian) in exactly the same way.

Goethe in fact quoted the nightingale’s plaintive song of this story in his Faust:

My mother, the wanton, killed me
My father, the Villain, ate me
My bones one and all, My sister small
I’ the cool did lay,
Then I turned to a beautiful woodland - bird,
Fly away, fly away. (Goethe, Fauste)

The English translation of the ancient Persian version of it reads:

I am, I am the errant nightingale,
That fly through the mountain and vale,
My villain father has killed me,
My unkind step-mother has eaten me,
My kind sister, in the wake of an oil lamp,
Has washed my bones with rose water, seven times
And buried me under a hyacinth bush. (Sobhi, The old Tales of Iran appearing in other nations' tales)