Rudaki

Abu Abdullah Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki Samarghandi, known as Adam of Poets, also written (858 - ca. 941) in Rudak, Tajikistan, was a Persian poet, and is regarded as the first great literary genius of the Modern Persian, who composed poems in the Perso-Arabic alphabet or "New Persian" script. Rudaki is considered as a founder of the Tajik/Persian classical literature. Even though most of his biographers assert that he was completely blind, some early biographers are silent about this or do not mention him as being born blind. His accurate knowledge and ####description of colors, as evident in his poetry, renders this assertion very doubtful. The great contemporary Iranian scholar, Said Nafisi, has a book about Rudaki called Biography, Environment and Time of Rudaki. He concludes that Rudaki and Amir Nasr Samani were Ismailis and there was a revolt against Ismalis around 940, a few years before Rudaki's death. This revolt led to the overthrow of the Samanid king and Rudaki, as his close companion, was tortured and blinded and his back was broken while they were blinding him. After this, Rudaki went back to the small town where he was born and died shortly after that. He was the court poet to the Samanid ruler Nasr II in Bukhara, although he eventually fell out of favour; his life ended in poverty. It is claimed that he well deserves the title of the father of Persian literature, or the Adam or the Sultan of poets even though he had various predecessors, because he was the first who impressed upon every form of epic, lyric and didactic poetry its peculiar stamp and its individual character. He is also said to have been the founder of the diwan, or the typical form of the complete collection of a poet's lyrical compositions in a more or less alphabetical order, which all Persian writers use even today. Of the 1,300,000 verses attributed to him, only 52 odes, lyrics and quatrains survived; of his epic masterpieces we have nothing beyond a few stray lines in native dictionaries. However, the most serious loss is that of his translation of Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa's Arabic version of the old Indian fable book Kalila and Dimna (Panchatantra), which he put into Persian verse at the request of his royal patron. Numerous fragments, however, are preserved in the Persian lexicon of Asadi Tusi (Persian poet). In his odes, all devoted to the praise of his sovereign and friend, unequalled models of a refined and delicate taste, very different from the often bombastic compositions of later Persian encomiasts, have survived. His didactic odes and epigrams expressed in well-measured lines a type of Epicurean philosophy of human life and human happiness, and more charming still are the purely lyrical pieces that glorify of love and wine.

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