A Sourceology and Stylistic Critique of a Fragment Attributed to Rudaki

Abstract

Rudaki is one of the poets whose poetry collection has not been found and the existing poems attributed to him have been collected from various sources such as biographies, dictionaries, rhetorical and historical books. Nafisi studied the cited resources and collected the attributed poems to Rudaki and published them which were taken as the basis for the next research on Rudaki’s poems. Although Nafisi tried to make a distinction between the attributed poems to Rudaki and poems of other poets in the book, there are still some verses in Rudaki’s book of collected poems that are stylistically more similar to the poems of other poets and later periods of Persian poetry. This research studies the rejection of the attribution of a fragment by the following opening-verse regarding Rudaki in a historical and stylistic manner: "I use the spirit of the prophets / What water can I get from the dry river of the Greeks?", which is addressed in the Rudaki Divan Nafisi (1963), Daneshpajooh (1996), Ahmadnejad (1997), Ghader Rostam (2013), and Dehghani (2016), and in Emami's collection (2009) and Shoar (2011) as the poems attributed to Rudaki. Nakhjavani (1955) brought it in Qatran's Divan and Ravaghi (2021) also wrote its poet of Qatran. The oldest resources which attributed this fragment to Rudaki and Qatran belong to the beginning years of the 12th century. From a stylistic point of view, excessive use of Arabic terms, the abundance of abstract words and imaginaries, the existence of religious terms, the tendency toward shariah, anti-philosophy approach, complaint, and snobbery, which are the properties and style of the poems in the sixth century, weaken the possibility of attributing this fragment to Rudaki and Qatran.

Keywords

• rudaki
• qatran
• critical text research
• layered stylistics