Poetry
Shahroshub
Not translated into English
Sayido Nasafiy · 1700
Synopsis
Two hundred and twelve trades pass one after another, each in its short piece of verse, four hundred and five couplets in all. The people of the workshops, shops and streets are shown at work, with what they do with their days and what they get from them. The poem takes the voice of those at the bottom, whom learned poetry does not usually look at, and speaks of their condition without detour.
Context
The poem belongs to a set of short pieces each devoted to a trade, of which it is the longest. The genre, in which the inhabitants of a city are passed in review, was known to Persian letters; its author turns it toward the workers of the stalls and squares. The same attention to the humble is found in another poem, completed around 1679, in which eighteen animals boast and disparage one another until an ant blames them all. His works were collected in Dushanbe in 1977, then in 1991.
Who it is for
In Persian, with no French version. A catalogue in verse, read in fragments. It helps to know that the poet used the everyday spoken language.
Prizes and reception
Read as a protest against the oppression of its time, it makes its author the voice of the humble classes of Bukhara.
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