Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/468

 282 RUINED TUS, THE HOME OF THE POET FIRDAUSI

or as difficult to match as window, month, twelfth, or silver in English 1 — and called upon Firdausi to complete the poetic stanza off-hand. The anecdote records that Firdausi's ability- was instantly — and most successfully — displayed, evoking admiration from his rival bards, who (though jealous) were obliged to hail him as a peer, so that he finally obtained admis- sion to the king's presence and was intrusted with the task of completing the great epic.^

Although this story is now commonly regarded as wholly fictitious, it nevertheless shows the high esteem in which Fir- dausi's genius was held, and long he lived in the sunshine of the court, being promised a gold piece for each couplet of the epic he composed.^ The liberality of Mahmud called forth a splendid eulogy in verse, which has already been referred to ; but it was retracted later in the scathing satire that the poet

��1 The only rhyme for silver in Eng- lish, I believe, is chilver, a provincial w^ord for a ewe lamb.

2 The difficult Persian rhyme-words ending in -shan, proposed to the new- comer by the established court-poets, Ansari, Asjadi, and Farrukhi, were respectively: rushan ('bright'), gul- shan (' rose-garden '), and jushan ('cuirass'), to which Firdausi is said to have supplied the proper name Pushan, as rhyme, and then to have told the story of the combat of Pushan and Giv in spirited epic verse; cf. Pizzi, Chrestomathie persane^ p. 135, Turin, 1889 ; Browne, Biographies of (p. 41 of the reprint) ; and his Tadh- kirat, or Memoirs of Dawlatshah, p. 51, London, 1901, this section tr. Vul- lers, Fragmente uber die Religion des Zoroaster, nebst dem Leben des Fer- dusi, pp. 3-7, Bonn, 1831. Browne, Lit. Hist. Persia, 2. 129, imitates the four rhyming lines of the Persian by translating as 'ocean, potion, lotion,

��Poshan.' Noldeke, Grundr. iran. Philol. 2. 153, n. 4, remarks that this interesting anecdote has no real au- thentic value. Instances of rhyme- capping as a test of skill are familiar in other lands. Dr. Gray calls my attention to a good parallel in Sanskrit literature, in the pseudo-historic Bho- japrabandha (ed. Parab, 2 ed., p. 34, Bombay, 1904), where King Bhoja starts a verse, to which Bana and Mahesvara each contribute a rhyming line, while Kalidasa completes the quatrain. In a sense, though more distantly, the Firdausi story recalls the Latin quatrain, each verse begin- ning with sic vos non vobis, which Vergil alone could complete for Augus- tus, as recorded in the life of the poet by the pseudo-Donatus.

3 See my article on Firdausi in Warner, World's Best Literature, 10. 5736-5739, New York, 1897, from which I have here repeated a paragraph or two.

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