Rudaki

Abu Abd Allah Ja'far ibn Muhammad Rudaki was born around 858. The twelfth-century biographer al-Sam'ani names Rudak, a district under Samarkand, as his home and adds the epithet “al-Samarqandi” to his name. In a book on the poet published in 1940, the Tajik writer Sadriddin Ayni placed his birthplace at the village of Panjrud in the upper Zarafshan valley near Panjakent, in what is now Tajikistan. Rudaki lived under the Samanids, when a literature in New Persian (Dari) was just taking shape in Transoxiana and Khorasan.

Little is known of his youth, and nearly all of it comes from the anthology compiled by Awfi in the thirteenth century. By that account, Rudaki knew the Quran by heart and was composing verse by the age of eight, and he learned to play the chang, a kind of harp, from the renowned musician Abu'l-Abak Bakhtiyar. Poet, singer and instrumentalist at once, he sang his own verses to the chang and was famous while still young. Al-Sam'ani notes that he transmitted hadith from a qadi of Samarkand, which has led scholars to conclude that he studied there before moving to Bukhara.

Most of his life was spent at the Samanid court in Bukhara. When Ismail Samani died in 907, Rudaki wrote an elegy consoling his son, Emir Ahmad, so he was already at court by then. He reached the height of his career under Nasr II (914–943), becoming his panegyrist and boon companion, under the patronage of the vizier Abu'l-Fadl Bal'ami, who ranked him above every Arab and Persian poet. Nizami Aruzi's “Chahar Maqala” (twelfth century) tells how the emir, who had lingered for years in the pastures of Badghis near Herat, leapt onto his horse and rode for Bukhara as soon as he heard Rudaki's “The Scent of the Muliyan Stream”. The story is partly legend, but it shows how highly the poet was regarded; Awfi even credits him with two hundred slaves and a caravan of four hundred camels.

Tradition credits Rudaki with more than a hundred thousand couplets; about a thousand survive — single lines quoted in dictionaries, above all Asadi Tusi's “Lughat-i Furs”, and in anthologies, together with a few complete poems. He wrote qasidas, ghazals, quatrains, elegies, didactic verse and masnavis, and is counted among the first to write the Persian ruba'i. At Nasr II's order he versified “Kalila wa-Dimna”, the book of Indian fables translated into Persian at Bal'ami's behest; only about a hundred couplets of it remain. “The Mother of Wine”, a qasida that survives in “Tarikh-i Sistan”, a chronicle by an unknown author, praises the governor of Sistan, Abu Ja'far Ahmad ibn Muhammad, and, according to the same chronicle, earned the poet ten thousand dinars. Wine and love, spring landscapes, reflections on a passing world and a plain, lucid language made his verse the model of the so-called Khorasani style.

When Bal'ami lost the vizierate in 937–938, after a movement against the Ismailis at court, Rudaki lost his patron and was sent away from the court. He spent his old age in poverty and blindness, the subject of his qasida “Complaint of Old Age”. Awfi claimed that he was blind from birth, but the vivid colours of his nature poetry lead scholars to doubt it; the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov, who examined the remains from the grave at Panjrud in the 1950s, concluded that the poet had been blinded as an adult. Rudaki died in his native village in AH 329 (AD 940/941).

Later poets such as Unsuri, Farrukhi and Mu'izzi acknowledged his primacy, and tradition has named him the father of Persian poetry. In 1958 Iran and the Tajik SSR jointly marked the 1,100th anniversary of his birth; a mausoleum was built over his grave at Panjrud and the Soviet post issued a stamp. An avenue and the central park of Dushanbe, Tajikistan's State Prize and a crater on Mercury bear his name, and Samarkand, the city of his epithet, has a Rudaki street and a monument to him. His poems were translated into Uzbek by Munirxon Muinzoda and Shoislom Shomuhamedov.