Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino

bibliography in the volume is accurate. The only unabridged English version, made in 1924, is inaccurate, the German one is a partial and rather free adaptation, while no French version exists at all. (What the bibliography does not say, but it should be stated here, is that this sametranslation by Bausani came out some years ago, published in Bari by the ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ publishing house, though with far fewer notes.)
    Nezami (1141-1204), a Sunnite Moslem (at that time the Shiites had not yet gained the upper hand in Iran), was born and died at Ganjè, in what is now Soviet Azerbaijan, so he lived in a territory in which Iranian, Kurdish and Turkish peoples mixed. In
The Seven Princesses (Haft Peikar
means literally ‘the seven effigies’, and was written around 1200 AD, one of five poems he wrote) he tells the tale of a ruler of the fifth century, Bahram the Fifth, of the Sassanid dynasty. Nezami thus conjures up Persia’s Zoroastrian past in an atmosphere of Islamic mysticism. His poem celebrates both the divine will to which man must submit entirely and the various potentialities of the earthly world, with pagan and Gnostic resonances (and Christian ones too: there is a mention of the great miracle worker Isu, or Jesus).
    Before and after the seven tales narrated in the seven pavilions, the poem illustrates the king’s life, upbringing, love of hunting (he hunts lions, wild asses, dragons), wars against the Grand Khan’s Chinese army, the building of his palace, his feasts and drinking bouts, even his minor love affairs. The poem is thus first and foremost a portrait of the ideal ruler, in which, as Bausani says, the ancient Iranian tradition of the Sacred King blends with the Islamic tradition of the Pious Sultan who submits entirely to divine law.
    An ideal ruler — we think — ought to have a prosperous rule and happy subjects. Not at all! These are the prejudices of our rather basic ideas of kingship. That a king is a miraculous mixture of all perfections does not rule out the possibility that his rule should be marred by the most cruel injustices at the hands of treacherous and greedy ministers. But seeing that the king enjoys divine favour, there will come a time when the grim reality of his kingdom will be revealed to his eyes. Then he will punish the wicked Vizier and provide recompense for whoever comes to tell him of the injustices they have suffered: so we have the ‘tales of the victims’, again seven of them, but less attractive than the other seven.
    Once he has re-established justice in his reign, Bahram can now reorganise the army and rout the Grand Khan of China. Having thus fulfilled his destiny, he has nothing left to do but disappear: in fact he does disappear, literally, riding into a cavern in pursuit of the wild ass he was hunting. The King in short is, in Bausani’s words, ‘Man par excellence’: what counts is the cosmic harmony of which he is the incarnation, a harmony which is reflected to a certain extent in his rule and subjects, but which resides above all in his person. (In any case, even today there areregimes which claim to be praiseworthy in and of themselves, even though their subjects live abject existences.)
    The Seven Princesses
, then, blends two types of Oriental wonder-tale: the celebratory epic account in
The Book of the Kings
by Firdusi (the tenth-century poet whom Nezami follows) and the novelistic tradition which springs from ancient Indian collections and will eventually lead to
The Arabian Nights
. Of course our pleasure as readers is more gratified by this latter type of narration (so my advice would be to start with the seven tales and then turn to the frame story), but the frame is also rich in fantastic, magic and erotic refinement (foot-caressing, for example, is very much at a premium: ‘the king’s foot inserted itself between the stunning woman’s silk and brocade garments, right through to her hip’). As in fairy tales, cosmic and religious