Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia by Michael Pifer

Author:Michael Pifer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

AN EDUCATION IN ERZNKA

It is time to tread where Bahāʾ al-Dīn, Rūmī’s father, would not: the multilingual and multireligious city of Erznka (contemporary Erzincan), home of many “bad people.”1 While still a signifıcant cultural and mercantile center (Marco Polo was particularly impressed by its baths and buckram), it was no longer exactly an Armenian metropolis by the thirteenth century.2 Situated northeast of the Cilician frontier, beyond the rule of an Armenian kingdom, Erznka was a mother city without children—a place that, for the moment, was fundamentally in between. It had fallen into the hands of the Mongols, who allowed the populace to maintain some autonomy under Ilkhanid control. Eventually, however, it will be swept up in the wake of Ottoman expansion, which has already begun to unfold, just offstage.

What would Bahāʾ al-Dīn have found had he been cajoled into exploring its winding streets, its urban confraternities, its bazaar and public square? In some ways, had he been more adventurous, certain aspects of the city might have struck him as familiar. However, since Bahāʾ al-Dīn is not here, we shall walk the streets of fourteenth-century Erznka in his stead. As we tread its circuitous passageways, roads, and routes, we encounter a small crowd ahead. Out of the din, a beckoning voice reaches our ears, chanting a passage from the Shāh-nāma (Book of Kings) of Firdawsī (d. 1020), which is largely considered the Persian epic today. We fınd ourselves enchanted by the lilt, the rise and fall of the mutaqārib meter, patterning the epic’s sound. When the performance ends, a group of Armenian speakers break off from the crowd. They seek out another poet, an Armenian by the name of Kostandin Erznkatsʿi, and confront him with a familiar request.

As Kostandin explains, after these “brothers” had listened to the performer chanting the Shāh-nāma “aloud,” or “with a voice,” they were left wanting more, and so they asked him to compose a new poem using the same style and sound. “The brothers asked [me], ‘Recite a poem to us in the voice [dzayn] of the Shāh-nāma,’” Kostandin reports. He then offers a pithy instruction: “I wrote these words. Read them in the voice of the Shāh-nāma.”3

Later, Kostandin appears before this audience again, his composition complete. Let us suppose for a moment that we are among Kostandin’s brothers, seated in a semicircle before him. What might cross our minds as his performance begins? Most likely, we would be keenly attentive to two elements of this adaptation. First, and more technically, is its sound (or “voice”), the musical and rhythmic chant that a performer employs. In this case, the performance’s “voice” should produce an uncanny aural convergence, creating a sonic kinship between Middle Armenian and New Persian poetry.4 Second, we would probably listen, rather intently, for how this new poem might diverge from its source material. Of course, all literary adaptations must do this somehow. The pleasure of a skillful adaptation, however, lies in the ways that the poet opens a suggestive space, one of dialogue and difference, between the new poem and the old.

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