Persian Literary Influence on English Literature

Persian Literary Influence on English Literature is a study examining the development and advancement of the British knowledge of Iranian literature and culture and their different views on Iranians, which was once published in English in Calcutta in 1983 and again in California in 2005. Usually in English literary histories, except for Fitzgerald’s free translation of Khayyam’s Rubáiyát (quatrains) or Matthew Arnold’s imitation of “Sohrab and Rostam” and James Moreau’s “The adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan” the influence of Persian literature is not mentioned. Hassan Javadi extensively and consistently traces the influence of Iranian poets to the roots and describes the trend of notices about the Persian literature. In this book, the dramas contemporary with Shakespeare which is inspired by the events of Shah Abbas’s period to the influence of Iranian poets on romances such as Thomas Moore, Byron, Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt or American poets such as Emerson, Whitman, and the influence of Ferdowsi, Saadi, Hafez, Attar on English literature each of them is investigated separately. The English version of the book dates back to the first of the twentieth century, but the Persian rewriting provides a detailed description of the spread of Iranology in Britain and the United States up to now, as well as the reasons for Khayyam’s quatrains in Fitzgerald’s translation and Rumi’s unique fame in our time. Bozorge Alavi wrote about the second English edition of this book: “This is a valuable work for English scientists and students, especially orientalists, who want to get acquainted with the source of some English poems adapted from the East of the earth, and at the same time be an effective help.” It leads Iranian scholars and students to realize that Persian literature not only dominated a wide area from the Ottoman Empire to India for several centuries but also from the late sixteenth century to England. Searching in the ocean of English literature and discovering Persian language pearls at the bottom of it has been a difficult task that Dr. Javadi has undertaken and succeeded in (Irannameh, Spring 1987).