The poetry of everyday life

In an age when it is fashionable to travel with a fridge, Nicholas Jubber’s decision to take an 11th-century epic poem as his travelling companion to Iran and Afghanistan can only be admired.

In an age when it is fashionable to travel with a fridge, Nicholas Jubber’s decision to take an 11th-century epic poem as his travelling companion to Iran and Afghanistan can only be admired.

Written by the poet Ferdowsi sometime around 1000, the Shahnameh or Book of Kings consists of a whopping 60,000 couplets, four times the length of the Odyssey and Iliad combined. By turns mythical and historical, it tells the story of 50 shahs from the Gaiomart of prehistory to the splendidly named Yazdagird III, whose fateful reign brought the Persian empire crashing down with the Arab invasion of 637. Decried and suppressed as heresy by the Islamic mullahs, for whom it inappropriately celebrates Iran’s pre-Islamic past, the Shahnameh is revered with equal force by Iranians young and old. It is, as Jubber observes, part of the country’s cultural DNA.

One of the great pleasures of this book, particularly for anyone unfamiliar with Iran, is how far removed it is from the weary, dreary media narrative we know so well, which paints only the most superficial picture of a complex and sophisticated society. We are spared the interminable debates on the President’s nuclear programme, the status of the opposition and the role of the hijab. Poetry, not prose, is the order of the day here.

As the Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami says, ‘Poetry in Iran pours down on us, like falling rain, and everyone takes part in it.’ Among his many forays into verse, Jubber quotes one especially memorable couplet:

Open the door of the tavern before me night
and day,
For I have become weary of the mosque and
seminary.