Résumé

“Le temps aux plus belles choses se plaît à faire un affront, et saura faner vos roses comme il a ridé mon front,” écrit Corneille amoureux quinquagénaire de la belle Marquise. Le poète avoue sa situation contingente devant l’irréversibilité du temps. Mais il ajoute, réveillant les amours de Ronsard et d’Hélène, ‘Vous ne passerez pour belle qu’autant que je l’aurai dit,”¹ car la liberté de l’auteur se situe au niveau de son imagination qui transcende la réalité sensible. Il ne saurait être question chez le poète d’un concept de liberté abstrait mais bien au contraire d’une suite de choix, de refus et d’acceptations, à travers lesquels il modèle situations et personnages selon sa vision personnelle du monde. Devant la perpétuelle muance de l’univers et la dégradation tragique et lente de son être, les mots “je,” “moi,” sont bien faibles pour préserver une unité qui lui échappe; aussi est-ce au niveau de la création, dans l’oeuvre même et ses protagonistes, qu’il faut chercher l’affirmation ou la négation de la liberté de l’homme face à la puissance corrosive du temps.

In the middle of the Second World War, in the autumn of 1941, Ridā Shāh Pahlavī was obliged to abdicate in favour of his son, Muhammad Riḍā (p. 359). Immediately after this the territory of Iran was occupied by British and Soviet armed forces; the occupation, however, had a very different character from that of the First World War, so that in cultural life too democratic tendencies soon began to make themselves felt. New world-orientated branches of science were cultivated; the number of translations from western literature increased; Persian literary production broadened its horizons and obtained greater opportunities for publication, thanks to the better organisation of the publishing trade; and later, when all literary output was systematically documented, the situation was ripe for the appearance of the synoptical surveys and literary evaluations that now flowed from the pens of those engaged in the study of literature. The numerous reviews and periodicals were not confined solely to the literary field; the specific problems of every domain of cultural activity, even the youngest — cinematography, for instance — were catered for in special magazines.

When quiz-masters or schoolteachers require their victims to produce the opposite of a given word the correct answer is often a word of totally different root, e.g. as the opposite of ‘artificial’ we can say ‘natural’. If the question were put the other way we could give as the opposite of ‘natural’ either ‘artificial’, or else, ‘unnatural’, according to the precise shade of meaning. On the spur of the moment we might well recall only ‘unnatural’, since obviously the use of a prefix is a convenient way of indicating reversal of meaning. In Esperanto this is in fact the usual way of forming contraries, so that bona ‘good’ has as its opposite malbona ‘bad’; in other words Esperanto simply prefixes mal- to any word in order to obtain that word’s opposite. To take another example: amiko is ‘friend’ therefore malamiko is ‘enemy’. Of course it is by no means unknown for English to carry out a similar process with ‘mal-’ (also with ‘mis-’ and ‘dis-’) but here the technique is not always quite the same as in Esperanto, since these prefixes more often than not indicate not exactly an opposite but rather an element of imperfection or remissness, as in ‘maltreat’ or ‘distaste’. It is ‘un-’ which so often expresses the negative or opposite of nouns, adjectives and verbs, but although this prefix has been used extensively in English since the earliest times it cannot be applied indiscriminately.

In the preceding chapters I have endeavoured to deal with at least the most important and most characteristic manifestations of Iranian folk-literature. It has been no simple task, not only on account of the vastness and complexity of the material, but even more so because until now questions pertaining to folk-literature have been tackled only as occasion offered and then not systematically.

It has already been explained in the preceding sections how the policies of the second Qajar, ‹Fath-Alī-Shāh, which totally lacked the broader conceptions of statesmanship and clung to the empty show of oriental pomp, opened the door to European capital and also to a change in the feudal economy such as it had so far existed. The rivalry of British and Russian imperialism throughout the 19th century accelerated this process, during which the first signs of a modernisation of Iranian life made their appearance, notably a few of the technical advantages of European civilisation, and an occasional waft of western thought. Later Nāṣiru›d-dīn supported the trend by introducing various reforms and European novelties — such as official newspapers, high-school education of a polytechnic character with European teachers, travel grants for studies in Europe, and so on — but he could no longer set limits to the trends he himself had helped to initiate.