Book launch: Domenico Ingenito's "Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry" (Brill, 2020)

Hello, everyone. Uh good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I know our very large audience is coming from

across the world.

Um, so um, I'm Ali Behdad, the Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies and on behalf of my colleagues at the

Center, I would like to welcome you to today's event to celebrate the publication of our colleague

Domenico Ingenito's "Beholding Beauty: Sa'di of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry."

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our co-sponsors: the Program on Central Asia, Department

of Comparative Literature, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance

Studies, the Program in Iranian Studies, and the Pourdavoud Center for the study of the Iranian world.

As some of you know, CNES was founded in and is a research hub where over 100

faculty from humanities, social sciences, arts, and the law school

collaborate in a variety of research and pedagogical

projects.

What makes a center such as the CNES successful, an important venue for the exchange of

ideas and the dissemination of knowledge about the MENA region within and beyond the campus,

is the quality of its affiliated faculty whose cutting edge scholarship and teaching bring fresh

perspective on the challenges and cultural richness of the region.

So it gives me special pleasure today to host today's event to celebrate the recent publication of our colleague

Domenico's wonderful new book, Beholding Beauty. Domenico represents the

ideal model of an academic for he's not only a first-rate scholar

but also a great teacher and a dedicated citizen of his department, the program in Iranian Studies and the CNES.

And we are indeed very fortunate to have him as a colleague at UCLA. Domenico, who received his PhD in Persian

language and literature from Università di Napoli “L'Orientale” Italy in 2012, is an Associate Professor

in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

His stellar scholarship addresses a wide range of topics from pre-modern Persian poetry

to anthropology of ritual and symbolic representation and from topics in comparative literature to material culture and

Iranian cinema.

He's the recipient of several awards and honors including a rotary club prize for the best M.A. thesis in

comparative literature and an Erasmus scholarship.

We're very fortunate to have two great scholars to discuss Domenico's book and I would like to introduce them

very briefly and welcome them now. Our first panelist is professor Paul Losensky who is a Professor of Comparative

Literature and Central Eurasian Studies as well as the Director of Persian Language Program at the Indiana

University.

His scholarship focuses on translation, translation history, and theory. He is the author of "Welcoming Fighānī:

Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal" in which he offers an illuminating

discussion of the development of Indian style during Safavid and Mughal era.

His translation work include Farid Ad-Din 'Attar's Memorial of God's Friends as well as Amir Khusrau's poetry,

"In the Bazaar of Love."

More recently, he has been working on the intersection of architecture and literature exploring

the ways in which Persian poetry depicts both real and imaginary buildings as well as the

use of architectural metaphors in Persian poetry. Our second speaker is Jane Mikkelson, who's a Post-Doctoral

Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Virginia. Dr. Mikkelson received her PhD in 2019 from the

University of Chicago where she wrote a wonderful, she wrote a wonderful dissertation entitled

"Worlds of the Imagination: Bīdel of Delhi and Early Modern Persian Lyric Style."

Her articles on Bīdel's figuration of the lyric self and other topics have

appeared in the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa,

and the Middle East, among other venues. Like our first panelist,

she is also a translator and has translated some of Bīdel's lyric poems on meditation.

Now I would like to invite Domenico to make a brief presentation of his new book.

Afterward, our speakers will present their responses to the book and then Domenico will briefly

respond to their comment. So please join me in welcoming Domenico and our speakers Professor Losensky and Dr

Mikkelson.

Thank you. Thank you so much, thank you for such a generous presentation, uh Professor Behdad,

for hosting this event. I'm truly moved by not only by the generosity of all the programs

and the centers that are involved in this book launch but also by the intellectual friendship that that

uh Paul Losensky and Jane Mikkelson also are are offering us today with their time and patience.

Uh, I'm also very moved by the number of colleagues and friends all around the

world who are joining us. I see that the number of these are around

over 200 people. And I recognize many, many familiar names. I cannot see your faces. Welcome. Thank you so much for

being here and all the new friends that are joining us today.

I received my copies of the book yesterday.

I'm showing it briefly. It's here. And I prepared a powerpoint just to go through in a very informal

way and I apologize for the informal register of this presentation. It would be just

a general overview of what the book is about and then I will let Jane and Paul elaborate on specific aspects

of this work.

Um, you know the work is about Sa'di of Shiraz, who is the probably one of the most important poets

of the Persian classical canon, wrote during the 13th century.

Um, Sa'di has been studied for more for several decades, for several centuries in the West.

Few monographs have been dedicated to his lyric poetry, to his ghazals. There are excellent

books that have been published recently in English uh on the overall overarching aspects of Sa'di's

literary output. Uh, I see also Professor [...] is with us today. She also published a wonderful

book about about Sa'di, but I decided to to breach this gap, and and um and write

about about his lyric poetry.

Overall, you will see some some images from manuscripts for this

research I've been working on, about 30, 28 manuscripts, some of which have never been studied.

Others have been used for partial critical editions, so I have tried also to

to re to re-engage the original documents in in ways that somehow can can fix some of

the issues that are found also in the critical editions of of of some of Sa'di's works.

Uh we know very little about Sa'di's life.

Uh he died in 1292, maybe 1291. I sometimes get, some manuscripts helped me

also um establish that precise date of his death that was was a contentious problem for

several years in the in the in the field. He studied in the Nizamiyya school, allegedly, in Baghdad

in the 1230s and was loosely attached to the Suhravardiyya Sufi order. We can talk about this later.

And what is interesting is that he sought political and literary patronage

throughout his life. Uh, the major works by Sa'di that are usually, usually

scholars focus on and readers also cherish the most are the Sa'di-nāma or the Bustān

and the Gulistān. Usually the dates that appear in most publications are the final

um, composition dates of these books which are 1257 for the Bustān and 1258 for the Gulistān.

I've tried to reframe uh the problem, the composition.

The manuscripts show that there are several stages of of composition for this. There are

different recensions and both books were – Sa'di started writing both books in the 50s. Um, there's

the whole problem of the alleged return of Sa'di to Shiraz in the late

50s and so on. We can talk about this.

I tried to re-reassess completely the entire entire biography of this poet.

As I said, what my– the focus of my book is, are the gazhals, uh the lyric poems.

There are about 700 different collections composed and put together in different stages of Sa'di's life.

So we have "The Delights" (Tayyibāt) of the 50s,

The Marvels most likely composed in the 1260s and "The Final Seals" (Khavātim) from the 1270s. There is a very

interesting section of Sa'di's work, uh the obscene works, uh probably composed in the early 1260s.

We'll talk about this as well and the Praise poems.

He, Sa'di was very active with with the political circles of his time,

Salghurid dynasty (the atabegs of Fars), Juvayni family later on

uh, the Mongol notables, and Shirazi religious scholars.

And also intellectual literary circles are extremely important to understand

Sa'di's intellectual framework. When working on Sa'di's poetry, one of the

most baffling characteristics of these verses is that they are extremely simple.

They read as an extremely simple and smooth, yet inimitable, yet inaccessible

um kind of beauty. And it's interesting how the work of translating

Sa'di's poetry is one of the most challenging frustrating experiences that a scholar

of Persian literary study can ever face because translations simply

never get to the point of that balanced um, softness and smoothness that one finds

in those lines. That's why I was comparing Sa'di's poetry with Rothko

and the experience of admiring a beautiful

image without really recognizing anything, without even knowing what to

say about an image apart from describing its sort of main components. I would like to

think about Sa'di's poetry as uh as an experience that is uh more about

contemplation initially and this is this very contemplative modality that Sa'di urges us to follow

that has prevented for many decades scholars from cracking the secret of the intellectual

components of his poetry.

Uh there is an example of one of the most beautiful openings of his ghazals which expresses this inimitable smoothness.

I'll read it first in Persian.

[...]

"Why did I give you my heart? You will break it, I know.

What did I do? Why don't you look at me anymore?

My heart and soul focus on you, but my gaze roams away.

My rivals should not understand that you are the object of my glances.

I look at other beauties: they leave my heart as soon as

they leave my sight.

But you firmly penetrate my heart, like the soul inhabits the body."

There are several prejudices and biases surrounding the modern reception of

Sa'di's poetry and in my book I try to address these issues.

And so I'm showing you this, this highlighted in red, this this main biases and how I tried to

to cope with this and re-re-discuss this problem. So there is this

idea of the predominance of ethical and didactic dimensions in Sa'di's poems

that is usually perceived as a boring, ethical, moralistic kind of author that has nothing to do

with the complexities that will be explored together.

It is true the ethical discourse is only one among many other dimensions that

characterize Sa'di's works.

The primary function of this ethical discourse is to guide ideal rulers, ideal readers (rulers and common folks

alike) toward the quest for a golden mean and the nuanced balance between mundanity and spirituality.

Another prejudice relates to the distance from political power, politics, and courtly affairs.

Sa'di's attachment to power is always problematic for certain. We can discuss this.

It is a cultural problem. It is a contemporary, cultural problem that uh prevents us and prevents most readers from

understanding the value of Sa'di's attachment to political power.

Sa'di in fact sought the favor of rulers and patrons throughout his entire life, often striving to access the

entourage or younger princes regardless of their dynastic affiliations. We will see why this is important.

There is a heteronormative bias. Um it is true that in Persian, the grammatical gender of the beloved

is not expressed. But we have to understand from historical from historical overarching structure, the kind of

desires that is is expressed in this kind of point,

the aesthetics of desire that Sa'di portrays in his works are predominantly homerotic.

It is, disarming though, when we read entries in for instance in in the Encyclopædia Iranica, [...] almost

Persian literature because this is that's nothing to do with the modern western concept of homosexuality.

Uh, I do not want to sound like Ahmadinejad who says that there is no

homosexuality in Iran, but the point is that anthropologically speaking,

there is a completely different set of norms and values

and and aesthetics that are in place when we talk about homperoticism,

specifically in the poet, in Sa'di's poetry.

It is a kind of functional homeroticism that relates to ritualized ideals of

kingship and sacred forms of eroticism.

There are also many biographistic assumptions. Sa'di talks a lot about himself and many scholars for many decades have

been taking at face value whatever Sa'di

says about himself.

Uh, I've tried to reassess the validity of these assumptions.

Uh very little historically accurate information can be gathered from Sa'di's

autobiographical claims.

The most important details though can be gleaned through the analysis of less

studied texts and the ideas of authorship that the

poet developed around his literary renown, mainly for political purposes.

Sa'di is often seen as a primary mystical poet.

There is one book about Sa'di's ghazals, there is only one major publication in Persian about Sa'di's

ghazals. And it's a book by Said [...].

And the main focus of the book uh is is is that there is this idea of mysticism that pervades entirely in

Sa'di's poetry, complete dismissal of the erotic aspects of his

ghazals. While the spiritual dimension of Sa'di's poetry cannot be denied,

his representations of love enact the human appreciation of physical beauty through the role of the external senses

and imagining faculties of the individual.

This is also true that some scholars on the other hand read Sa'di as a purely erotic poet.

So we have this this sort of this constant quarrel right, between those who defend Sa'di's mysticism and those who are uh

suggesting that there is an exclusively erotic um aspect. Sa'di's expression of love and

desire cannot understood without taking into account

the "sacred eroticism" that exudes from his poems. In his ghazals, Sa'di

conceives of the visible world as an arena in which the divine splendor

can be understood through the contemplation of mundane beauty. And the final problem, there is

Sa'di's dismissal of philosophy.

And in general, there is still a lot of work to do in the field to understand what the role

of philosophy has been in the shaping of of of uh thought expressed by these poets uh

in their verses.

The peculiar combination of dramatic rationalism, mundane commitments, and spiritual

aesthetics that characterize Sa'di's work reveals that the poet was deeply

influenced by a complex network of correspondences, sorry, between moderate strands of Sufi

thought and Islamic philosophy.

The manuscripts are extremely useful when when when we tackle this kind of problems. For instance, the controversy on

the mystical or mundane nature of Sa'di's lyric poems.

Is the beloved a reflection of god? Is the beloved just a human person?

Uh was Sa'di mystic? Was he a Sufi? Did he have one of these maps? Which this mask for instance uh

kept in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris has been studied by other scholars, but

this specific folio has never been really looked at and it declares very clearly

when and where and how and by whom Sa'di's Sufi lodge,

Sa'di's monastery, we could say also, was established,

how much was spent and when and by whom it was restored in the outskirts of Shiraz,

uh a few decades after the death of the author.

So this this is why I tried to go back to these original documents in order to

reassess these kind of problems. Um I will briefly now sketch the main

topics of the book by showing that– the book is made, is divided into three different parts.

And they can be, they're interconnected of course, but they can also be read

um as separate monographs.

Uh and and I try to account for the complexity of Sa'di's thought and

the connection between mundanity and spirituality by dedicating the first part to

the to the material aspect, to the physical aspect of uh the contemplation of beauty and

the politics of contemplating beauty that exists from its points

whereas the second part focuses on the spirit, we focus on thought, on the philosophy behind it,

we focus on the Sufi influence uh on Sa'di's poem, and then the third part is the enactment,

is is the enactment of of these physical and metaphysical ideals and practices through um recitation and

the circulation of his poetry. And we'll be talking about that as well later.

So the first uh part which I called "uncovering the skin of the ghazal"

opens with a chapter that discusses the Homoerotics of political power and the Emergence of Gendered Desires.

Right, so the question is what is the relationship between

ritualized homoerticism and political power in the context of Sa'di's literary

activity in the Salghurid and Ilkhanid courts. So it's it's a it's it's an attempt to redefine the

prejudice that would completely dismiss not only the gender of the beloved in Sa'di's poetry but also

the historical function of this. There is a reason why and there was there was an effect that was primarily political

and static and philosophical. There are some lines, I'm showing for instance how these two elements are

intertwined. Uh we don't really have much time so I will skip the lines for now.

The second chapter is about the nature of lyric poetry

in the context of autobiographism.

How fruitful is lyric poetry as a fictional discourse and how does it connect with the relationship between history,

biography, and courtly ideals of power and functional eroticism. What happens in a lyric poem? What kind of truth

emerges from a lyric poem?

And how did Sa'di frame this problem within the context of his major works in prose,

like the the Gulistān, the Rose Garden, which is a mix, represents a mix of prose and verse.

How does a pseudo-autobiographical text enacts lyric poetry by mimicking an ideal

representation of the external world? Nothing that Professor Losensky will be talking

about this aspect later.

Uh and then I, I've refrained from sharing obscene texts because because I do think that they require context.

Uh and I'm sorry Paul, I know that that's your favorite chapter.

Um I tried to look at the obscene texts as counter texts for Sa'di's lyric voice as a reflection of of Sa'di's mystical

afflatus.

So I try to see to look at both uh aspects of his poetry to see how there is reification, a sexual reification

and the spiritual fetishization, fantasization taking place at this point.

The second part uh is the most probably important section of the entire book, uh "Through the Mirror of your Glances:

The Sacred Aesthetics of Sa'di's Lyric

Subject." Um the body as a divine sign. What are the hermeneutics of spiritual desire?

How does the human beloved reflect divine duty? Is the beloved an incarnation of god?

Does he iconically signal his ineffable presence?

How to reassess the problem with the vision of god in the context of Sa'di's poetry?

We have this this line uh, [...]

"You appear in the morning and no one

bows down to worship your face.

Why? People fear God, whereas I am too

bewildered to prostrate."

The lines, it looks very smooth but there is there is, I wrote a whole chapter to

discuss what's happening in in in these shifts that you can see between these two uh mystics.

Uh "The 'Arif As a Beholder: The Divine Pen Depicting the Khatt of the Beloved." So

here I try to also to make sense of the erotic component in conversation with the hermeneutics of

trying to visualize God. There's this beautiful line in which

Sa'di says, "On the page-like cheek of the beautiful ones they see the downy-beard"

Khat(t), which means both downy-beard and writing of scripture. "Short is their sight! But the beholder, (the 'arif)

contemplates the pen of God's creation."

The chapter six I'm glad I see Professor [...] today who is one of the

main experts on Avicenna and the Abyssinian traditions, especially as far as the study, or the internal senses and

Avicenna psychology is concerned. And her work deeply inspired this

this this chapter and along with work of other scholars such as [...] and others.

I try to to show how important the heritage of Islamic philosophy in

combination with different trends in the field of Sufi thought um for the development of the psychology

of Sa'di's lyric subject.

So there there is this whole extremely complex, really interesting fascinating theory, the

internal senses that explain how we imagine things, how we produce mental images of things and how these

mental images interact with external reality.

And throughout Sa'di's ghazals, there are many references to this tradition.

Uh which doesn't mean that Sa'di was prescriptively was systematically transcribing science and philosophy into

his poems but it was part of, as Jane Mikkelson says, "in ambient availability." He was there

in the circles to which he belonged uh and he did reflect in his poetry, just

like some of contemporary scientific paradigms can be reflected in the poetry that is produced today in

in in the U.S. or in Iran or in other literary traditions.

So for instance, "So pervasive is the depiction of the beloved in my imagination that no

intelligibles (ma'qul) are any longer depicted in my mind."

In another poem, he says, "Everyone's mind imagines someone's beautiful face but the one I imagine is beyond

imagination." And I think that here, he is using different ways, different

aspects of imaginative faculties in this poem.

And then another line is, "From the aperture of my thinking," (fikrat) which

is a key word.

"My heart showed to the Rational Soul, the

signs of my desperation." Uh, I'm not elaborating on chapter seven, eight in which I put

uh the theory of internal sense in conversation with Al-Ghazali especially in one book, major book uh,

composed in Persian, um KĪMIYA-I-SAÔĀDAT The Alchemy of Bliss. And I tried to show

how there is a practice of contemplating beauty for spiritual

ends that exists throughout the entirety of Sa'di's poetry and the thing

that Jane would be elaborating on aspects of of this problem. Uh the third part,

the lyrical ritual sama' is the performative space of sacred eroticism um in which I try to

make sense of the circulations of this poetry and how performance and performativity interplay

in the in the composition and circulation of Sa'di's ghazals.

And I'm done. I think for today I will just present very briefly four or five points. Uh I refer to these

as paradigm shifts through the re-historicization

of Sa'di's life and works.

And the book aims to offer several paradigm shifts in the study of Sa'di's poetry which I'm analyzing here.

I try to shifting focus on Sa'di's ethics to study his aesthetics, so from the emphasis on prescriptive

moral norms to the study of the centrality of the realm of vision

and the role of the body for the exploration of the visible and the invisible.

From the mundane versus spiritual dichotomy, I don't really care anymore

about this controversy, to an integrated study of the relationship

between the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the act of contemplating

beauty, in its material and imaginable manifestations.

From the dismissals of Sa'di's intellectual endeavors to the retrieval of the complex of ideals,

discourses, and practices that characterized Sa'di's cultural upbringing between Shiraz, Baghdad, and

and Tabriz, both synchronically and diachronically.

And then uh I attempted every assessment

of Sa'di's non-scholastic Sufi tendencies through the lens of the historical

relationship between philosophy and Sufi thought and its "ambient availability" as Jane says in 13th century Shiraz.

And finally, a shift from hermeneutical approaches to Sufi poetry to the recognition of specific models of

intellection, sensory perception, and imagination that

inform the historical construction of the lyric subject.

And this is the last one, I promise.

I cannot see this–

Reconceptualization of lyric poetry is a discourse that is both conventional and confessional in its forms and effects.

Performance and performativity are the main axes of that allow the circulations of this poetry

for courtly, aesthetic, and spiritual ends.

And I'm good for now. And I think that um thank you for your attention.

Uh I believe that Paul comes next.

It's a real honor for me to be uh asked to participate in this.

Um, I have been involved in the gestation, we might call it, of this book for several years now. I've read numerous

drafts and Domenico and I have had numerous conversations about the books. So it's

nice to be here um as a midwife. I'm bringing this, bringing this long gestating uh

book into into the public eye.

Um I have yet to receive my copy but I do have,

I was very happy to get the page proofs of the final version of the book from Brill.

And it was nice to see that all of the baby's limbs are in their proper place and he seems to be responding to

visual stimuli. Um in any case um, I'm gonna really sort of focus on the theoretical groundings

uh as I see them of Domenico's project. Um Jane and I have kind of agreed that

we're going to point to particular passages so I guess if you're making a list while you're

waiting for your copy of the book to arrive um you should write down part one chapter two, part

two, part two the introduction and chapter six and the introduction to part three. This

is where Domenico often very unobtrusively uh introduces quite a insightful theoretical framework for

what he engages in.

And he begins this project really an inch in chapter two of part one

um where he uh talks, where he goes back to the generative semiotics of [...] to lay out kind of a model

that bridges the gap between the ghazal as sort of pure convention: nightingales, roses, gardens

inaccessible beloveds, blah blah blah blah blah and

Ad infinitum. And the other uh the opposing tendency which is to read this poetry as though strictly for the content, as

though um this content was being presented to us without this whole kind of conventional material.

Without going into the details of [...] four-part

schema, which is a schema, we kind of go from basically linguistics to

what I would call conventions to maybe the individual treatment of conventions,

to then historical referentiality. And what I like about this model is that it allows us to move

kind of systematic, I don't want to say systematically, but to move

with a kind of logical trajectories between the conventional

uh elements of the ghazal genre and its historical situatedness.

Um and so this is like I say, this is a model that I think sets

up the historicist project, which lies in the center of this book. Um reading Sa'di

um as a as an author writing in a particular place, in a particular time, with a particular

uh education, and filling in that rich historical background that informs his poetry throughout even when the

references are not uh explicit, even when it is sort of this ambient availability, a phrase I also

like very much. Um and how that material then comes to shape a particular

treatment of the more conventional, of the more conventional stuff.

Um so this is, this is a very useful, a very useful kind of historical, maybe a a hermeneutic rubric if you will,

for understanding both the striving of the Ghazal for eternal,

you know, for kind of an eternal validity and it's historical embeddedness.

Um the second part of my comments um, and I'm going to really try and keep on time, I might call imitation is the

sincerest form of flattery.

At several key moments in the book um norm– in the in the passages in particular

that I mentioned earlier, um Domenico is, makes use of the response poem.

Um putting Sa'di's poetry into a network of poems that are related by rhyme and meter and this

is sometimes Sa'di talking back to earlier poets.

It's some time a later poet talking back to Sa'di.

Um aside from the fact that this is a topic near and dear to my heart,

um it also Domenico uses it quite well as a way of demarcating what is specific to Sa'di's take on

mystical poetry. Um and he provides these these exercises in comparative reading across the tradition, really help

him define and I think this is one of the major accomplishments of the book, really help him define what

is if you will, characteristic of Sa'di's particular, shall we call it, sober approach to Sufism.

My students and I'm sure many other readers always think of Rumi and the ecstasy and the leaving the body.

What these comparative readings do is allow Domenico to really point out um

a very different kind of approach to Sufi poetry.

Um so it's always good when you take a big term like that and and refine it down and

I was happy to see that the the methodology of reading response poems.

Uh he made such great use of it.

Like I say, the sincerest form of flattery, and I will return it by the end of my comments.

Um the second thing that I think is uh another element if you will of Domenico's theoretical

approach is his analysis of the lyric "I".

This is a this is a topic that has tortured me

for a couple of decades now and I think Domenico does a wonderful job at clarifying how

a, for lack of a better word, how an individual voice emerges uh from this highly convention-bound tradition.

And he quite rightly points out that there is a, um how did we, how do we have it here, that there is this,

yeah is it confessional or conventional, is one way of putting it, um but perhaps

more a little more precisely is the very indeterminate relationship between the historical author

and the voice of the poems that we hear, the lyric "I".

And again Domenico gives us a number ways of thinking through that problem more precisely

in terms of his theoretical, in terms of his theoretical approach. Um he argues and this is kind

of paraphrasing that what we have in the ghazal is not so much a representation

of historical experience but a representation of the perception of historical experience.

In other words, what the poems present to us is a kind of individual world view. Um not all

Ghazal poets do this by any means but the best ones do. Um and so that what we are given is not so much

um the representation of a world but the representation of a perception of a world. And I think that's an

incredibly powerful uh insight and it tells us what the purpose of the ghazal might be.

I mean, he raises the very, what do what do words do, what does the ghazal do socially? In Domenico's

case, the answer has to do with sama', what he calls the what he translates as the lyric

ritual. Um the poem either brings us into that, into that ritual or serves as a um a simulacram of that of that

experience.

Um so those are what I see is some of the most important theoretical kind of groundings and insights of this work.

Um like I say they're often presented very unobtrusively, but look for those introductions, you'll kind of get this

what I want.

um so like I said, I was going to return the favor of uh imitation as a sincerest form of flattery.

I divide books basically into three broad character categories. One of them is books I choose not finish.

Um the other one is books that teach me something.

And the third one, and this is uh the category that I think

I prize the most, books that make me think. Um books that make me uh reconsider problems that I've been

thinking about for a long time.

Domenico's book is great because it's both two and three. It both taught me a lot

of things I didn't know before about uh 13th century intellectual life,

but it also made me think. And I'll just say a couple of things about how I think it's going to affect my work

um on my big project, which is a book on Saib.

One of them is again, it helps me define what the relations– Saib is frequently introduced as

autobiographical reflections into the final line of his ghazals, the signature verses.

Um and it helps me again kind of think

about how do we handle those autobiographical statements within his larger aesthetic project.

A second way that I kind of am thinking about this is what do the poems from my period do.

Sama' is not the central cultural institution in the 17th century that it was in the

13th century but nevertheless these poems are doing

something and they better be doing something because

they are, they exist by the thousands. Uh and so trying to think through what happens when we move from a

primarily oral performative context to a context in which

writing and what we might call private appreciation play a lot more dominant role.

The question of the social function or the, if you will, the pragmatic function of poetry doesn't go away,

but what kinds of new forms does it take.

Um finally, um the question of uh of the philosophical environment that surrounded uh Saib.

Saib was a much less learned man and at least in terms of the

intellectual sciences than Sa'di was, but nevertheless he's being affected by a number of things.

One of the one of the things and this is a transition into uh into what Jane has to say, one of the

concepts that I found most interesting is the concept of [...]

and [...].

[...] is, to put it crudely, of the drawing of conclusions from sensory perception, the drawing of,

if you will, lessons or general rules from uh from sensory perception.

In Sa'di's case the, the object of sensory perception is pretty much the beloved

in all of his in all of his physical glory. Um and I'm beginning to think that one

of the things that most distinguishes, uh Saib has very similar emphasis on [...],

what we can learn from the world. but what Saib's contribution,

I'm beginning to think is, is that instead of just looking at the beloved, just. Sorry, instead of looking primarily

at the beloved, Saib really opens up opens up this process to his broader urban environment.

Um and brings in all kinds of aspects of whether the

material culture, kind of childhood games, uh all sorts of things that hadn't

really found a home in the ghazal before begin to find a home. And they find a

home in precisely this sort of way.

The poem as an act of interpretation and an act of drawing lessons from the environment. And Saib also

draws on an Avicennian concept, which is [...], kind of belongs to

a cosmological rather than psychological realm.

But again these are sort of the the kinds of things that Dominic's book has made me think.

Um so I thank him for that.

Uh and for the friendship over the last several years and again congratulations on

on your on your brand new baby.

And I will pass the baton to Jane.

Yeah, just to echo Paul, I mean I too have just been so inspired by

Domenico's scholarship and conversations over the years and it's

just a real immense honor and absolute genuine pleasure to be here today to celebrate this incredible book in

public with with all of you.

Um so to reframe a figure as central to the classical canon as Sa'di is to Persian literature

is for many reasons a very bold endeavor.

And what's so astonishing about Beholding Beauty is that Domenico reframes Sa'di for us in so many different ways.

So in my remarks here, I'd like to focus on um

two broad reappraisals uh of Sa'di that Domenico's book gives us.

So first I'll talk about a little bit about the long-awaited full picture of

Sa'di's body of works that emerges from the chapters in part one um based on

Domenico's philologically meticulous consideration of his entire literary output

including the obscene poems, long banished to the wings and neglected by scholars until now.

And the second reframing involves attending to the wide ecosystem of philosophical thought available in

the 13th century Islamic world within which Sa'di's ideas take shape. So

both of these broad interventions allow us to explore in wholly new ways what

Domenico so beautifully calls, quote,

"The open landscape of Sa'di's balanced contemplation of the beauty of the world. End quote."

So in part one, which I love the title of part one.

Uncovering the Skin of the Ghazal, explores several intertwined questions:

what do we mean by a specific lyric style? How do we identify it ? Who speaks for it?

What are its units and measures? Sa'di has long been associated since pre-modern times with a style called

[...], what Domenico translates as "inimitable smoothness" characterized by a kind of minimalism that in Domenico's lovely

description, quote, "Requires the dedication of attentive prospectors who set their eyes on a stream and

discern gold from the reflections in the water."

So it's clear that love is really the central focus of the hundreds of lyric

poems that Sa'di composed but he does not himself supply us with precise definitions of love,

lust, passion. And while Sa'di does not explicitly theorize the erotic or explain how it functions in his poems,

this absence of silver platter delivered authorial intentions as Domenico argues

need not prevent us from rigorously investigating what these concepts mean

for Sa'di and how they function. Instead of settling for easy stable definitions, Domenico insists that we need to embrace

the ambivalences and multiple possibilities in Sa'di works,

quote, "As if we were to navigate through a cluster of islands without the aid of maps,

an experience of the literary territory that is rhizomatic rather than

cartographical."

End quote. So this book really urges us to attend to many different kinds of

instabilities and indeterminacies. These range from textual to conceptual, aesthetic, and contextual,

instead of aligning or collapsing them and really seeing where this leads us.

The aim of part one is to present the full range and texture of the Sa'dian spiritual intellectual sensorium

and this means attending seriously also to the happy thoughts, the obscene pornographic poetry largely

ignored by scholarship was, which is I think explored with really great nuance um by Domenico in chapter three.

And what really comes through here is the rich porousness between modalities and genres and registers and concepts

in Sa'di's system. It would be philologically unsound as

Domenico shows to dismiss or diminish the sensuality and homoeroticism that is so central to

Sa'di's corpus. And one of the many truly exciting contributions of this book

is that it shows us how seemingly distinct, even opposed entities, like the amatory and pornographic lyric, also

poetry and prose, politics and lust, spiritual devotion and carnal desire, how all of these together constitute a

very flexible system of ideas that requires and thrives on ambiguity

and versatility. For instance, we see how Sa'di develops what Domenico calls, quote,

"A rhetorical and stylistic conflation of homoeroticism, lyricism, and political insight as a literary

modality. end quote."

When Sa'di composes verses that linger on physical beauty as an

embodiment of his patron's princely qualities, these poems begin to embody what Domenico calls, quote,

"A sexualized representation of political power, creating a synergy between the erotic and the encomiastic,"

end quote.

And these synergies which are explored in great historical, theological and critical depths in the book

are not the result of Sa'di's rote rearrangement of fixed concepts.

On the contrary, even something is apparently concrete as desire in Sa'di's hands is represented with

ambivalences and plural possibilities, creating unresolved tensions rather than conveying specific intentions.

So in the chapters of part one we see, for instance,

how fluid the gender of the beloved can be within the economies and entanglements of desire.

We are also attuned in new ways by Domenico to the shimmering interplay between reality and fiction,

convention and concrete representation.

We learned that contrary to the dictates of medieval Persian amatory lyric where the beloved is traditionally a

beautiful boy who captures the gaze of an older man, some of Sa'di's poems also describe

encounters with someone conspicuously not younger, someone who is in fact, quote,

"A strong man who has long since crossed the threshold of manhood," end quote.

Unlike many typical sub-varieties pornographic poems from the period portray primarily in uh

the humorously body or the shockingly grotesque, Sa'di's obscene poems can do

more than merely amuse, shock, or elicit other varieties of 13th century pearl clutching.

Rather, Domenico shows us that other indeterminate intimacies are present here as well.

In Sa'di's poems, we can see all of these of all things amatory lyrics shining through just

below the surface.

Domenico argues that obscene poems ought to be read as counter texts to the amatory lyric showing how close

intertextual ties between serious and obscene texts reveal a poetic system that spans a

plurality of approaches to the depiction of desire.

So what is the effect of this on readers and listeners?

The more the reader is simultaneously exposed to these two seemingly very different sides of the lyric spectrum,

the more the demarcation between them appears blurred.

As Domenico says, quote, "Once we familiarize ourselves with the possibility of a pornographic

representation floating under the skin of the courtly,"

end quote, this allows us then to re-read and reappraise

Sa'di's ghazals through the lens of diverse semiotic possibilities.

The following line from an obscene poem by Sa'di and Domenico's wonderfully

restrained I think and very chiseled translation exemplifies some of these ambiguities of

desire and lust speech and silence. "How could I be fulfilled by just looking at you. Other actions I

imagine but none of them can I say to you."

And there's a sudden delicacy here. Right, the there's the reference to acts unfolding

in the imagination yet left unsaid that it's really rather shocking.

The very presence of something like amator lyric decorum here in an obscene poem is really arresting.

The approach laid out in the book of considering obscene and courtly amatory lyric poems as mutually dependent

counter texts as co-constituents of an interconnected textual system allows us to see how these poems can

open up to new shades of meaning, each lyric modality uncovering what is latent and

the other in suggestively indeterminate plural

ways.

One of the most humane and important theoretical contributions of part one

is the injunction to mind the gap between modern categories and

assumptions about desire, lust, sexuality, and passion, and pre-modern practices, sensibilities, and

varieties of human experience that are imperfectly picked out by our modern terms.

As Domenico says, if we, quote, "grant these texts their partial alternative with respect to us

and our categories we might discover how the concept of love and passion celebrated by Sa'di in his poems

is much more unsettling, disturbing, and confusing than we ever could have imagined

but also more alluring, modern and cosmopolitan." I love that quote.

So if part one of the book is focused on the centrality of the body and the affordances of the

senses and Sa'di's textualized experiences of desire, part two situates Sa'di's sacred

eroticism against the broader intellectual background

of the medieval Persian world. Here, Sa'di's focus on carnal desire is examined within the context of a wide

variety of attempts to make sense of embodied human experience, which is of course a vastly

interdisciplinary complex project taken up in philosophy,

Sufism, politics, jurisprudence literature and more.

Sa'di is extremely coy about his sources, so the burden of reconstruction falls on modern scholarly shoulders.

Where should we look for specific sources and strands of influence that shape Sa'di's thought world?

If Domenico shows how the possibilities offered by sensuous reality are never far from the surface of even Sa'di's

most chaste courtly lyrics, what theories of epistemology, psychology, cosmology?

What available forms of spiritual philosophical structured striving allows Sa'di to balance carnal desire

and spiritual aspirations in his inimitably smooth way? How can beholding beauty in the world be a process

capable of leading the lyric subject towards communion with the divine? Many problems press

themselves on scholarly attempts to answer these questions, problems faced by many of us who work on

pre-modern Persian literature.

How can we reconstitute a system of thought on behalf of a figure who consciously shuns scholastic systematicity?

In the five chapters of part two, Domenico builds a strong case for the

need to move beyond deflationary scholarly tendencies that

align Sa'di only with one or the other Sufi order, collapse his thought to fit under under

the umbrella of one system, or claim to unlock all of Sa'di's ideas with a single doctrinal skeleton key.

Instead, Domenico sets Sa'di's theory of spiritual aesthetics within a wide plurality of thought systems.

These chapters chart the affinities between Sa'di's thought and Al-Ghazali's aesthetics and

epistemology and also with Avicenna and rationalism and psychology.

These systems in different but connected ways, acknowledge and try to make sense

of the complex embodiments and aspirations that comprise human experience.

Caught as it is between the visible world accessed by the five external senses

and God's invisible realm, hidden but sometimes accessible by humans through various contemplative procedures.

Al-Ghazali admits that human efforts to come into contact with God can take multiple paths.

There is rational contemplation but also visionary experience or beholding.

So too in Sa'di where as Domenico puts it, quote,

"Sensuality and the quest for God are never mutually exclusive," unquote. They really co-exist frequently

in provocative enriching tension. Like Ghazali, Sa'di

acknowledges and explores these multiple access points to higher truth and doesn't shy away from the

tensions between these multiple paths.

In one poem Sa'di writes, "Anyone who has human form and defeats lustful desires will acquire human nature in full.

We're nothing but animals otherwise." But then in the same poem we have this line:

"I shan't free myself from these ties all my life long."

In spite of his cruelty, Sa'di will never detach his hand from the beloved's waist.

So on the one hand we have a poet clearly obsessed with the physical world, with the beauty that's found and

experienced there, and who has it, who is at the same time attentively

directed towards something beyond lust.

So why dwell in such complex indirect ways on these seemingly incompatible dimensions of human desire and spiritual

striving?

As Domenico puts it, "The body of the beloved turns into a space of semiotic conflict in which multiple desires and

possibilities converge, especially with respect to the fictional world of the text and its points of contact with

external reality." Precisely by dwelling on the beloved's body as a space of multiple hermeneutic possibilities,

Domenico argues that Sa'di is highlighting and also performing different aspects of the human capacity

to contextualize desire in multiple ways. Avicenna's psychology posits the fact of partnership

even of the necessary cooperation between different faculties.

Higher cognitive capacities depend on the gleanings of the external senses, on data from the physical world.

Building on this framework, Ghazali theorizes the permissibility of listening to amatory poetry,

stressing that the listener or reader has interpretive license, what Domenico calls an open interpretive

modality where the gaze of the beholder of beauty is constantly shuttling between

courtly amatory registers of lyric desire, the carnal realities that lurk beneath,

and spiritual endeavor whose starting point is the contemplation of physical beauty in the world.

Teaching readers to transmute lower desires into more rarefied meditations on the divine

and to develop self-awareness about the internal processes that make this possible

is an aim that Sa'di shares with these philosophers.

These thinkers admit multiple paths to contact with the divine while also allowing for the messiness

that can result from the inevitable conflations between embodiment, lust, and spiritual yearning so

unforgettably documented by Sa'di. and I think Domenico really convincingly

argues that Sa'di's own approach is best understood when examined within this larger ecosystem

of spiritual and philosophical ideas that were widely available and

circulating in his time.

So to briefly conclude, both these instances of reframing Domenico's

book and acts for Sa'di uh are I think examples of open thinking, a phrase recently used by Gordon Teske

borrowing from Adorno to characterize the flexible system of exploratory

inquiry in Spenser's "Faerie Queene" where thought is not static, narrow, confined, but dynamic and open-ended.

In Domenico's book, Sa'di emerges as a refreshingly complex figure whose works constitute a similarly open

framework for experimental thinking.

Domenico insists throughout the book that we must track the tensions between genres and modalities,

not fixed authorial intentions. That we ought to view Sa'di's corpus as moving with great nuance through flexible

systems rather than meating out pre-digested ideas. That his poems are not vehicles

for well-defined meanings but spaces of possibility and that Sa'di has been received as a

timeless source of wisdom precisely because he makes such open thinking available.

There are so many things I love about this book and it's truly hard to limit myself

to praising only a few of them here. One thing I'd like to stress is the range of truly exciting

comparative possibilities that this book opens up for medieval studies.

Throughout the book, Domenico points out parallels between Sa'di and Dante,

between the Gulistān and Canterbury Tales, the Decameron, and his brilliant insights about the

psychological complexity of the lyric subject,

the virtuosically achieved balance between truth and fiction, the nuanced moral realism that we see

in Sa'di's works.

All of these contributions will be of immense interest and lasting importance for medievalists and other literary

scholars far and wide.

Lastly, I want to mention the deep authorial warmth that pervades this book. Domenico approaches Sa'di's words,

biographical traces, ideas and contexts with such great care and commitment.

And there's a real ardor in these pages that kindles and spreads to the reader. One of my favorite passages in the book

is where Domenico likens the variations that vibrate throughout Sa'di's ghazals to Rothko's paintings, and I'm so glad

Domenico that you shared a Rothko with us so that people can appreciate this.

Domenico says, "like Rothko, Sa'di's poems are made of delicate simplicity, balanced contrasts of mood, and gradual

variations across the spectrum of sensory experience," end quote. In addition to the many original

innovative and lastingly important scholarly contributions of this book, Beholding Beauty makes a humane case for

the value of openness to multiple possibilities, of holistic approaches, and of non-linear

exploration, and Domenico's unforgettable phrase of quote, "The anthropological complexity of

the human theater," end quote.

The methods and sensibilities offered in this book have really never seemed more

urgently needed than today. So I'm going to stop there and turn it back over to you to Domenico.

I'm moved, you know, beyond any capability of speech by Paul's and and Jane's comments. I

yeah sorry I needed half a minute to just recompose myself.

Thank you, thank you very much. Uh yes, that this project is an open project.

It's something, I never felt I had to finish the book because I had to publish it at some point,

but I really think about these possibilities as as as not non-static and these conversations are extremely

interesting for me and I look forward to re-discovering um and study aspects of

Sa'di in the future, in the near future and also the translations to me. I kept translating originals,

translating these poems but I'm absolutely interested in in really re-considering, re-translating,

re-re-analyzing and the work that um you Ali, with your center, and

I also I want to thank all the centers and all the programs that uh made this possible co-sponsoring

this event. This really makes me feel part of the community. I want to thank also Professor

Rahim Shayegan, the director of the program on the Pourdavoud Center. I'm very grateful for all

this support that has been filtering through the years and um and all thank you for the questions.

These questions were absolutely, absolutely marvelous. Please do contact me and I want to keep talking about

these things with all of you.

Thank you Domenico. Yes indeed, the book is um generative. And for me, I mean as someone

who always sort of privileged Hafez over Sa'di, this definitely was a sort of

at least a paradigm shift for my own mind. I uh um so thank you for that

very important book. I very much look forward to reading it and I would like

to encourage our audience to order the book. And I think that you will definitely will enjoy it. It's

clearly a paradigm shift in terms of understanding Sa'di.

So thank you very much. I would like to thank our wonderful audience from across the world.

Um I would like to thank uh Domenico for producing this wonderful book, generative book. And of course Professor

Losensky and Dr. Mikkelson for their great, great presentations.

Thank you all. Thank you very much.

Thank you.