The Poet’s Knowledge of God: The Work of Parvin Etesami in the Context of the Iranian Spiritual Tradition

Abstract

The subject of this article is the mystical poetry of Parvin Etesami (1907–1941). In it, we analyse the religious foundations of the poet’s work of the first half of the twentieth century (a turning point in Persian culture), which continue the Persian tradition of searching for God on the paths laid by her predecessors and express her knowledge of God in old poetic forms (monazere, qasida) with a new poetic language. The study of the poetic ontology of Parvin Etesami, that is, of her reflections on God, is based not only on a collection of 60 poems published in Russian (Journey of a Tear, 1984), but primarily on precise translations of Etesami’s poems, published for the first time in the article, which could not be included in the Soviet edition and which were carried out by two of the authors of this article. The article analyses the poet’s ideas about God as the creator of man, about God’s predestination(the establishment of man’s mission on earth as a reflection of divine beauty), and about the Grace of God as the essence of human destiny. In the monologues of the dervishes, ideal personalities in the verses of Parvin, the value of the fruits carried by the mystical consciousness of one who has achieved contemplation of true reality is affirmed. It opposes the ideas of ordinary consciousness, for which the style of behaviour of the mystic is like madness. The love for God and God’s love are shown in Etesami’s poetry as the centre of the heart, so that externally manifested religiosity (the Kaaba as a shrine is the architecturally revealed centre of the world) and the inner comprehension of God (the Kaaba of the heart) are affirmed by Parvin in their complementary wholeness. In this way, it is shown that in the verses of Parvin, fidelity to the thousand-year-old spiritual tradition and individual creativity appear as an organic unity

Transl.: Koshemchuk T. A., Reisner M. L., Yahyapour M. 2022. The Poet’s Knowledge of God: The Work of Parvin Etesami in the Context of the Iranian Spiritual Tradition. Concept: Philosophy, Religion, Culture. 6(2). P. 41–58. DOI: https://doi. org/10.24833/2541-8831-2022-2-22-41-58. (In Russian)