Ferdowsi (940–1020)

A thousand years old, and still burning.

Let me be honest: rating the Shahnameh feels absurd. It's like giving oxygen a star rating. But since Goodreads demands it, five stars it is. And I mean it.

I read this in the original Persian. Not because I wanted to show off, but because Persian is my second language and I've studied it long enough. And let me tell you: reading Ferdowsi's own words—his rhythm, his deliberate choice of Persian over Arabic, his subtle wordplay—is a different show more experience entirely. Translations give you the story. The original gives you the soul.

The Shahnameh (The Book of Kings) is an ancient Persian epic completed in 1010 AD after thirty years of labor by the poet Ferdowsi. It tells the mythical and historical story of Iran, from the first legendary king to the fall of the Sassanian Empire. The language is surprisingly accessible for a thousand-year-old poem—not easy, but alive. Ferdowsi wrote in a "pure Persian" that deliberately avoided Arabic loanwords, and you can feel his mission on every page: to preserve Iranian identity after the Arab conquest.

The first part reads like Genesis crossed with Greek mythology: kings rise, fall, and struggle against darkness. But the heart of the epic is the heroic age, centered on the legendary hero Rostam. The story "Rostam and Sohrab"—where Rostam unknowingly kills his own long-lost son in single combat—is one of the most devastating things I've ever read. In the original Persian, the dialogue between father and son, the dramatic irony, the slow tragic realization... it rivals Sophocles. I had to put the book down more than once.

The final section covers the historical Sassanian dynasty and the Arab conquest. It's slower, more melancholic, but it carries the weight of a culture preserving itself through verse. Reading it in Persian, you hear the mourning in the meter.

Flaws? It's sprawling. Some genealogies blur together. Heroes sometimes feel repetitive. But that's like complaining that a mountain has too many rocks.

If you love Homer, Malory, or grand, sweeping fantasy, read this—in whatever language you can. But if you know Persian, do yourself a favor and read the original. Ferdowsi's voice is worth the effort.

Bottom line: A cornerstone of world literature that actually earns the title. هزار سال است و هنوز می‌سوزد. show less

Helen Zimmern, you were friends with Nietzsche and you did a decent job translating this INCREDIBLE WORK OF EPIC GENIUS (from the German, or direct from Farsi? I haven't been able to find out). So I am sorry to say that it is on your head that I hang the evident absurdity of stinting this FOUNDATIONAL WRITING for what Goethe considered one of the four main branches of world lit. Why does anyone do prose translations of poetic works? You wouldn't do a poetic translation of Herodotus, or an show more instruction-manual translation of the Decameron, or a constrained-writing translation of Finnegan's Wake that only uses the letter "e" (although I'd read the latter, in the spirit of twisted tribute to Joyce and Christian Bök). So I can only imagine that you did this out of laziness and greed for gold, Helen Zimmern; and not only that, you left out the whole fourth, "historical" cycle of this legendarium, with the Sassanids and Alexander the Great and, at the end, the Arab invasion and the end of the old Zoroastrian Iran and the descent into night. And one might say that's not a big deal, that they always abridge Don Quixote and Genji and whatnot, but I think in this case it really makes a difference.


Because as much as this is foundational and goes back right to the beginning of man and heroes wrestling Satan and all (and how amazing and Kull-the-Conqueror is it that the adversaries in the earlier, mythic and heroic cycles which we are provided with here have SNAKE BLOOD and are descended from ZOHAK THE SNAKE-MAN?), it's also a secondary epic. Right? Like, it doesn't matter if the Persians had a prior epic to which this is referring and playing off. Because they had a tradition. They had two thousand years of the Avesta, and they had Ahura Mazda/Ormuzd, and they had the ferment of the Middle East, and by the time Ferdowsi is writing they actually have the Qur'an too, although I like the way he plays it--nothing that'll actually have the year 1010 equivalent of the Revolutionary Guard knocking on your door, but an epic that in its refusal to do obeisance to Muhammad PBUH, reaches back to that pristine heroic past--and in this case, says, "these are the stories we would have written then, if we hadn't been thundering around the world righting wrongs and kicking the crap out of the Turks and just generally being as heartbreakingly beautiful as it's possible to be, partying a little too hard perhaps, but by God we were men." And yes, it wears its nationalism a bit more front and centre than most national epics do, but can you wonder? This is the proud history of a subjugated people. And when you remember that, it makes the triumphalism first toothless, then touching, then sad. Ferdowsi wrote this using only words of "pure" Indo-Iranian etymology, excising all the Semitic Arabic terms that had infiltrated the language with conquest and Islam, and in the process, so I read, he basically created the standard Persian language. And this is where Zimmern does a great job, actually, with her archaic phrasing and her "welkin" and "guerdon".


A great people at their lowest point, struggling to remember what made them great. That's what this is, and it's so much more affecting for that than, like, the Iliad--and so much more modern, in that we like our heroes flawed. And here they become increasingly flawed their clouds of glory increasingly attenuated, their propensity to backbite and stab in the dark increasingly dangerous with each passing cycle, until the Pehliva Rustem (usually Rostam, so I understand) has a fulltime job just keeping the Shah Kai Kaious out of trouble (saying volumes in itself about the Iran's historical leadership problem) and chastising the dastardly Afrasiyab (who always gets away at the last minute, just like Dr. Claw) and trying to keep his own honour bright, and in--again--a distinctively modern way, getting tired of all the bullshit, and sometimes guessing wrong and killing the wrong dude, but not rending his heart about it and dashing himself from a cliff--getting up again the next day and slaying another pile of Turks, because for mouths to be fed peace has to reign. And at the end of it all, in a bathetic move too daring not only for the Bible or Homer but even for tertiary/quaternary epics like The Silmarillion or whatever, he dies on the back of his warhorse Rakush, by falling in--a pit of spikes. Oh indignity, but then, there is even more glory in the legend that doesn't rely on the crutch of a glorious death.


And there is so much human folly--I forget which shah it is now that decides he can fly to the moon by making a chair with four spears and sticking four slabs of meat on the ends of the spears and letting four giant eagles sink their claws into that and take wing, but the silliness of it and the (immediate) end he meets are like a michievously mocking take on Icarus, form the perspective of a guy who evidently thinks that if the politicians and bureaucrats had been able to lay aside their doofy schemes and leave the nation in the hands of Ormuzd and its warriors, then they wouldn't be in the prostrate position they were at the time of writing. And the superlatives heaped on Iran's warriors ("our boys") and the bloodlust ("support the troops") are a bit much, but you can understand where it comes from.


I think if I had been able to read the historical sections there would have been a lot more to say on this theme, but since Zimmern didn't feel obligated to include them, I can lay this aside with blood astir and leave it with a 4.5, knowing that it's unfair, as a sort of covenant to come back to it one day and read the whole thing, in verse, and say more. show less

Loved it. It's got so many more women than I expected and they get to do stuff and not be anonymous.

I have not read other translations so I don't know how this compares, but here Davis has put The Shahnameh into ordinary modern English. It's accessible and engaging and now I know why a thousand year old (secular) book is regularly quoted and referenced by so many people.

I can say that the stories that I read from this book tell about many subjects: love, honor, adventure, cunning, fealty, loyalty, revenge, grief to name a few. But I would consider pride to be the greatest concern of these stories from the Shahnameh. Especially, how pride leads only to tragedy.

So many characters could have escaped their dismal fate, if only they had put away their pride. Most of them being Rostam himself. Rostam who is the greatest warrior of Iran, the maker of Kings, imbued show more with supernatural strength and versed in the magical arts, was brought down due to his own pride and with him the rest of his household.

Let people beware pride. It is a blind rabid lion, tearing apart its own kin in its frenzy. show less