Beholding Beauty

Reviewed by: Muhammad Isa Waley – Former Curator for Persian and Turkish, British Library

Published by: Leiden/Boston: Brill, 202, xx+697pp. ISBN: 978-9004435896 (hardback), 978-9004435902 (e-book).

Classical Persian poetry is a world in itself, and for the Western world, the bulk of its riches remain altogether unknown. Even the works of Musharrif al-Dīn ibn Muṣliḥ Saʿdī of Shiraz, a prodigious and prolific author as renowned as any the Persianate world has produced, are little known elsewhere apart from his two masterpieces, the Būstān (Orchard) in verse and the Gulistān (Rose Garden) in prose interspersed with verses. One of the best works on Persian literature is Storia della letteratura persiana (Milan, 1960), by the late Antonino Pagliaro (pre-Islamic) and Alessandro Bausani (Islamic); regrettably, it is still inaccessible to anybody who does not read Italian. Now, in his Beholding Desire, the Italian scholar Domenico Ingenito has done the world of Persian scholarship an immense service not only by producing a major study of Saʿdī’s lyrical poetics, but also by doing so in fluent and stylish English – not only in his text but also in his accurate translations of many lines of verse.

Ingenito’s monograph comprises an introduction; ten chapters, arranged in three parts; an appendix (pp. 525-641) containing, in an elegant naskhī font, all the Persian texts cited; an extensive bibliography (642-687); and an excellent index (688-697). The three parts are entitled as follows: (1) Uncovering the Skin of the Ghazal; (2) Through the Mirror of your Glances: the Secret Aesthetics of Saʿdi’s Lyric Subject; and (3) The Lyrical Ritual (Samāʿ) as the Performative Space of Sacred Eroticism. These titles are cited partly as being to some extent indicative of the general approach and intent behind the study. That does not mean that the scope of the book is confined to the mystical or pseudo-mystical eroticism in Saʿdī’s poetry. Nevertheless, readers of this Review are warned that, as the book’s subtitle hints, eroticism – and to a large extent homoeroticism – is one of the chief themes of Ingenito’s book. The author’s aim, in his own words, is “to offer meaningful pathways through the open landscape of Saʿdī’s balanced contemplation of the beauty of the world, one which stands at the intersection of imagination and the psycho-physiological dimensions of spirituality and sexual desire.”