Quatrain 15
Tuesday Print Article ای پیر خردمند پگه تر بر خیز
وان کودک خاک بیز را بنگر تیز
پندش ده و گو که نرم نرمک می بیز
مغز سر کیقباد و چشم پرویز
source, Dashti 38, p. 251
ay pir-e kheradmand pagah tar bar khiz
vaan kudak-e khaak biz raa bengar tiz
pandash deh o gu ke narm narmak mi biz
maghz-e sar-e kayqobaad o cheshm-e parviz
O wise old man, rise up earlier in the morning and carefully watch that child who sifts the dust. Counsel him and say: "Gently, gently sift the brain of Kai-qūbad's head and the eyes of Parvīz!"
Kasra, quatrain 112
Behold the boy who sweeps the dust, and please,
Counsel him thus: "O gentle, gentle be
With head of Qobad and eyes of Parveez."
(see Saidi's notes, p. 248-9, on the ancient hero, Key-Qobad, founder of the Keyanian dynasty -- source: Ferdawsi's Shahname -- and Khosrow Parviz (Khosrow The Conqueror)/Khosrow II, Sasanian dynast who ruled from 590-628 A.D.)
Translation & Discussion of the quatrain:
1. O wise old man, get up early at dawn ... see below on pagah tar 2. The boy who sweeps the ground, keep a sharp eye on him...khaak biz, lit. ground/earth sweeper. I wonder if khaak biz is considered a compound by Persian grammarians; or is it simply noun+verbal suffix? In English we might think of it as a compound like 'streetsweeper'; biz is the present stem of the verb acting as an agent here and we can translate khaak biz as a compound whether 'officially' it is or not. These are just some of my musings, sitevisitor (and that's a compound). I realize that Persian is rich in compounds yet I have not seen any classification of Persian compounds by classical indo-iranian standards, a question I brought up in weblog Quatrain 5; for example, 'streetsweeper' is a tatpurusha compound, where the first element has object relationship to the second, that is 'sweeper of the street.' 3. Advise him and say, "gently, gently sweep...ke will introduce a direct quote. mi biz, the imperative which usually takes no prefix or be-, sometimes as here, mi (only for the sake of the meter?).
4. (continuing above in '3') the brain of Kayqobad and the eye(s) of Parviz" maghz-e sar 'the marrow of the head'
(English 'marrow' and Persian maghz have a common ancestor in indo-iranian *mozgho- ). Kayqobad did not for what we know suffer at the end of his life but Khosrow, having once amassed great wealth, was later victim of a plot, thrown into prison and died several days later (for Khosrow/Chosroes, see Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chapter 46, passim). For the speaker of this quatrain, here was a great hero, Kayqobad, and the last powerful Sasanian monarch, Khosrow, now both reduced from power and life to death and dust.
All about پگه تر pagah > dawn, early morning + tar > comparative suffix:
pagah tar : curiosity first made me wonder about the prefix pa- and then tar, the latter a strange use of the comparative to my thinking…pa comes from Avestan (and old Iranian), upā, cognate with Greek hypo and Latin (s)ub, and prefixed to gah ( گه/گاه ) it carries the meanings of ‘toward’/ ‘about’/’at’/‘at the time of’ – so pagah > ‘in time’/ ‘at an early time’/ ‘betimes’; but why tar? To get up earlier? Earlier than the boy who sweeps? I remembered reading in Szemerényi’s Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics (the 1996 OUP translation of Szemerényi’s revised 1990 Einführung in die vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft), that astar (mule) in new Persian didn’t mean according to him ‘horsier’ (almost a horse) but differentiated the mule from the ass, that is, ‘of the horse kind.’ I went to the source, p. 199, and found this discussion of the –tero suffix and read further, as he quotes Émile Beneviste, that the suffix –tero/here tar: qualifie surtout des notions de caractère spatial (positions dans l’espace et dans le temps). So I believe that pagah tar reflects this distinction and means not 'earlier' but ‘early not late in the dawning.' I have not yet looked into classical or archaic usage of Persian for examples of differentiation with –tar; if historical linguists visit the site, I'd like their opinion.
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