Ghazal parodies of Bus’hak Shirazi as one of the forms of Persian humorous poetry (hazl) at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries

Abstract

This article is devoted to the work of Bus’hak Shirazi, whose poetic heritage had not been studied in detail before, but was only mentioned in review works on the history of medieval Persian literature. A collection of his works, published in 1302 AH (1924), was kept in the library of the University of Toronto and became available to the author of this work in the form of a PDF copy. In modern Iran, the book has not been reprinted and is a bibliographic rarity. Bus’hak created his works within the framework of the poetic practice of “nazira-navisi” (response writing) to the reference works of his predecessors and the well-known works of his contemporaries. “Answers” were composed according to special rules, and the tradition as a whole, starting from the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries, played an important role in the literary life of medieval Iran. Within the framework of this work, several ghazals of Bus’hak Shirazi were studied, which are part of his “Divan of Foods”, and a comparative analysis was carried out with the works he parodied (sample ghazals of Saadi and Hafiz) in order to identify the peculiarities of Bus’hak’s parody style. The study demonstrates that Bus’hak’s parody work is another component of the mosaic of the literary life of that time, without which its picture cannot be considered complete.