Born on 17 February 1903, Sadegh Hedayat was an Iranian writer, translator, satirist, and poet. Best known for his novel The Blind Owl, he was one of the earliest Iranian writers to adopt literary modernism in their career.
Hedayat was born to a northern Iranian aristocratic family in Tehran. His great-grandfather Reza-Qoli Khan Hedayat Tabarestani was a well-respected writer and worked in the government, as did other relatives.
Hedayat was educated at Collège Saint-Louis (French catholic school) and Dar ol-Fonoon (1914–1916). In 1925, he was among a select few students who traveled to Europe to continue their studies. There, he initially went on to study engineering in Belgium, which he abandoned after a year to study architecture in France.
There he gave up architecture in turn to pursue dentistry. In this period he became acquainted with Thérèse, a Parisian with whom he had a love affair[citation needed].
In 1927 Hedayat attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Marne but was rescued by a fishing boat. After four years in France, he finally surrendered his scholarship and returned home in the summer of 1930 without receiving a degree. In Iran, he held various jobs for short periods.
Career
Hedayat subsequently devoted his whole life to studying Western literature and to learning and investigating Iranian history and folklore. The works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, and Guy de Maupassant intrigued him the most.
During his short literary life span, Hedayat published a substantial number of short stories and novelettes, two historical dramas, a play, a travelogue, and a collection of satirical parodies and sketches. His writings also include numerous literary criticisms, studies in Persian folklore, and many translations from Middle Persian and French. He is credited with having brought the Persian language and literature into the mainstream of international contemporary writing.
Hedayat traveled and stayed in India from 1936 until late 1937 (the mansion he stayed in during his visit to Bombay was identified in 2014). Hedayet spent time in Bombay learning the Pahlavi (Middle Persian) language from the Parsi Zoroastrian community of India.
He was taught by Bahramgore Tahmuras Anklesaria (also spelled as Behramgore Tehmurasp Anklesaria), a renowned scholar and philologist. Nadeem Akhtar's Hedayat in India provides details of Hedayat's sojourn in India.
In Bombay Hedayat completed and published his most enduring work, The Blind Owl, which he had started writing, in Paris, as early as 1930. The book was praised by Henry Miller, André Breton, and others, and Kamran Sharareh has called it "one of the most important literary works in the Persian language".
Sadegh Hedayat and Khayyam songs
Khayyam’s songs have been compiled by Sadegh Hedayat and selected by Jalal, a typist. Ghias-ud-Din Abolfath Omar Ibn Ibrahim Khayyam Neyshabouri, born on 28 May 427 in Neyshabur and died on 12 Azar 510 in the same city, was one of the great men of Iranian knowledge whose discoveries and services in mathematics and astronomy have preserved his worldwide fame to this day.
He was also a sage, omniscient and philosopher, yet his current fame, especially among Persian speakers, owes much to his quatrain.Khayyam was also a professor of literary, religious, and historical sciences, and his role in solving third-order equations and his studies of the fifth Euclidean principle have made him one of the leading mathematicians in the history of science.
Sadegh Hedayat is the first person in Iran to do research to identify Khayyam’s original quatrains.
He has written two works describing Khayyam’s literary position: the article “Introduction to Khayyam’s Quartets” which was published in 1303 AH and the book “Khayyam Songs” was published for the first time in 1313 AH.
Hedayat’s research has led many greats to write commentaries, critiques, and commentaries, and various works have been created on the subject.
In order to clarify the quatrains as much as possible, Sadegh Hedayat has highlighted songs with a star that are skeptical and have been attributed to Khayyam with caution: Again, the sky is so different, Kazadeh, it is easy to reach your heart.
In the introduction of the book, it is stated that few books in the world, such as Khayyam’s poems and songs, have been both admired and hated! This is because Khayyam bravely composed his quatrains with open-mindedness and open-mindedness at a time when intellectuals were slandered by atheism.
Sadegh Hedayat, after examining Khayyam’s poems, came to the conclusion that a number of Khayyam’s quatrains had been mistakenly attributed to him. He considers the poor quality of some of the quatrains as a good reason why these poems are not for Khayyam.
Therefore, he has tried to obtain accurate copies of Khayyam’s poems by examining the various manuscripts and putting them together, and to remove the quatrains that do not belong to him. The result of his great work is the book of Khayyam songs that is now in front of you.
MNA/
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