This class of verse, ephemeral as our own topical and The Taṣníf or popular topical ballad. comic songs, leaves far fewer and slighter traces in literature than its actual importance would lead us to expect. A taṣníf about the Ṣáḥib-Díwán beginning:

<text in Arabic script omitted>

(“He made [the garden of] Dil-gushá under ‘the Slide’;
He made Dil-gushá with the sticks and the stocks:
Alas for Dil-gushá! Alas for Dil-gushá!”)

was the most popular ballad when I was in Shíráz in the spring of 1888, * but it is probably now as little remembered as an almost contemporary ribald English satire on a certain well-known Member of Parliament who “upset the milk in bringing it home from Chelsea.” I have no doubt that the Probable an­tiquity of the taṣníf. taṣníf or ballad sung by the troubadour and wandering minstrel existed in Persia from very early—perhaps even from pre-Islamic—times. Bárbad and Sakísá may have sung such topical songs to Khusraw Parwíz the Sásánian thirteen hundred years ago, as Rúdagí almost certainly did four centuries later to the Sámánid prince who was his patron; * and a fragment of a typical taṣníf (called by the curious name of ḥarára) sung in Iṣfahán on the occasion of the capture and execution of the heretic and assassin Aḥmad ibn 'Aṭṭásh, * is recorded in the history of the Saljúqs composed by Abú Bakr Najmu'd-Dín Muḥammad ar-Ráwandí early in the thirteenth century of our era, under the title of Ráḥatu'ṣ-Ṣudúr wa Áyatu's-Surúr .

The authorship of these taṣnífs is seldom known, and they are hardly ever committed to writing, though my friend the late George Grahame, when Consul at Shíráz in 1905, very kindly caused a small selection of two score of those most popular at the time in that city and in Ṭihrán, Iṣfahán, Rasht, Tabríz, and elsewhere, to be written down for me; and a selection, adapted as far as possible to the An English rendering of twelve taṣnífs. piano, was published in or about 1904 under the title of Twelve Persian Folk-Songs collected and arranged for voice and pianoforte by Blair Fairchild: English version of the words by Alma Strettell (Novello & Co., London and New York). In this excellent little book the songs are well set, well rendered into English, and intelligibly if not ideally transliterated, and the following sentence from the short prefatory note shows how sensible the compiler was to the indescribable charm of Persian minstrelsy:

“But one needs the setting of the Orient to realize what these songs are: the warm, clear Persian night; the lamps and lanterns shining on the glowing colours of native dresses; the surrounding darkness where dusky shadows hover; the strange sounds of music; voices, sometimes so beautiful, rising and falling in persistent monotony—all this is untranslatable, but the impression left on one is so vivid and so full of enchantment that one longs to preserve it in some form.”

Most of these taṣnífs are very simple love-songs, in which lines from Ḥáfiẓ and other popular poets are sometimes incorporated; the topical, polemical and satirical class is much smaller, though in some ways more interesting as well as more ephemeral. A parody or parallel of such a taṣníf may be produced to accord with fresh circumstances, as happens nearer home with the Irish and the Welsh mochyn du. An instance of such an adaptation is afforded by the second poem cited in my Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (pp. 174-9). Of course in the taṣníf the air is at least as important as the words, and a proper study of them would require a knowledge of Persian music, which, unhappily, I do not possess. Indeed I should think that few Europeans had mastered it both in practice and theory, or could even enumerate the twelve maqáms and their twenty-four derivatives (shu'ba).*

Of this I have treated so fully in my Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (Cambridge, 1914) that it is unnecessary to enlarge further on it in this place. It is a product of the Revolution of 1905 and the succeeding years, and in my opinion shows real originality, merit and humour. Should space permit, I may perhaps add a few further specimens when I come to speak of the modern journalism with which it is so closely associated, and which, indeed, alone rendered it possible. The most notable authors of this class of verse include 'Árif and Dakhaw of Qazwín, Ashraf of Gílán, and Bahár of Mashhad, all of whom, so far as I know, are still living, while the two first named are comparatively young men. Portraits of all of them, and some particulars of their lives, will be found in my book above mentioned.