Bo Utas Livres

This collection showcases the scholarly work of professor emeritus Bo Utas on Middle and New Persian literature, presented on his 70th birthday, with an introduction and index by Carina Jahani. Comprising 19 articles—15 in English and 4 in French—it features a significant piece titled “Genres in Persian literature 900 to 1900,” which explores the definitions of literature, the evolution of oral and written forms, and genre development. Another article examines the fusion of Arabic and Middle Iranian elements in New Persian prosody. Several contributions focus on Sufism's influence on Classical Persian poetry, notably the works of Abdullah Ansari and Ahmad Ghazali's Savanih. The manuscript tradition and themes of the “journey to the other world” in Misbah ul-arvah are analyzed, challenging its traditional attribution to Auhad al-Din Kirmani. Additional topics include Greco-Persian literary interactions in the romantic epos Vamiq u ‘Azra, concepts of war and peace in Iran, non-religious Book Pahlavi literature, the aesthetic aspects of New Persian, and Modern Persian prose from the early 20th century. Theoretical discussions on stemmatic methods in manuscript editing and computerized stemma construction are also included. The four entries in the “Dictionnaire universel des littératures” cover Farid al-Din Attar, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Sana’i-yi Ghaznavi, and Sufism.

Focusing on the vocabulary analysis of the Sufi Mathnavi poem from the 14th century, this book provides a comprehensive method for describing both total and special vocabularies. It includes a complete concordance with inflectional forms, along with a frequency word-list specific to this New Persian text. Additionally, the work features a statistical survey detailing the general vocabulary, Arabic loan-words, and terminology related to Sufi religion, making it a valuable resource for linguists and scholars of Persian literature.

In a long series of essays, written during almost half a century, Bo Utas analyses the development of West Iranian languages, particularly Old, Middle, and New Persian, from various perspectives. The focus is placed on the transition from Middle to New Persian and the final essays (hitherto partly unpublished) especially elucidate this process in the light of an interaction between oral and written language.