The Seven Beauties

The Seven Beauties 

by Nizami Ganjavi
Bahram sees the portraits of the seven beauties. Behzad School, 1479. Nizami Museum of Azerbaijani Literature, Baku
Original title	Haft Peykar
Language	Persian

The Seven Beauties (Persian: هفت پیکر‎‎) also known as Bahramnameh (بهرام‌نامه, The Book of Bahram) is a famous romantic epic by Persian poet from city of Ganja Nizami Ganjavi written in 1197. This poem is a part of the Nizami's Khamsa. The original title Haft Peykar can be translated literally as “seven portraits” with the figurative meaning of “seven beauties.” Both translations are meaningful and the poet doubtless exploited intentionally the ambiguity of the words. The poem was dedicated to the Ahmadili ruler of Maragha, Ala-al-Din Korpe Arslan bin Aq-Sonqor. The poem is a masterpiece of erotic literature, but it is also a profoundly moralistic work.

A critical edition of the Seven Beauties was produced by Helmut Ritter and Jan Rypka (Prague, printed Istanbul, 1934) on the basis of fifteen manuscripts of Khamsa and the Bombay lithograph. More recently, the poem was re-edited by the Azerbaijani scholar T. A. Maharramov (Moscow, 1987). There is also uncritical edition by Wahid Dastgerdi (Tehran, 1936 and reprints) and an edition by Barat Zanjani (Tehran, 1994).

The poetry German translation of a passage from the poem named Bahram Gur and Russian princess made by orientalist Franz Erdmann was published in 1832 in Kazan.

There are three complete translations in western European languages. First, in 1924 Charles Edward Wilson translated the poem to English in 2 volumes with extensive notes). Second, Alessandro Bausani in 1967 translated it to Italian. And finally an English version by Julie Scott Meisami published in 1995. The Russian prose version by Rustam Aliyev, which was published Baku in 1983, and by Vladimir Derzhavin published in 1959 in Moscow. The partial translations was also made by Rudolf Gelpke in German prose (Zurich, 1959). It should be noted that there is an English metatranslation by E. Mattin and G. Hill published in 1976 in Oxford.