25 Facts About Rudaki

Rudaki was a poet, singer and musician who is regarded as the first major poet to write in New Persian.

Rudaki's success was largely due to the support of his primary patron, the vizier Abu'l-Fadl al-Bal'ami, who played an important role in the blooming of New Persian literature in the 10th-century.

Rudaki thereafter lived his last years in poverty, dying blind and alone in his hometown.

In Iran, Rudaki is acknowledged as the "founder of New Persian poetry" and in Tajikistan as the "father of Tajik literature".

Rudaki lived during the era of the Samanid Empire, under which New Persian literature began to develop and flourish.

The historian Awfi, even says that Rudaki was born blind, but this has been questioned by some modern scholars, due to the expressive picture of nature given by Rudaki in his writings.

Besides being a poet, Rudaki was a singer and musician.

Rudaki was instructed on how to play the chang by a prominent musician named Abu'l-Abak Bakhtiar.

However, according to literary scholar Sassan Tabatabai, Rudaki had apparently already joined the Samanid court under Nasr II's father and predecessor Ahmad Samani.

Rudaki's success was largely due to the support of his primary patron, Bal'ami.

Rudaki was a close friend to his student Shahid Balkhi, a leading poet and scholar of the Samanid realm.

Rudaki's career started to decline following the downfall of Bal'ami in 937.

Rudaki soon fell out of favour with the amir and was dismissed from the court.

Rudaki thereafter lived his last years in poverty, dying blind and alone in his hometown in 940 or 941.

Rudaki's best known work is his versification of the Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of Indian fables.

Nasr II had ordered Bal'ami to translate the book from Arabic to Persian, and then appointed "interpreters" to read it out loud, so that Rudaki, who was blind, could versify it.

Rudaki's surviving poetry is generally easy for literate native Persian readers to understand despite variations in terminology, word forms, and phrase and sentence patterns.

Rudaki was more prone to evoke ancient Iranian and Zoroastrian notions instead of Muslim ones.

Rudaki is considered to have been the first major poet to write in New Persian.

In Iran, Rudaki is acknowledged as the "founder of New Persian poetry" and in Tajikistan as the "father of Tajik literature", both claims which according to the Iranologist Richard Foltz are not contradictory.

Rudaki's life is depicted in the 1957 film of A Poet's Fate, written by Satim Ulugzade.

The 1100th anniversary of Rudaki's birth was commemorated by Iran and the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic in 1958, who together held a conference which was joined by several eminent Iranian and Tajik academics.

The Soviet archaeologist and anthropologist Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov dug out and analyzed Rudaki's remains, which he used to recreate the latters face on a sculpture.

However, he had not been forgotten, as demonstrated by the attribution of his name to the Pseudo-Diwan-i Rudaki, called "one of the notorious literary frauds" by de Blois.

Scholars such as the 17th-century Hasan ibn Luft Allah al-Razi and 19th-century Reza-Qoli Khan Hedayat both easily recognized that the Pseudo-Diwan-i Rudaki was mostly composed of poems by Qatran Tabrizi, while the rest were already-known poems of Rudaki that had been mentioned in tadhkiras.