Klasyczny epos perski — tradycja i świadomość autorska
Classical Persian Epics — Conscious Authorship and Tradition

Summary/Abstract: The article explores the concept of authorship in early (10th−11th century A.D.) classical Persian epic poetry, it uses examples of three representative works: Ferdousi’s Šāhnāme, Asadi’s and Gorgāni’s Vis-o Rāmin. As the analyzed passages show, all three authors, in spite of their works being based on the existing, traditional sources, have a strong sense of their individual authorship. They understand their role as saving pre-Islamic Iranian patrimony from oblivion, as a modernization of literary language and style and finally, as a search for their personal fame. An attempt at discovering inner senses of the inherited literary material, beyond its external meaning, seems to be another aspect of their authorial creativity.

• Details
• Contents