Poet, translator, literary researcher and freelance journalist Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi has released a book on cats, titled “The Four-Legged Qalandars: Footprints of Cats in Poetry, Stories, Paintings, Politics, Religion, Medicine, Cinema and Science.”
It is published by the Tehran-based publishing house Nashrenow, ISNA reported on its Persian website.
In Iran, Central Asia, India and Pakistan, qalandar is an honorific title for wandering ascetic Sufi dervishes or individuals in an advanced spiritual stage and free from mundane cares.
“As a translator specializing in poetry and biography of poets, I never thought one day I’d be writing about cats,” Hassanzadeh said. “But I came across an old manuscript that encouraged me to study cats and their influence on renowned figures in art and literature,” she added.
The motivating passage in the manuscript is about a celebrated Arab grammarian of the 11th century Egypt Abul-Hassan Taher Ibn Ahmad Ibn Babshad of Persian origin and born in the city of Basra, today’s Iraq.
Ibn Babshad, who was a wealthy businessman, was having a meal on the roof of a mosque with friends and acquaintances, when a cat approaches. He gives the cat a morsel which the animal holds in its teeth and moves away hurriedly.
On the following day the cat returns and does what it did on the first day. Ibn Babshad and his friends become curious about what the cat does with the food. They follow it and end up in the ruins of some abandoned building.
There they see the cat delivers the food to a lonely resident of the ruins which is another cat, but blind. Ibn Babshad is extremely impressed by what he sees.
A cat that shares its food with a handicapped peer moves him so deeply that he donates all his possessions to charity, and becomes a hermit.
Ibn Babshad was born into a family of pearl traders who migrated to Cairo. In his youth he came to Baghdad to learn science and back to Egypt.
Hassanzadeh published her first poetry book when she was 22. Her poems appear in the anthologies “Letters to the World”, “Contemporary Women Poets of Iran” and “Anthology of Best Women Poets.”
She is the author of “Eternal Voices: Interviews with Poets East and West” and “The Last Night with Sylvia Plath: Essays on Poetry.”
She has translated Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson, Women Poets of the World, Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, The Beauty of Friendship: Selected Poems by Khalil Gibran, and Love Poetry of the World. One of her recent translations is the” Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry”.
