Rudaki

Who is Rudaki?

Abu Abdullah Ja'far ibn Muhammad Rudaki was born around 858 in the village of Panjrud (Banoj), in the Rudak district between Samarqand and Bukhara, in what is today Tajikistan. He is honored in Iran as the founder of New Persian poetry and in Tajikistan as the father of Tajik literature, since Tajik is a variety of the same New Persian literary language he helped establish. Rudaki served as a court poet during the Samanid era, a Persian-speaking dynasty centered on Bukhara that sponsored a flowering of poetry, music, and scholarship after centuries of Arabic literary dominance. Renowned in his own time for his fine singing voice and skill on the chang (harp) as well as his verse, he is said to have composed well over 100,000 lines of poetry, though only a small fraction survives today, most notably fragments of his versified retelling of the fable collection Kalila wa Dimna. Traditional accounts describe him as blind, either from birth or later in life, though this detail is debated by modern scholars. He was long supported by the Samanid vizier Abu'l-Fadl al-Bal'ami, whose patronage helped New Persian poetry flourish at the Bukhara court. Rudaki's surviving poems, prized for their clarity and lyric grace, mark the beginning of the continuous written tradition that both Persian and Tajik literature trace themselves back to.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Rudaki" entry · Wikipedia, "Rudaki" · François de Blois, Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey