Shahnameh, translated by Ahmad Sadri

Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings

by Ferdowsi

translated by Ahmad Sadri

Liveright 2025

The Dick Davis translation of Ferdowsi's great Persian Book of Kings, the Shahnameh, which appeared in 2006 and has since been adopted by the Penguin Classics line, was a great heavy brick of a thing when it was first published by Viking, nearly 1000 pages. The new English-language translation from Liveright is by Ahmad Sadri, and it doesn't even reach 600 pages, it's just a normal hefty book in the hand, not an imposing tome like its predecessor. “The current version includes the entire work,” Sadri writes, adding “the story is told with relentless economy. Only persons with speaking lines have been named, and once a character is introduced, we follow them, adding as much psychological depth and human interest as could be squeezed from the text.” Ferdowsi's 50,000 couplets are here rendered in prose chapters broken up into plenty of smaller segments, which at once compresses the narrative and hurries it forward.

In his Translator's Note, Sadri naturally compares his epic to some that are likely to be more familiar to Western readers, and at every point, his affection for the work peeks through:

Unlike Homer, Ferdowsi does not claim to be possessed by a muse. The poet's somber voice brackets every story with philosophical commentary, and it occasionally breaks through the narrative like a Greek chorus to regale the audience with the story's moral. Nor is Ferdowsi above using such occasions to complain of his poverty and old age, mourn the death of his young son, or express his fear of death before finishing the poem – which he completed after thirty-three years (from 977 to 1010 CE). It is as if the poet was deliberately humanizing himself to counter the larger-than-life image we all have made for him.

The point is well taken (although to be fair, Homer never claims to be possessed by the Muse), and Ferdowsi is very adept at capturing all these little tonal shifts and shadings, although the main tone he adopts throughout is the slightly stiff, slightly archaic register of Edwardian myth-retellings, mixed with a bit of Rumi, and all of it charged with Ferdowsi's own inimitable authorial presence. So readers get plenty of passages where “virtuous Zarmehr forgave his father's killer in order to preserve the peace,” or “Lohrausp ascended the throne and remained loyal to the legacy of the saintly king he had replaced.” Or the book's many, many moments of near-foolhardy valor:

Kay-Kavous was enjoying his new-found peace in the royal palace when Afrasiab, the king of Touran, sent a hundred thousand soldiers across the Oxus River to occupy the adjacent provinces of Iran. Kay-Kavous called his knights to council and announced that he would lead the charge against the enemy. The royal advisors did not endorse this plan. Kay-Kavous had twice allowed himself to be taken captive, endangering the country's safety. The king asked his knights, “Well, which brave knight will rise to this worthy challenge?”

Purists will likely howl at the squishing of Ferdowsi's verse into paragraphs of prose, and they may also bemoan the complete absence of notes or critical glosses (there are some genealogies and one antique map), but these things are aligned with the clear purpose of this new edition, which is to lower just in general the intimidation factor and lure in actual readers. And surely this is a goal worth sacrificing great masses of masnaviyat?

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News