Qatran Tabrizi

Qatran Tabrizi

Abū-Mansūr Qatrān-i Tabrīzī (Persian: قطران تبريزى‎, born 1009, died 1072) was a royal Persian poet.

He was born in Sahar near Arrah, bihar Tabriz and was the most famous panegyrist of his time in Iran. His full name according to an old manuscript handwritten by the famous poet Anvari Abivardi (529 Hijra about 60 years after the death of Qatran) is Abu Mansur Qatran al-Jili al-Azerbaijani. The Al-Jili would identify his ancestry from Gilan while he himself was born in Shadiabad. He also identifies himself as part of the Dehqan class.

According to Jan Rypka: “He sings the praise of some thirty patrons. His work has aroused the interest of historians, for in many cases Qatran has perpetuated the names of members of regional dynasties in Azerbayjan and the Caucasus region that would have otherwise fallen in oblivion. His best qasidas were written in his last period, where he expressed gratitude to the prince of Ganja, the Shaddadid Fadlun, for the numerous gifts that were still recollected by the famous Jami (d. 1492). Qatran’s poetry follows in the wake of the poets of Khurasan and makes an unforced use of the rhetorical embellishment. He is even one of the first after Farrukhi to try his hand at the Qasida-i Masnu’i, ‘particular artificial qasida’".

According to Jan Rypka: When Nasir Khusraw visited Azarbaijan in 1046, Qatran requested to him to explain some of the most difficult passages in the divan of Munjik and Daqiqi that were written in “Persian”, i.e. according Chr. Shaffer, in the Persian of Khurasan, a language that he, as a Western Persian, might not be expected to understand, in contrast to the guest from Khurasan.

Kasravi is of the opinion that the text of the Safar-nama has here been corrupted because Qatran, though he spoke Iranian Adhari (the old Iranic language of Azerbaijan before the advent of Oghuz Turks) was fully acquainted with (Khurasani dialect of) Persian, as his Divan shows. De Blois mentions that: The point of the anectode is clear that the diwans of these poets contained Eastern Iranian (i.e. Sogdian etc.) words that were incomprehensible to a Western Persian like Qatran, who consequently took advantage of an educated visitor from the East, Nasir, to ascertain their meaning .

Qatran Tabrizi has an interesting couplet mentioning this fact:

Qatran’s qasidehs on the earthquake of Tabriz in 1042 CE has been much praised and is regarded as a true masterpiece (Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature. Reidel Publishing Company. 1968).

In his Persian divan of 3000 to 10000 couplets, Qatran praises some 30 patrons.

He is not to be confused with another Persian author: Qatran of Tirmidh, who wrote the Qaus-nama one hundred years later.