TEHRAN, Jan. 22 (Mehr News Agency) -- Iran and Tajikistan will jointly celebrate the 1150th birth anniversary of the Persian poet Abu Abdullah Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki (858-941) during a series of programs in 2008.

The collaboration will be based on an agreement recently signed between the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tajikistan (ASRT) and Iran's Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO).

"According to the agreement, a series of comprehensive programs including seminars and literary festivals have been arranged to be held in several Iranian cities and in the city of Dushanbe," CHTHO's Research Center Director Taha Hashemi said on Tuesday.

The line up will begin in September.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization also plans to commemorate Rudaki through holding projects with the support of Afghanistan, Iran, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

Rudaki was the first great literary genius of the modern Persian language who composed poems in "New Persian" comprising the Perso-Arabic alphabet script. Rudaki is considered a founder of Persian classical literature.

He was born in Rudak (Panjrud), a village in Khorasan, Persia. It is now located in Panjakent, Tajikistan. Most of his biographers assert that he was totally blind, but the accurate knowledge of colors shown in his poems makes this very doubtful. He was court poet to the Samanid ruler Nasr II (914-943) in Bukhara, but he eventually fell out of favor and ended his life in poverty.

Of the 1,300,000 verses attributed to him, there remain only 52 elegies, ghazals and quatrains.
 

... Payvand News - 01/22/08 ...