Rudaki wrote a hundred eighty thousand verses—few remain
Rudaki (about 858–940/41), court poet of the Samanids, is hailed as New Persian poetry’s founder and Tajik literature’s father. Sources credit him with more than 180,000 verses; almost all vanished, leaving fragments, a near-hundred-line qasida, and scraps of his Kalīla wa-Dimna.
Born near Samarqand—Tajik scholar Sadriddin Ayni fixed the village as Panjrud—he sang, played the chang, and reportedly knew the Qur’an by eight. Biographical threads tie him to amir Nasr II (r. 914–943) and especially vizier Abu’l-Fadl al-Bal’ami (died 940), who ranked him above Persian and Arab peers; Sassan Tabatabai argues he already comforted Ahmad Samani after Ismail Samani’s 907 death. At court a poet was not mere entertainer: Sasanian lore cast poets as props of rule, expected to praise, advise, and moralize. When Bal’ami fell in 937, Rudaki lost favour, left court, and died blind and destitute in his hometown—Awfi claimed congenital blindness, though modern readers doubt it given his vivid nature imagery.
Asadi Tusi’s dictionary preserves many stray lines; the anonymous Tarikh-i Sistan quotes a qasida of nearly one hundred verses to Sistan governor Abu Ja’far Ahmad ibn Muhammad (923–963), calling him Sasanian-blooded “pride of Iran”—a claim of cultural continuity—and earning ten thousand dinars. Nasr II had Bal’ami translate Kalīla wa-Dimna from Arabic, then readers recited so the blind poet could versify; François de Blois counts about fifty surviving lines, Michel Epinette about one hundred twenty. Other verses belong to the Sindbad cycle. Tone stays largely secular, leaning on Zoroastrian andarz ethics more than mosque sermonizing despite Isma’ili sympathies.
François de Blois calls him the most celebrated Persian poet before Ferdowsi. After Mongol-era taste shifted to ornate styles he faded, then revived with plain Khorasani fashion in the nineteenth century. Soviet and Iranian scholars marked his 1100th birth anniversary in 1958; Gerasimov reconstructed a face from remains at the reputed Panjrud grave. A Radio Tehran setting of “Bu-ye ju-ye Mulian” after the 1953 coup even pressed his return-to-Bukhara lines into Shahist celebration—proof that a tenth-century voice still bends to modern politics.
Source: Rudaki
