Frequently used to close or mark the completion of a short lyric poem, the takhallus or penname also serves to point to the poet’s artistic talent, and to the poet’s role as a producer of public texts for recitation and/or performance. Since at least the fourteenth century CE, female poets writing in Persian (such as Jahan-Malik Khatun [d. after 1389]) have signed their compositions with their takhallus. Many pre-modern and early modern women poets of the Iranian world employed pennames that were unmistakably feminine, not only in terms of their semantic meaning, but also in terms of grammatical form. This paper will focus on three such poets active contemporaneously in Iran in the first half of the nineteenth century: Valiya Qajar, Mastura Kurdistani, and Tahira Qurrat al-‘Ayn. Through a detailed and comparative reading of their poetry it will be demonstrated that, not only did these Iranian poets (unlike a good number of their contemporaries or near contemporaries in Europe) refrain from hiding their gender, but rather they stressed it both through the ways in which they utilised their takhallus, and through bold celebrations of femininity such as those expressed in the fakhriya (short self-praise poem). The fact that these key women poets of the early Qajar period resisted the temptation to engage in literary transvestitism by hiding their gender in unisex pennames challenges the notion that it was not until the twentieth century that Iranian women demanded their gender be acknowledged by those who read their works.

Why do Persian poets mention their pen name at the end of a ghazal as if they were adopting someone (or something) else’s voice? Is this a mere rhetorical artifice of authorial embellishment, or does it perhaps suggest some deeper textual architecture yet to be fully understood by our modern perspective? Apart from the analytical surveys elaborated by Meisami and other scholars, our understanding of takhallus – the pen name with which classical Persian poets used to sign the final part of their lyrical texts – still lacks a thorough theoretical approach able to penetrate its deeper socio-aesthetic mechanisms. In fact, the simplistic bias that sets an identity between the self of the pre-modern author, his takhallus and the so called “lyrical I” belongs to a static perspective unable to explain the historical development of this signature and the performative context in which it creates an unique interaction between the text, the world, and the author. In the first part of this paper I will focus on the peculiar use that praise poets of the Samanid and Ghaznavid period made of their pen name within the structure of the qasida as a link between the aesthetic and the political in the transition from the nasib to the madh. I will then relate these archaic instances of takhallus to the emergence of early ghazals as aesthetically and functionally independent texts originally stemming from the space of the qasida. This analysis will be furthered by the examination of the use of deictics in order to ascertain to what extent the takhallus can be considered as a marker of a performative context and a fictitious projection of the author, able to stand in a space between history and literary creation.

The mention of the poet’s penname in the final signature verse of the ghazal frequently entails a shift in grammatical person, known as technically as iltifāt in Arabo-Persian rhetoric. Readers implicitly identify the first-person speaker in the body of the lyric poem with the voice of the poet, but in the signature verse or takhallus, the poet is either addressed by name in the second person or referred to in the third person. This shift can open up a rhetorical space for the poet to speak as a writer and craftsman and to look back and comment on the poem he has just presented. Particularly noteworthy for this kind of metapoetic self-reference are the signature verses of Sā’ib Tabrizi (d. 1676), the acclaimed master of the early modern Persian ghazal. In some cases, Sā’ib uses the takhallus to acknowledge his debt to other poets by identifying the author of the poem that served as his model and quoting a half-verse from it. But in other instances, he utilizes the signature verse to celebrate the originality of his work: “Whoever knows the delight of exotic tropes and images, / Sā’ib, will know of our fresh style.” Is this use of the takhallus peculiar to Sā’eb or does it typify a literary self-consciousness characteristic of Persian poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries more generally? This paper will compare Sā’ib’s practice with the works of two other prominent poets of this period—his contemporary Kalīm Kāshānī (d. 1651) and his great successor ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil (d. 1720)—to determine how widespread such metapoetic gestures in the signature verse are and to evaluate any differences in poetics or attitudes to poetry they may indicate.

In Persian, the usual word for “pen-name” or “poetic pseudonym” was not always associated with the meaning it has come to take on almost exclusively today. While resort to the final “signature verse” was common practice among lyric poets, it is not until the 15th century that literature specialists came to register the taxalloṣ under this heading. Instead, medieval Persian scholars of balāġa referred it back to its original definition in Arabic rhetoric. Hence, taxalloṣ was understood as the “transition” between the introductory part of the qaṣīda and the panegyric proper. Yet, the Persian usage of the poetic pen-name may well have retained something of this earlier meaning: from the Arabic root xalaṣa, taxalloṣ denotes the act of “escaping” or “finding an exit.” The very location of the signature verse alerts us to this fact: in the classical Persian ġazal, the poet’s name heralds the end of the poem. To name oneself, in this case, is not merely courteously to take leave; it is the gesture by which the poet seals the formal completion of his composition. However, this synoptic feature is not the privilege of the poet’s name alone. According to medieval Persian specialists of balāġa, other names cited in the ġazal or in the qaṣīda – the name of the patron, or even, of some illustrious character – may lay claim to a similar closure effect. This paper will focus, accordingly, not so much on the notion of the lyric speaker, as on the name as a device, and on the act of naming in classical Persian lyric poetry in a broader sense.