Riddle Me This

While translating the preface to the third divan of poetry by the Indian poet Amir Khusraw (d. 1325), Ghurrat al-Kamal, I encountered four of Khusraw’s riddles for the first time and was awed by his inventiveness. I am hereby sharing them as a civic duty to people who read Persian. Even though the poems stand on their own as poems, not riddles, if you manipulate the words and letters according to the instructions hidden in the poem, you will land upon the solution – which consists of a name for the first three riddles and a word for the last. See if you can guess before reading the explanation below each poem. (The explanations are all paraphrases of Khusraw’s own explanation, so if you disagree with how he uses Arabic, blame him, not me 😉)

 Example 1:

مشک از سرِ زلفِ تو گرفتم بی شک

تا در خد بی خالِ تو یک مو دیدم

The quatrain cited here outwardly deals with the musky tresses of the beloved and his mole-less cheek upon which one hair, or bristle, appears. In an extremely clever way, as Khusraw explains, when one removes the shak, or doubt, from the word mushk, or musk, as the poem urges, one is left with the letter mim. Likewise, the beloved’s cheek, as the poem tells us, has no mole, or khal; when one thus removes the diacritic point from the top of the letter kha in the word for cheek, khad, one is left with the term had. When one places a hair – or mu – between those letters, again as the poem directs, the term becomes hamud. Placing the single mim from the first line before that word produces the name “Mahmud.”

Example 2:

دی گردِ خطِ سبزِ تو می گردیدم

نامِ تو همی گفتم و می بشنیدم

از خطِ تو در میانِ مو ره دیدم

باریک نمود، ره بگردانیدم

Again, the poem here deals with hair on the face of the beloved. The poet sees a path, or rah, between the hairs, or mu. The path is narrow, so he must revolve it, so that rah – or, more correctly, the consonants r-h -- becomes h-r. If h-r is placed in the “middle” of the hairs, or mu, and if one adjusts the voweling, the name “Mahru” – moon-faced one -- emerges.

Example 3:

نامِ بتِ من که هست همچون زرِ ساو

گر دریابی، زر دهمت وزنی داو

شمشیرِ زبان روان کن اندر تیزی

پس بر سر دزد مغز را بین و بکاو

Here the poet praises the name of his beloved, who is just like pure gold, and invites the reader, in discovering the name, to wield the sword of his tongue upon the brain of a thief swiftly – or, according to the pun, in Arabic. (He uses the word tizi – which can also mean sharpness and quickness -- to mean Arabic rather than Tazi, the more typical form.) If, as Khusraw points out, the word for brain is rendered in Arabic, it is mukh; and the word for thief in Arabic is lis – thus Mukhlis emerges.

Example 4:

ای از قلمِ تو کرده نه چرخِ کهن

پیدا به عجم چشمۀ شیرینِ سخن

تا نامِ تو روشن شود از سحر گری

آن چشمه که هست در عجم ماهی کن

This is another complicated and extremely inventive riddle which seemingly invites the reader to use sorcery to turn a spring into a fish. As Khusraw explains, from the point of view of the riddle, one must recognize that the Arabic word for spring (chishma in Persian) is ‘ayn, which is also a letter; and an Arabic word for fish (mahi in Persian) is nun, also a letter. The poem directs the reader to turn the ‘ayn in the word ‘ajam – Iran -- into a nun, which then produces the word star: najm.

(Adapted from Preface to the Full Moon of Perfection by Amir Khusraw, translated and edited by Alyssa Gabbay, Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press, forthcoming)