Debating the superiority of seeing or hearing in medieval Persian literature

What is it about?

How do we experience the world surrounding us via the senses? What is the difference between seeing something and listening to a sound? Such common questions figure in Abu l-Majd Tabrizi’s "Debate between the Ear and the Eye" (c. 1317), although he approaches them differently than what we may say today. The Ear and the Eye talk as persons, each claiming to be superior to the other. They discuss matters such as their relationship to falling in love, why beauty and book-learning matters to them, and how the two appear in stories about prophets and saints.

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Photo by Yassin Mohammadi on Unsplash

Photo by Yassin Mohammadi on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Tabrizi’s "Debate between the Ear and the Eye" is like a snapshot (or recording) of a common question created in a particular moment. The expectations for how literary debates are conducted in Persian had been established some three centuries prior to Tabrizi’s day. However, the rapid-fire citations found in the debate he gives us showcase a specific social-cultural context. The formal elements of the debate genre thus serve to highlight a combination of continuity and disjunction that suffuses the text with valuable historical information. Our aim is not only to illuminate a past social world, but to use an exploration of that world to become more aware of how we think and write about such questions today. In this vein, our translation of Tabrizi’s work goes beyond what the text itself is saying. While Tabrizi’s "Debate" comes from one author, our goal as a pair of translators—one taking up the voice of the Eye, the other the voice of the Ear—is to treat the process of translation as a creative activity.