Love, Death and the Spiritual Quest in the Poetry of Dante and Neẓāmi

The paper focuses on the self-projection of Dante and Neẓāmi in their work, albeit through different modalities. In the Divine Comedy, the author finds immediate selfprojection in the character of himself, the pilgrim protagonist, and, in the Vita Nuova, in the first-person narrator of his own sentimental diary; while in Neẓāmi’s verse novels (mathnavi), the author rather projects himself into certain figures, notably the character of Farhād in the verse novel Khosrow and Shirin. Farhād rises almost to an alter ego of Neẓāmi who through him shows us the udhrite influence on his conception of love and the ideal woman. The focus of the article is on Farhād’s mystical-love experience, compared with the similar experience—albeit from different biographical and cultural coordinates—of the protagonist of the Comedy and the Vita Nuova.