Persian Merat-ol-Jamal: The Typology and Codicology of ‎One of the Subgenres of Saraapaa

As is generally known, Saraapaa is a Persian literary genre in which the poet or the author strives mainly and primarily to describe the beauties of the beloved from head to toe, generally according to the literary traditions and in a creative and imaginary manner. The main subject of Saraapaa is only the description of the beloved in all her existential dimensions; it is the sole purpose of its creator to write such a description; and it is written completely in a literary language, in the framework of traditional rhetoric, adorned with imagery and poetic exaggerations. These three are necessary and intertwined characteristics of original Saraapaas. This classification is emphasized upon in order to differentiate between Saraapaa and those collections of poems and scattered writings which contain such a subject, but their authors have not had prior intentions and have not envisioned independent forms for them.One of the most significant subgenres of Persian Saraapaa is compiled Saraapaanameh, commonly known as Merat-ol-Jamal (literary, mirror to beauty), which is itself divided into several types. Compiled Saraapaanamehs are extracted from among verse or prose works which are not originally Saraapaa but contain subjects of Saraapaa; therefore, as the name implies, they are not written but collected and the collector is usually someone other than the poet or the author. However, Merat-ol-Jamal by Saeb Tabrizi is one of the most famous examples of compiled Saraapaas, the author and the collector of which is Tabrizi himself, a remarkable poet who has a distinguished place in Persian literature for creating novel subject matters and anthologies.