A Reconsideration of the Emendation of a Verse from the Story of Rostam and Sohrab

This article examines a verse from the story of Rostam and Sohrab in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh — bar-u har zamān bar xorušad hami / to gofti ke dar zin bejušad hami — and offers three proposals for its emendation. First, it suggests replacing bar-u with be-naw (meaning "moment by moment" or "repeatedly"), which, based on grammatical and semantic considerations as well as the lectio difficilior found in one manuscript, resolves the issue of pronoun reference in bar-u. Second, it argues for preferring daryā ("sea") over dar zin ("in the saddle"), a choice supported by the high frequency of similes comparing roaring to the turbulence of the sea in Shahnameh and other classical texts, and by the narrative context, which reveals a more authentic version of the verse. Third, it advocates for selecting guyi over gofti, grounded in the distinction established by Professor Khānlari regarding the usage of these two adverbs of simile and supposition. While accepting Khānlari's framework, the article adds the observation that when the past tense is used with guyi—unlike with gofti—the speaker envisions the effect and consequence of the action as extending into the present, a point illustrated through other verses of Shahnameh. Consequently, the proposed final reading of the verse is: be-naw har zamān bar xorušad hami / to guyi ke daryā bejušad hami. Ultimately, when manuscript variants for these three components of the verse are weighed alongside internal and external textual evidence, a different recension emerges—one more consistent with the linguistic and narrative structure of Shahnameh.