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Statue of Rudaki in Panjakent, Tajikistan

Rudaki depicted as a blind poet, here on this Iranian stamp.

Abdullah Jafar Ibn Mohammad Rudaki (Persian: ابوعبدالله جعفربن محمدبن حکیم‌بن عبدالرحمن‌بن آدم رودکی; also written as Rudagi or Rudhagi, (859-c.941) was a Persian poet, and the first great literary genius of modern Persian language, who composed poems in the "New Persian" Perso-Arabic alphabet script. Rudaki is considered a founder of Persian classical literature.

He was born in 858 in Rudak (Panjrud), a village in Khorasan, Persia.^[1][2] It is now located in Panjakent, Tajikistan. He was a Persian poet, and the first great literary genius of modern Persian language. Most of his biographers assert that he was totally blind, but the accurate knowledge of colors shown in his poems makes this very doubtful. He was the court poet to the Samanid ruler Nasr II (914-943) in Bukhara, but he eventually fell out of favour and ended his life in poverty.

Early in his life, the fame of his accomplishments reached the ear of the Samanid Nasr II ibn Ahmad, the ruler of Khorasan and Transoxiana, who invited the poet to his court. Rudaki became his daily companion, rose to the highest honors and amassed great wealth. In spite of various predecessors, he well deserves the title of father of Persian literature, the Adam or the Sultan of poets, since he was the first who impressed upon every form of epic, lyric and didactic poetry its peculiar stamp and its individual character. He is also said to have been the founder of the diwan that is, the typical form of the complete collection of a poet's lyrical compositions in a more or less alphabetical order which prevails to the present day among all Persian writers.

Of the 1,300,000 verses attributed to him, there remain only 52 qasidas, ghazals and rubais; of his epic masterpieces we have nothing beyond a few stray lines in native dictionaries. But the most serious loss is that of his translation of Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa's Arabic version of the old Indian fable book Kalila and Dimna (Panchatantra), which he put into Persian verse at the request of his royal patron. Numerous fragments, however, are preserved in the Persian lexicon of Asadi Tusi (the Lughat al-Furs, ed. P. Horn, Göttingen, 1897). In his qasidas, all devoted to the praise of his sovereign and friend, Rudagi has left us unequalled models of a refined and delicate taste, very different from the often bombastic compositions of later Persian encomiasts. His didactic odes and epigrams express in well-measured lines a sort of Epicurean philosophy of human life and human happiness; more charming still are the purely lyrical pieces in glorification of love and wine.

There is a complete edition of all the extant poems of Rudaki which were known at the end of the 19th century, in Persian text and metrical German translation, together with a biographical account, based on forty-six Persian manuscripts, in Hermann Ethé's Rudagi der Samanidendichter (Göttinger Nachrichten, 1873, pp. 663-742); see also

• Neupersische Literatur in Wilhelm Geiger's Grundriss der iranischen Philologie (ii.
• Paul Horn, Geschichte der persischen Literatur (1901), p. 73
• E. G. Browne, Literary History of Persia, i. (1902)
• C. J. Pickering, A Persian Chaucer in National Review (May 1890).

More recently, in 1963, Saʻīd Nafīsī identified more fragments to be attributed to Rudaki and has assembled them, together with an extensive biography, in Muḥīṭ-i zindagī va aḥvāl va ashʻār-i Rūdakī.

• E.G. Browne. Literary History of Persia. (Four volumes, 2,256 pages, and twenty-five years in the writing). 1998. ISBN 0-7007-0406-X
• Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature. Reidel Publishing Company. 1968 OCLC 460598. ISBN 90-277-0143-1
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition article "Rudagi", a publication now in the public domain.

• List of Persian poets and authors
• Persian literature

• Rudaki, Abu Abd Allah, a biography by Professor Iraj Bashri, University of Minnesota. Includes translations of "Lament in Old Age", "Mother of Wine", and "Ju-yi Muliyan."
• Rudaki on Iranian Yellow Pages