The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 164

Jila Peacock?Iranian
Nightingale in Love

Nightingale in Love,

2005
Edition 12/12
Signed

Roaming the dawn garden to gather flowers,

Framed
Silk screen print
20 x 28 cm

Forlorn like me he loved the rose,

I heard the cry of a nightingale.

Guide Price £100
Lot 57

Jila, an Iranian born painter and printmaker, graduated in painting
from St Martin’s School of Art in 1984. She moved to Glasgow in 1990
where she is a part-time lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art and a
member of the Glasgow Print Studio. Her most recent work, Seven
Seas, images of waves inspired by Anglo-Saxon words describing sea
conditions, was exhibited as a solo show at the Glasgow Print Studio in
March 2010 and at the Bonhoga gallery, Shetland, in May 2011. Her
monoprint series, Seafarer (2000) based on the Anglo-Saxon poem, is
held in the Fitzwilliam Museum collection, Cambridge.
In 2003-04, an Arts & Humanities Research Council award from the
University of Cambridge allowed her to produce a limited edition
handprint book Ten Poems from Hafez. Jila chose ten love poems by
Hafez and, following in the footsteps of the great Islamic calligraphers,
produced ten shape-poems that sit alongside her translations from the
Persian. Exhibited by the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2005 and British
Museum Word into Art exhibition, in 2006, the limited edition books
now form part of both museums’ collections.
Her silk-screen print of a Persian shape-poem Horse was displayed at
the British Museum Olympic Equestrian exhibition in 2012.
162 The Art of Resistance? Defending Academic Freedom

And in that mournful trill surged all his grief.
I wandered in the garden’s timeless moment,
Balancing the plight of rose and bird.
For the rose is the heart of beauty,
And the nightingale, beauty’s slave;
The first may show no favour,
The second seeks no change.
So stirring was his passionate song
That I was moved beyond endurance;
For endless roses flower each day,
Yet no man plucks a single bloom
Without the risk of thorn.
O Hafez, seek no gain from the orbit of this wheel,
It has a thousand pitfalls and no concern for you.
Hafez (d. 1390)
Hafez is Iran’s most quoted lyric poet, whose status in Iran can
be compared to that of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world.