Roknābād or Ruknābād is the name of a district on the north-east side of Shiraz, watered by a man-made stream of the same name. It was made famous in English literature in the translations of the 14th-century poet Hafez made among others by Gertrude Bell, who wrote : Earlier, in the very first version of a Persian poem to be translated into English, the orientalist William Jones had translated the same verse as follows : The beauty of the stream was celebrated not only by Hafez, but also by the poet Saadi, and by the traveller Ibn Battuta. The tombs of both Hafez and Saadi are both situated near branches of the stream: the tomb of Hafez near the road halfway between the Qur'an Gate and the bazaar, and the tomb of Saadi just over a mile to the east of Hafez's tomb. Travellers such as Ármin Vámbéry and Edward Granville Browne were surprised to find that the Roknabad stream, despite its fame in Persian poetry, was quite small; according to Wilberforce Clarke, only 4 foot wide. The stream is fed by a man-made underground channel bringing irrigation water from a mountain about 6 miles from Shiraz on the north side of the city. The district itself was named after a 10th-century rulerRukn al-Dawla.
Saadi and Hafez
The 14th century poet of Shiraz, Hafez, mentions Roknabad several times, but the most famous reference is the verse translated by Jones, Bell, and others taken from his Shirazi Turk poem: In the 13th century, the poet Saadi also wrote about the stream, and how he was continually drawn back to Shiraz by its beauty: Another name which Hafez gives to the stream is āb-e Roknī "the water of Rokn". In the following lines he refers to the fact that the stream has its source in the Allahu Akbar pass to the north of Shiraz:
Ibn Battuta
The traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited Shiraz in 1327, wrote in the account of his travels completed in 1355:
Edward Granville Browne
, later to become author of the well-knownA Literary History of Persia, visited Shiraz as a young man in March 1888, and recorded his impressions of the Roknabad stream as he approached the city from the north as follows:
The linguist and traveller Herman Bicknell, who spent several months in Shiraz in 1868, writes: An illustration in Bicknell's translation shows the position of the two streams in relation to the Isfahan road.
