Mossafer

عود: يا مسافر وحدك- محمد عبد الوهاب
(video by OudProff)

I arrived at this song after a long journey that took me from the web to Tehran, from there to Bucharest, then to Istanbul, to Tehran again, to Kabul, and then back to the web, where I found an oud player with a curios nickname (no more no less than Oud.Proff). His song was about a lonely traveler (Ya Msafir Wahdak). The transliteration of Msafir varies: in other versions is Msafer, or Mossafer, or even Musafir.

Was that song about me? Surely not (though I was a lonely traveler in my own right, another Msafir Wahdak so to speak).

Well, let's define the space of my journey: it was kind of imaginary, not crossing the borders of my laptop. I was just tracing one word (you could guess it by now: the Mossafer).

I had started from one of Kiarostami's movies, Mossafer: about a small boy and his huge love for a soccer team playing in the neighboring city. The boy was doing everything in his power (it means cheating and stealing) to gather money for a bus ride and a match ticket.

The title of the movie was inciting for me: the word exists also in Romanian, Musafir: only the American translation of the movie gives The Traveler, while in Romanian the word means Guest. I wanted to know which was the correct meaning of Mossafer in Farsi (the language of film director Kiarostami).

The Romanian word is borrowed from Turkish. I needed to go to Istanbul then. I had with me a set of old photos of the city; it was a gift from a nice lady living far away, in a small American town some place in Massachusetts. It was interesting: the cop in that town was speaking Romanian! So, another mystery, isn't it? Well, some mysteries can be explained: the cop was a Romanian immigrant. But let's not digress! Here is the set of photos:

(video by Can)

Well, the photos were fine while what I needed was a dictionary. I found one in an old second-hand bookshop. A look into this English-Turkish dictionary gave me for Guest the following translations:

Misafir, Konuk, Davetli, Asalak Canlı

So the word has in Romanian and Turkish exactly the same meaning (by the way, for Traveler, the English - Turkish dictionary sends you to Yolcu, Gezgin, Seyahat Eden Kimse, Seyyah, Pazarlamacı, which is another animal).

Only the language in Kiarostami's Mosaffer was Farsi :) So I had to go further, to Tehran, while meditating at the journey of the word: Mossafer (or Musafir, whichever) had departed from some distant place in Persia or the Arabic Peninsula, had surely stepped by in the Thousand and One Nights, had befriended Sindbad, had then admired the dawn on Bosphorus (I'm sure the word had met also Evliya Çelebi, maybe even Piri Reis), and eventually remained as a honored guest in my Romanian language; meanwhile I was following the opposite direction, towards that distant place still unknown to me.

Tehran was kind of familiar to me, from some Iranian movies. Finding an Iranian-English dictionary was not difficult either; the tricky part was the Arabic alphabet, used in Farsi.

I tried firstly the word Traveler and it gave me مسافر. I tried then the Farsi word and I got some very clear information, about similar words:





I found then the word also in Pashtu, and I realized that this Mossafer started actually the journey from Arabic. It spread all over Muslim world, and suffered a little change of sense in Turkish: Traveler and Guest are, after all, very close in meaning.

Romanians took the word from Turkish, along with many other terms. Musafir has in today's Romanian an archaic flavor. The word much more in use is Oaspete.

(Iranian Film and Poetry)