The article comprises an analysis of the famous ghazal by the 14th cent. Iranian poet Shams al-Din Hafiz. Traditionally it has been considered as a response to a poem by his late contemporary Shah Ni‘matullah Vali. This poetic dialogue is rather remarkable since it reveals both the literary and the personal polemics. The juxtaposing of the two texts opens in their research further hermeneutic perspectives. The ideal images of the ghazals’ lyrical characters can be projected onto the personalities of the two poets and their relationships, which provides the poem by Hafiz with a new semantic dimension.The authors declares that there is no conflict of interest.

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The rich history of Persian literature reception in the West includes such a  major event as the translation of the Persian narrative into European languages. This  has influenced the comprehension of a new epistemological paradigm in the humanities. The story under discussion is the first chapter of Amir Khusrav Dihlavi’s poem  “Eight Paradises” (Hašt bihišt, 1299–1301), in which the Indian princess tells the Sassanian king Bahram Gur a tale of three princes from Sarandip (Sri Lanka, Ceylon). As  the plot progresses, the princes restore the events of the past according to clues and  signs and repeatedly demonstrate their firāsa or ability to guess based on the analysis  of evidence. The stages of European reception of this story are well known. All this material is discussed in the methodologically famous work “Clues: Roots of an Evidential  Paradigm” (1986) by Carlo Ginzburg, who connected the “evidential paradigm” with  the Arabic firāsa, a “complex notion which, in general, designated the ability to pass, on  the basis of clues, directly from the known to the unknown”; Ginzburg noted that the  Sarandip princes were famous exactly for that ability. In this article, the Persian prose  sources of the Three princes tale are under discussion, as well as some other sagacity  stories from Persian didactic books (adab). Among the detective characters Abū ʻAlī ibn  Sīnā gained particular popularity; in some stories, the great philosopher and author of  the fundamental canon “The Medicine” acts as a doctor who recognizes a disease by  symptoms and at the same time as a detective who restores the course of events from  evidence and refutes unfair accusations before a judge.