Download or read book The Mirror of My Heart A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women written by Rabe`eh Balkhi and published by Mage Publishers. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe’eh, who lived over a thousand years ago) and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present. Before the twentieth century they tended to come from society’s social extremes. Many were princesses, a good number were hired entertainers of one kind or another, and they were active in many different countries – Iran of course, but also India, Afghanistan, and areas of central Asia that are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Not surprisingly, a lot of their poetry sounds like that of their male counterparts, but a lot doesn’t; there are distinctively bawdy and flirtatious poems by medieval women poets, poems from virtually every era in which the poet complains about her husband (sometimes light-heartedly, sometimes with poignant seriousness), touching poems on the death of a child, and many epigrams centered on little details that bring a life from hundreds of years ago vividly before our eyes. This new bilingual edition of The Mirror of My Heart – the poems in Persian and English on facing pages – is a unique and captivating collection introduced and translated by Dick Davis, an acclaimed scholar and translator of Persian literature as well as a gifted poet in his own right. In his introduction he provides fascinating background detail on Persian poetry written by women through the ages, including common themes and motifs and a brief overview of Iranian history showing how women poets have been affected by the changing dynasties. From Rabe’eh in the tenth century to Fatemeh Ekhtesari in the twenty-first, each of the eighty-four poets in this volume is introduced in a short biographical note, while explanatory notes give further insight into the poems themselves.
Download or read book Persian Love Poetry written by Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and published by Interlink Books. This book was released on 2013-09-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love is a major theme in Persian poetry and can be interpreted in various ways—as mystic love, the basis of the relationship between humans and God, or as passionate or affectionate love between lovers, husbands and wives, parents and children, family and friends, or even as patriotic love of Iran. The literary style and indeed the Persian language itself are floral and elaborate, but the themes differ little from our preoccupations with love and romance today. This collection of extracts has been selected from the best of traditional and contemporary Persian poetry. Each poem is illustrated with a fine example of Persian art from the collections of the British Museum. With a brief introduction to the Persian poetic tradition and a short biographical note about each of the poets, this beautiful anthology is the perfect way to discover the treasures of Persian literature and art.
Download or read book Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings written by Olga M. Davidson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterpiece of Persian Classical epic, the Shahnama or Book of Kings was composed by Abu'l-Qasem Ferdowsi at the beginning of the eleventh century. Because the Shahnama presents itself as a chronicle of the reigns of the shahs from the primordial founders to the Sasanian dynasty which ended in 651, scholarly attention has centered on the question of its historical accuracy. Addressing the literary as well as the historical and mythological aspects of the Shahnama, Olga M. Davidson makes this centerpiece of Iranian culture accessible to Western readers. Drawing on recent work in epic studies and oral poetics, Davidson considers analogies with Classical and medieval European narratives as she investigates the poem's social contexts. Her interpretation of the Shahnama focuses on both the figure of the poet himself and on his protagonists-the superhuman hero Rostam and the historical or historicized shahs. Exploring the Shahnama as an example of court poetry designed to glorify the idea of empire, Davidson identifies as a driving force of Ferdowsi's narrative a strong current of antagonism between king and hero. Ironically, she shows, it is the epic hero himself who poses the greatest threat to the concept of kingship that he is sworn to defend. Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings will be welcomed by readers working in such fields as comparative literature, Middle Eastern Studies, folklore, literary theory, and comparative religion.
Download or read book The Divan of Hafiz written by Hafiz and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connoisseurs of world literature need to spend some time acquainting themselves with the Divan of Hafiz, one of the foremost collections of Persian verse. Scholars agree this volume has exerted a singularly important influence on Middle Eastern culture, akin to Shakespeare's role in the sphere of Western letters.
Download or read book A Two Colored Brocade written by Annemarie Schimmel and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annemarie Schimmel, one of the world's foremost authorities on Persian literature, provides a comprehensive introduction to the complicated and highly sophisticated system of rhetoric and imagery used by the poets of Iran, Ottoman Turkey, and Muslim India. She shows that these images have been used and refined over the centuries and reflect the changing conditions in the Muslim world. According to Schimmel, Persian poetry does not aim to be spontaneous in spirit or highly personal in form. Instead it is rooted in conventions and rules of prosody, rhymes, and verbal instrumentation. Ideally, every verse should be like a precious stone--perfectly formed and multifaceted--and convey the dynamic relationship between everyday reality and the transcendental. Persian poetry, Schimmel explains, is more similar to medieval European verse than Western poetry as it has been written since the Romantic period. The characteristic verse form is the ghazal--a set of rhyming couplets--which serves as a vehicle for shrouding in conventional tropes the poet's real intentions. Because Persian poetry is neither narrative nor dramatic in its overall form, its strength lies in an "architectonic" design; each precisely expressed image is carefully fitted into a pattern of linked figures of speech. Schimmel shows that at its heart Persian poetry transforms the world into a web of symbols embedded in Islamic culture.
Download or read book A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry written by Wheeler McIntosh Thackston and published by Ibex Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 1994 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Millennium Of Classical Persian Poetry" is a guide to the reading & understanding of Persian poetry from the tenth to the twentieth century.
Download or read book Emerson in Iran written by Roger Sedarat and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-05-31 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerson in Iran is the first full-length study of Persian influence in the work of the seminal American poet, philosopher, and translator, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Extending the current trend in transnational studies back to the figural origins of both the United States and Iran, Roger Sedarat's insightful comparative readings of Platonism and Sufi mysticism reveal how Emerson managed to reconcile through verse two countries so seemingly different in religion and philosophy. By tracking various rhetorical strategies through a close interrogation of Emerson's own writings on language and literary appropriation, Sedarat exposes the development of a latent but considerable translation theory in the American literary tradition. He further shows how generative Persian poetry becomes during Emerson's nineteenth century, and how such formative effects continue to influence contemporary American poetry and verse translation.
Download or read book Faces of Love Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz written by Mohammad Hafez-e Shirazi and published by Mage Publishers. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Persian Sufi Poetry written by J. T. P. de Bruijn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the poems rather than on their authors. Surveys the development of Persian mystical poetry, dealing first with the relation between Sufism and literature and then with the four main genres of the tradition: the epigram, the homiletic poem, love poetry and symbolic narrative.
Download or read book Persian Words of Wisdom written by Bahman Solati and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the secret of happiness? What is the nature of love? What makes us good hosts or good guests? What traits should we seek out in friends and seek to embody as friends ourselves? How should we approach the sensual beauties of this world- when do they induce us to error and when are they signs of God? The poets and bards of many traditions have long sought answers to such questions, but perhaps no culture has taken up this challenge with more passionate urgency than that of Persia, from the ninth century AD to modern-day Iran. These eleven centuries of poetic tradition include poets who have become well-known in the West, such as 'Umar Khayyam, Rumi, and Hafiz, as well as many others whom Westerners have yet to discover. In Iran these poems remain part of everyday popular culture, with people of all classes and levels of education able to recite them from memory, even if they may not always be sure who the poets were, where they came from, or what precisely was the spiritual intent behind the verse. In Persian Words of Wisdom, the US-based Iranian scholar Bahman Solati has compiled hundreds of examples reflecting his country's religious and spiritual traditions, especially the Shia branch of Islam and Islamic Sufism, but also the Zoroastrian faith. This bilingual edition with his own English translations further illuminates the sometimes enigmatic poems with parallel Western proverbs, as well as comparison quotations from Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist scripture and secular sources ranging from Mark Twain to Dale Carnegie. One of Solati's goals in this anthology is to build a cultural bridge through poetry between the West and Iran, making these treasures of Persian culture more available both to Westerners generally and, most specifically, to young people of Iranian descent who have grown up in the English-speaking world, perhaps without fully understanding the wealth of their heritage. For them and all readers, this will be a book of discovery.
Download or read book Metaphor and Imagery in Persian Poetry written by Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-10-14 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of essays on classical Persian literature, focusing on Persian rhetorical devices, especially imagery and metaphors. The various contributions discuss the origin and the development of debate poetry, the transmission of Persian and Arabic tales to the works of Europeans medieval authors such as Boccaccio and Chaucer, but also the development of Aristotelian poetics and epistemology in Persian philosophical tradition. Furthermore, the baroque style of the Shiʿite author Ḥusayn Vāʾiẓ Kāshifī, the use of wine metaphors by mystics such as Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Ḥāfiẓ’s original use of candle metaphors, the translation of Khayyām’s metaphors into English, and the importance of a single metaphor in the epic Barzū-nāma are discussed. Contributors include: F. Abdullaeva, G.R. van den Berg, J. Landau, F.D. Lewis, N. Pourjavady, Ch. van Ruymbeke, A. Sedighi and S. Sharma
Download or read book Shahnameh written by Abolqasem Ferdowsi and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 1041 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive translation by Dick Davis of the great national epic of Iran—now newly revised and expanded to be the most complete English-language edition A Penguin Classic Dick Davis—“our pre-eminent translator from the Persian” (The Washington Post)—has revised and expanded his acclaimed translation of Ferdowsi’s masterpiece, adding more than 100 pages of newly translated text. Davis’s elegant combination of prose and verse allows the poetry of the Shahnameh to sing its own tales directly, interspersed sparingly with clearly marked explanations to ease along modern readers. Originally composed for the Samanid princes of Khorasan in the tenth century, the Shahnameh is among the greatest works of world literature. This prodigious narrative tells the story of pre-Islamic Persia, from the mythical creation of the world and the dawn of Persian civilization through the seventh-century Arab conquest. The stories of the Shahnameh are deeply embedded in Persian culture and beyond, as attested by their appearance in such works as The Kite Runner and the love poems of Rumi and Hafez. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book The First Book of the adiqatu l aq qat Or the Enclosed Garden of the Truth written by Abū al-Majd Majdūd ibn Ādam Sanāʼī al-Ghaznavī and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry written by Reza Taher-Kermani and published by Edinburgh Critical Studies in. This book was released on 2022-02-28 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry surveys the variety of ways in which Persia, and the multitude of ideological, historical, cultural and political notions that it embodied, were received, circulated and appropriated.
Download or read book Persian Poetry in England and America written by John D. Yohannan and published by Academic Resources Corp. This book was released on 1977 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive treatment of the influence of Persian poetry upon English & American literature. Contains a definitive bibliography.
Download or read book Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetics written by Olga M. Davidson and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Olga M. Davidson applies comparative literary approaches to classical Persian traditions of composing and performing poetry and song. She focuses on the eleventh-century ce epic Shahnama and its relationship to other genres embedded in it, including forms of verbal art originally composed without the aid of writing, such as women's laments.
Download or read book Contemporary Persian Protest Poetry written by Hadi Bahar and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a compilation of Persian protest poems written in the last century. This collection comprises works that address the socio-political issues of their time, often focusing on government oppression of the people. Such topics can stimulate a reader's interest and empathy, possibly spurring him/her into action. Because of the lack of freedom of speech in Iran and constant fear of censorship, Persian poets use various tools, including rhyme, metaphor and symbolism, in order to bypass the government's censorship. The works of the following poets are included in this compilation: Mohammad Taqi Bahar, Simin Behbahani, Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani, Nader Naderpour, Fereydoun Moshiri, Ahmad Shamlou, Mehdi Akhavan Salis, Parviz natel Khanlari, Hadi Khorsandi, Nasim Shomal, Karo Derderian, Hila Sedighi, Mohammad Reza Aali-payam, Iraj Mirza, Basij Khalkhali.
