Download or read book The Market in Poetry in the Persian World written by Shahzad Bashir and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-23 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Poetic speech is a pearl, connected to the king's ear.' This statement gestures to words as objects of material value sought by those with power and resources. The author provides a sense for the texture of the Persian world by discussing what made poetry precious. By focusing on reports on poets' lives, they illuminate the social scene in which poetry was produced and consumed. The discussion elicits poetry's close connections to political and religious authority, economic exchange, and the articulation of gender. At the broadest level, the study substantiates the interdependency between cultural and material reproduction of society.
Download or read book Belonging written by Niloufar Talebi and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent political developments, including the shadow of a new war, have obscured the fact that Iran has a long and splendid artistic tradition ranging from the visual arts to literature. Western readers may have some awareness of the Iranian novel thanks to a few breakout successes like Reading Lolita in Tehran and My Uncle Napoleon, but the country's strong poetic tradition remains little known. This anthology remedies that situation with a rich selection of recent poetry by Iranians living all around the world, including Amir-Hossein Afrasiabi: “Although the path / tracks my footsteps, / I don’t travel it / for the path travels me.” Varying dramatically in style, tone, and theme, these expertly translated works include erotic divertissements by Ziba Karbassi, rigorously formal poetry by Yadollah Royaii, experimental poems by Naanaam, powerful polemics by Maryam Huleh, and the personal-epic work of Shahrouz Rashid. Eclectic and accessible, these vibrant poems deepen the often limited awareness of Iranian identity today by not only introducing readers to contemporary Iranian poetry, but also expanding the canon of significant writing in the Persian language. Belonging offers a glimpse at a complex culture through some of its finest literary talents.
Download or read book World Between Poems Short Stories and Essays By Iranian Americans written by Persis M Karim and published by George Braziller Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is the first published anthology of writings by Iranian immigrants and first generation Iranian Americans. This collection is the first published anthology of writings by Iranian immigrants and first generation Iranian Americans. Wide ranging and deeply personal, these pieces explore the Iranian community's continuing struggle to understand what it means to be Iranian in America. The selections come together to present a rich, humanizing portrait of a growing community Americans tend to view negatively. Many are intimate reflections on the pain of being alienated from the language, history, and geography of one's childhood. Others grapple with the complexities of cultural and personal identity. Iranian Americans, like any other immigrant community, must face the ongoing negotiation between past and present, their native home and their adopted home. A World Between gives voice to their unique and moving stories.
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 A Little Book of Persian Poetry written by GLEN ALBERTO. SALAZAR and published by Splendor Books. This book was released on 2014-02-07 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Little Book of Persian poetry presents an anthology of the treasured classics written by Rumi, Saadi and Hafez. Mystical and profound, these poems will infuse the heart and soul with hidden Sufi wisdom. Close your eyes and listen to the language of the heart! You know the majestic Simurgh bird got caught in this net… And what can I do? I’m only a small songbird. ~ Rumi “The Edge of the Roof”
Download or read book Sa di in Love written by Homa Katouzian and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'In the breath that I die, for you I'll be longing/ Wishing to turn into the dust of your belonging' - Sa'di, Expressions of Love. With poetry which speaks across the ages, Sa'di (1210-1281) is a vital classical poet and a towering figure of the medieval Persian canon. Comparable in skill and stature to other Persian poets such as Ferdowsi, Hafez, Rumi and Omar Khayyam, Sa'di's verses--best known through his 'Bustan' and 'Golestan' address universal themes of passion, love and the human condition in works which are both psychologically perceptive and beautifully crafted. His mystical writings, contemporaneous with Rumi, reveal a degree of depth, wisdom and insight which have placed Sa'di in the pantheon of world literature. In this essential new translation of Sa'di's work, leading expert on Iranian studies Homa Katouzian seeks to bring the poet's lyrics to a new readership. The book provides the Persian text and Katouzian's English translation side-by-side, creating an indispensible tool for students and enthusiasts of Iranian history, literature and culture.
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 Literature as World Literature written by Mostafa Abedinifard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate literatures across neighboring and distant cultures, and seek innovative ways of developing a transnational Persian literary studies, engaging in constructive dialogues with the global forces surrounding, and shaping, Persianate societies and cultures.
Download or read book The World of Persian Literary Humanism written by Hamid Dabashi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanism has mostly considered the question “What does it mean to be human?” from a Western perspective. Dabashi asks it anew from a non-European perspective, in a groundbreaking study of 1,400 years of Persian literary humanism. He presents the unfolding of this vast tradition as the creative and subversive subconscious of Islamic civilization.
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 576 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 The Tongue of the Unseen written by Dr. Rahmat Mazaheri Seif and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the middle ages, Persia has produced more great poets than any other country in the world. Sir William Jones about two hundred fifty years ago, in his introduction on Hafez, wrote, "...At Oxford there is a manuscript containing the lives of a hundred and twenty-eight of the finest Persian poets," of these, according to Iranians, the fourteenth century poet, Hafez, is their last, greatest, and the most beloved of all; even though, Persia has had poets like Sa'di, Khayyam, Ferdosi, Nezami, and Rumi to boast about! (Iranians take Rumi as a Persian.) They also consider Hafez as their most difficult poet to understand. One may ask, how could such a difficult poet be so popular among people of all walks of life? No Hafez scholar, heretofore, has directly addressed, or adequately answered this question! In this book, the author, for the first time, raises and answers this question by bringing convincing examples from different parts of the divan. Another unique aspect of this book is in the fact that the author has interpreted some couplets entirely different than what other commentators have done, and sometimes, the opposite of theirs! Still another difference that we find in this book is the sequence of the couplets in some ghazals. The author, in order to find the natural unity of the poems, he has arranged a new sequence for the couplets. Something that is lacking in all available divans. The translations are accurately and charmingly done in the form of uni-rhymed ghazal, and each one is preceded by the original, and followed by a commentary, something that has never been done before. This book is written for English-speaking people who wish to know Hafez, especially, the siblings of the Iranians in diaspora, whose children have heard the praise of Hafez from their parents, but are unable to read him in Farsi. It is for them to read him in english and put to test the judgment of their parents.
Download or read book Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry written by Leonard Lewisohn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-06-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The romantic lyricism of the great Persian poet Hafiz (1315-1390) continues to be admired around the world. Recent exploration of that lyricism by Iranian scholars has revealed that, in addition to his masterful use of poetic devices, Hafiz's verse is deeply steeped in the philosophy and symbolism of Persian love mysticism. This innovative volume discusses the aesthetic theories and mystical philosophy of the classical Persian love-lyric (ghazal) as particularly exemplified by Hafiz (who, along with Rumi and Sa'di, is Persia's most celebrated poet). For the first time in western literature, Hafiz's rhetoric of romance is situated within the broader context of what scholars refer to as 'Love Theory' in Arabic and Persian poetry in particular and Islamic literature more generally. Contributors from both the West and Iran conduct a major investigation of the love lyrics of Hafiz and of what they signified to that high culture and civilization which was devoted to the School of Love in medieval Persia. The volume will have strong appeal to scholars of the Middle East, medieval Islamic literature, and the history and culture of Iran.
Download or read book Late Tang China and the World 750 907 CE written by Shao-yun Yang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-25 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the Tang dynasty (618-907) has acquired a reputation as the most 'cosmopolitan' period in Chinese history. The standard narrative also claims that this cosmopolitan openness faded after the An Lushan Rebellion of 755-763, to be replaced by xenophobic hostility toward all things foreign. This Element reassesses the cosmopolitanism-to-xenophobia narrative and presents a more empirically-grounded and nuanced interpretation of the Tang empire's foreign relations after 755.
Download or read book Early Tang China and the World 618 750 CE written by Shao-yun Yang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For about half a century, the Tang dynasty has held a reputation as the most 'cosmopolitan' period in Chinese history, marked by unsurpassed openness to foreign peoples and cultures and active promotion of international trade. Heavily influenced by Western liberal ideals and contemporary China's own self-fashioning efforts, this glamorous image of the Tang calls for some critical reexamination. This Element presents a broad and revisionist analysis of early Tang China's relations with the rest of the Eurasian world and argues that idealizing the Tang as exceptionally “cosmopolitan” limits our ability to think both critically and globally about its actions and policies as an empire.
Download or read book Swahili Worlds in Globalism written by Chapurukha M. Kusimba and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element discusses a medieval African urban society as a product of interactions among African communities who inhabited the region between 100 BCE and 500 CE. It deviates from standard approaches that credit urbanism and state in Africa to non-African agents. East Africa, then and now, was part of the broader world of the Indian Ocean. Globalism coincided with the political and economic transformations that occurred during the Tang-Sung-Yuan-Ming and Islamic Dynastic times, 600-1500 CE. Positioned as the gateway into and out of eastern Africa, the Swahili coast became a site through which people, inventions, and innovations bi-directionally migrated, were adopted, and evolved. Swahili peoples' agency and unique characteristics cannot be seen only through Islam's prism. Instead, their unique character is a consequence of social and economic interactions of actors along the coast, inland, and beyond the Indian Ocean.
Download or read book Persian Narrative Poetry in the Classical Era 800 1500 written by Mohsen Ashtiany and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Persian literature is the jewel in the crown of Persian culture. It has profoundly influenced the literatures of Ottoman Turkey, Muslim India and Turkic Central Asia. It has been a source of inspiration for Goethe, Emerson, Matthew Arnold and Jorge Luis Borges among others and praised by William Jones, Tagore, E. M. Forster and many more. Yet Persian literature has never received the attention in the West, which it merits. Whereas Persian art and architecture, and more recently Iranian cinema, have been written about extensively and at different levels for a varied audience, Persian literature - the greatest achievement of the Iranian people, and one of the major literatures of the world - has largely remained the exclusive domain of specialists. And although in the past few years the poems of Rumi have attracted the kind of popular attention enjoyed by Omar Khayyam's quatrains in the 19th century, Persian literature has never had the impact of the recognition outside the Persianate world of a major world literature. A History of Persian Literature responds to this need and offers a new, comprehensive and detailed history of its subject. This multi-volume, authoritative survey reflects the stature and significance of Persian literature as the single most important accomplishment of the Iranian nation. Prominent scholars in the field bring a fresh critical approach to bear on this important topic and each volume includes representative samples of this literature. The third volume in this ground-breaking series explores mainly the poems written in the couplet form (mathnavi) including narrative mathnavis, allegorical mathnavis such as Conference of the Birds by Attâr as well as didactive mathnavis such as Sa'di's Bustân and Rumi's Mathnavi-ye Ma'navi. Included in this volume are also Strophic Poetry, Satirical and Invective Poems and Occasional Poems (qat'e) and some rarer forms of Persian poetry. Exploring these genres of Persian poetry and the major figures of each genre such as Rudaki, Nezâmi, Sanâ'i, Attâr, Sa'di and Rumi, there is a detailed examination of the intricate interplay between form and content. Through expert and revealing analysis of these distinctive Persian poetic genres this volume provides invaluable insights into their creation and development. Examining the contribution of the great practitioners of the era, some of the most distinguished authorities on the subject lend their expertise to unravel the complex but central role played by poetry in its golden age. This volume is an invaluable companion for anyone who wants to understand the continuing relevance and influence of Classical Persian Poetry."--
Download or read book Remapping Persian Literary History 1700 1900 written by Kevin L. Schwartz and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrating forgotten tales of literary communities across Iran, Afghanistan and South Asia - at a time when Islamic empires were fracturing and new state formations were emerging - this book offers a more global understanding of Persian literary culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. It challenges the manner in which Iranian nationalism has infilitrated Persian literary history writing and recovers the multi-regional breadth and vibrancy of a global lingua franca connecting peoples and places across Islamic Eurasia. Focusing on 3 case studies (18th-century Isfahan, a small court in South India and the literary climate of the Anglo-Afghan war), it reveals the literary and cultural ties that bound this world together as well as some of the trends that broke it apart.
