Download or read book East West Poetry written by Martin Bidney and published by Global Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry that responds to the Quran and to the tradition it created. Written for the general reader and the specialist, Muslim and non-Muslim, East-West Poetry responds to the Quran, scriptural heart of Islam, and to the tradition it created. An introduction relates the Quran to Hebrew and Christian biblical writing and to Rumi, who illumined the Quran with Sufi mystic wisdom; and we sample earlier Western poetic celebrations of Islamic culture. Rarely has a book been so timely as this one. It is an East-West collection that comes at just the right moment in our cultural history, now that America is reawakening to the plenitude of its varied traditions. The double role of the books author as researcher and poet benefits the reader of the 140 Islam-related lyrics offered here. Katharina Mommsen Martin Bidney has [brought] the Christian Gospel and the Muslim Quran together with the Torah to form a luminous torch of love and understanding. Khalil Semaan
Download or read book West Eastern Divan written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Gingko Library. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1814, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read the poems of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz in a newly published translation by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. For Goethe, the book was a revelation. He felt a deep connection with Hafiz and Persian poetic traditions, and was immediately inspired to create his own West-Eastern Divan as a lyrical conversation between the poetry and history of his native Germany and that of Persia. The resulting collection engages with the idea of the other and unearths lyrical connections between cultures. The West-Eastern Divan is one of the world’s great works of literature, an inspired masterpiece, and a poetic linking of European and Persian traditions. This new bilingual edition expertly presents the wit, intelligence, humor, and technical mastery of the poetry in Goethe’s Divan. In order to preserve the work’s original power, Eric Ormsby has created this translation in clear contemporary prose rather than in rhymed verse, which tends to obscure the works sharpness. This edition is also accompanied by explanatory notes of the verse in German and in English and a translation of Goethe’s own commentary, the “Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan.” This edition not only bring this classic collection to English-language readers, but also, at a time of renewed Western unease about the other, to open up the rich cultural world of Islam.
Download or read book Love Poems from God written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-09-24 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred poetry from twelve mystics and saints, rendered brilliantly by Daniel Ladinsky, beloved interpreter of verses by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz One of 6 Books Oprah Loves to Give as Gifts During the Holidays “All kinds of beautiful poetry.” –Hoda Kotb In this luminous collection, Daniel Ladinsky—best known for his bestselling interpretations of the great Sufi poet Hafiz—brings together the timeless work of twelve of the world’s finest spiritual writers, six from the East and six from the West. Once again, Ladinsky reveals his talent for creating profound and playful renditions of classic poems for a modern audience. Rumi’s joyous, ecstatic love poems; St. Francis’s loving observations of nature through the eyes of Catholicism; Kabir’s wild, freeing humor that synthesizes Hindu, Muslim, and Christian beliefs; St. Teresa’s sensual verse; and the mystical, healing words of Sufi poet Hafiz—these along with inspiring works by Rabia, Meister Eckhart, St. Thomas Aquinas, Mira, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Tukaram are all “love poems by God” from writers considered “conduits of the divine.” Together, they form a spiritual treasure to cherish always.
Download or read book East West Encounters written by Sylvie Blum-Reid and published by Wallflower Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Franco-Asian film and literary productions in the context of France's colonial history. Includes analysis of such key film texts as Indochine, Cyclo and The Lover.
Download or read book Rumi Past and Present East and West written by Franklin D. Lewis and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive study of the world's bestselling poet Drawing on a vast array of sources, from writings of the poet himself to the latest scholarly literature, this new anniversary edition of the award-winning work examines the background, the legacy, and the continuing significance of Jalâl al-Din Rumi, today’s bestselling poet in the United States. With new translations of over fifty of Rumi’s poems and including never before seen prose, this landmark study celebrates the astounding appeal of Rumi, still as strong as ever, 800 years after his birth.
Download or read book Vilnius Diary written by Anna Halberstadt and published by Box Turtle Press/Attitude Art, Incorporated. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Jewish Studies. With the concentrated precision of poetry, VILNIUS DIARY has also the richness of a novel and the intimacy of a memoir. Memory, loss, and immigration are captured in poignant images. Each poem inhabits a dual time and space. Never simply a lament, Halberstadt weaves together the sacred and the wildly profane, lighting the great darkness with wit and laughter. "Anna Halberstadt''s VILNIUS DIARY kept me reading late into the night. With the concentrated precision of poetry, it has also the richness of a novel and the intimacy of memoir. One poem leads to the next with addictive power, moving from her childhood in Lithuania to her later life in New York by way of Moscow, Vienna, and Rome. Memory, loss, and immigration are captured in poignant images: the print of cat''s paws in the dust of an attic in Vilnius, a knitted cap clutched in white-knuckled hands at the Moscow airport, buildings in Rome ''peeling and bruised like old hand-made shoes,'' a grandfather''s grave buried in beer cans in the vandalized Jewish cemetery of Kaunas, pigeons huddling on a New York street ''like small-time drug pushers.'' There''s an occasional lyrical burst of feeling for the natural world, as in ''the enormous palace of the evening sky.'' Throughout, the poet returns again and again to Vilnius: ''provincial, sleepy, magical,'' ''Atlantis of disappeared life,'' its cobblestones stained with the blood of pogroms. The reader, like the writer, will fall under its spell, haunted by the terrible magic of the city. ''VILNIUS DIARY'' is impossible to forget."—Elizabeth Dalton "''The need to forget gradually / turned into a need to remember,'' Anna Halberstadt writes in this moving autobiographical collection of poems, which keeps returning to her Jewish childhood in Lithuania, her interim time in Russia, her first hardscrabble years in New York. VILNIUS DIARY is a fine book of days—scrupulously remembered, refreshingly truthful, deeply astonished."—Edward Hirsch "History''s a glowing lamp held slightly aloft in Anna Halberstadt''s hand. She guides us wisely, richly, and satirically across continents, tough choices and the gorgeous pithy details of otherwise overwhelming tragedies and truths. I love this book—across all of it and poem by poem because it''s like a kind of careful shopping, she weighs and feels each thing and remembers to read her own heart too and the hearts of all the lost and known friends, the cousins and lovers and parents and strangers—waiting in rooms and getting on trains, acting, vanishing, all of it, all of them. This beautiful book lives most perfectly in the throbbing heart of our time."—Eileen Myles "This is a brilliant collection that immerses the reader from the first lines, sweeping us away... Anna Halberstadt''s VILNIUS DIARY begins its poetic journey from behind the Iron Curtain only five years after the Holocaust. The poet''s elegiac tone mourns and celebrates the Vilnius of her youth and like Sebald''s Austerlitz images seem to flow effortlessly in an unending succession to evoke the drowned world of the past... In image after incantatory image the poet tells us of her immigration from Russia; in Rome ''persimmons like orange lanterns / hanging on naked branches;'' the wrenching up of roots and replanting them in the unfamiliar soil of America, a nine-year-old-son and two aging parents in tow... Each poem inhabits a dual time and place... The genius of VILNIUS DIARY lies in its refusal to be circumscribed. Never simply a lament, Halberstadt weaves together the sacred and the wildly profane, lighting the great darkness with wit and laughter. This is the poet who calls God a bastard but recognizes divinity in a beehive, the poet who mourns a family tree cut off during the Shoah, yet wickedly observes changing women''s fashions. Literate in three languages, she gives us VILNIUS DIARY in English. . . . The collection not unlike the immigrant''s initiation into a Viennese supermarket—''beautiful fruit in precious wrappers / Warhol cans of tomato soup / phallic bananas without a scratch or blemish.''"—Stephanie Dickinson "Anna Halberstadt is a posthumous daughter of Jewish Vilne, also called Vilnius (in Lithuanian) and Wilno (in Polish). ''I forget words not in one, but three languages,'' she says wryly: her poems are permeated by hues of Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian. Sometimes they are sprinkled by entire sentences in Lithuanian. For Anna Halberstadt, as for many of its former inhabitants, Vilnius became a city of ''disappeared people, disappeared voices.'' Always in transition, she catches the ever- changing context of her life in a series of exact and fascinating images bringing to mind the poetry of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, as well as the fiction of Isaac Babel. Partly reminiscences, partly diary entries, partly meditations, Anna Halberstadt''s poems remain pure and tragic works of art."—Tomas Venclova "Anna Halberstadt''s VILNIUS DIARY is a book of journeys in actuality and memory... Here are some lines that indicate the bitterness the poet, who is a therapist, has overcome: ''Fall in love again / for a new love / always remembers and reflects the previous one / in a crooked mirror. / Eventually differences will blur, / eventually you will feel / you love all of them / past and present / or don''t care for any / what the hell...''"—Michael Graves
Download or read book East West Literary Imagination written by Yoshinobu Hakutani and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac. Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges.
Download or read book The East Face of Helicon West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth written by M. L. West and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1997-10-23 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last sixty years scholars have increasingly become aware of links connecting early Greek poetry with the literatures of the ancient Near East. Martin West's new book far surpasses previous studies in comprehensiveness, demonstrating these links with massive and detailed documentation and showing they are much more fundamental and pervasive than has hitherto been acknowledged. - ;Ever since Neolithic times Greek lands lay open to cultural imports from western Asia: agriculture, metal-working, writing, religious institutions, artistic fashions, musical instruments, and much more. Over the last sixty years scholars have increasingly become aware of links connecting early Greek poetry with the literatures of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Canaan, and Israel. Martin West's new book far surpasses previous studies in comprehensiveness, demonstrating these links with massive and detailed documentation and showing that they are much more fundamental and pervasive than has hitherto been acknowledged. His survey embraces Hesiod, the Homeric epics, the lyric poets, and Aeschylus, and concludes with an illuminating discussion of possible avenues of transmission between the orient and Greece. He believes that an age has dawned in which Hellenists will no more be able to ignore Near Eastern literature than Latinists can ignore Greek. -
Download or read book Language for a New Century written by Tina Chang and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extensive collection of contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern poetry includes the work of four hundred contributors from a variety of backgrounds, in a thematically organized anthology that is complemented by personal essays.
Download or read book Contemporary East European Poetry written by Emery Edward George and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology featuring 160 poets writing in 15 languages. By the standards of Western Europe, the subjects are heavy on social and political issues, which only reflects the difference between the two Europes.
Download or read book Summer in Baden Baden written by Leonid Tsypkin and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The narrator recounts his journey to Leningrad as the story of the 1867 travels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his new wife, Anna Grigoryevna, also unfolds.
Download or read book Indo European Poetry and Myth written by M. L. West and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-11-13 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indo-Europeans, speakers of the prehistoric parent language from which most European and some Asiatic languages are descended, most probably lived on the Eurasian steppes some five or six thousand years ago. Martin West investigates their traditional mythologies, religions, and poetries, and points to elements of common heritage. In The East Face of Helicon (1997), West showed the extent to which Homeric and other early Greek poetry was influenced by Near Eastern traditions, mainly non-Indo-European. His new book presents a foil to that work by identifying elements of more ancient, Indo-European heritage in the Greek material. Topics covered include the status of poets and poetry in Indo-European societies; metre, style, and diction; gods and other supernatural beings, from Father Sky and Mother Earth to the Sun-god and his beautiful daughter, the Thunder-god and other elemental deities, and earthly orders such as Nymphs and Elves; the forms of hymns, prayers, and incantations; conceptions about the world, its origin, mankind, death, and fate; the ideology of fame and of immortalization through poetry; the typology of the king and the hero; the hero as warrior, and the conventions of battle narrative.
Download or read book Crazy Brave A Memoir written by Joy Harjo and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-07-09 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “raw and honest” (Los Angeles Review of Books) memoir from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a haunting, visionary memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice.
Download or read book Allegoresis written by Longxi Zhang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is it that a text, particularly a canonical text, is often said to contain a meaning different from what it literally says? How did allegorical readings arise and develop? By looking at such examples as Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Song of Songs and traditional Chinese commentaries on the Confucian classic Book of Poetry, Zhang Longxi discusses allegorical readings from a broad perspective that bridges the usual East/West cultural divide and examines their social and political implications. His approach is wide-ranging, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary, exploring allegoresis with regard to religion, philosophy, and literature. In his inquiry into allegory and allegorical interpretation, Zhang examines the idea of a self-explanatory text of the Bible as conceived by Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther; discusses the importance of the literal basis of textual interpretation; and takes up the question of moral responsibility and political allegiance. Zhang, who regards utopia as an allegory of social and political ideas, explores how utopian visions vary in their Chinese and Western expressions, in the process commenting on contemporary literary theory and political readings of literature past and present.
Download or read book Literature Religion and East West Comparison written by Anthony C. Yu and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book pays critical homage to the eminent comparatist of Chinese and Western literature and religion, Anthony C. Yu of The University of Chicago. Broadly comparative, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary in scope, the volume consists of an introductory essay on Yu's scholarly career, and thirteen additional essays on topics such as literary texts and traditions of varying provenance and periods, ranging from ancient Greece, medieval Europe, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, to China from the classical to modern periods. The disciplines and areas of research that the essays draw into constructive engagement with one another include comparative literature, religion and literature, history of religions, (or comparative religion), religion and social thought, and the study of myth. Eric Ziolkowski is Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at Lafayette College.
Download or read book Beyond East and West written by John C.H. Wu and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When John C. H. Wu’s spiritual autobiography Beyond East and West was published in 1951, it became an instant Catholic best seller and was compared to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, which had appeared four years earlier. It was also hailed as the new Confession of St. Augustine for its moving description of Wu’s conversion in 1937 and early years as a Catholic. This new edition, including a foreward written by Wu’s son John Wu, Jr., makes this profoundly beautiful book by one of the most influential Chinese lay Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century available for a new generation of readers hungry for spiritual sustenance. Beyond East and West recounts the story of Wu’s early life in Ningpo, China, his family and friendships, education and law career, drafting of the constitution of the Republic of China, translation of the Bible into classical Chinese in collaboration with Chinese president Chiang Kai-Shek, and his role as China’s delegate to the Holy See. In passages of arresting beauty, the book reveals the development of his thought and the progress of his growth toward love of God, arriving through experience at the conclusion that the wisdom in all of China’s traditions, especially Confucian thought, Taoism, and Buddhism, point to universal truths that come from, and are fulfilled in, Christ. In Beyond East and West, Wu develops a synthesis between Catholicism and the ancient culture of the Orient. A sublime expression of faith, here is a book for anyone who seeks the peace of the spirit, a memorable book whose ideas will linger long after its pages are closed.
Download or read book The East West House written by Christy Hale and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A biography of Isamu Noguchi, Japanese American artist, sculptor, and landscape architect, focusing on his boyhood in Japan, his mixed heritage, and his participation in designing and building a home that fused Eastern and Western influences.
