
The Mirror Of My Heart
A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by WomenIn Stock
ISBN: 9781949445169
Paperback
600 Pages
Subjects:
Literary studies: poetry & poets
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 Rabeeh 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. One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabeeh, 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 societys 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 doesnt; 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.
Dick Davis is an accomplished poet and scholar; he is also the finest translator of Persian poetry. With Layli and Majnun, he brings Nezamis classic to life for the first time in brilliant and moving English verse that captures all the extraordinary power and ingenuity of the original poem. Meanwhile, an introduction and copious explanatory notes shed a fascinating light on Nezamis life and work, and the astonishing virtuosity of his poetic style, that help set the stage for the readers enjoyment of this tour de force of Persian literature.
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