Belonging

Literature & Fiction

dick-davis

Poetry

Anvil Press Poetry

A Trick of Sunlight

A bus journey through Mexico, with vivid descriptions, and pictures of the experience.

Bus Journey Across Mexico

Travel

Mexico

Western Star Publishing LLC

Wine is seen as the natural partner of many great cuisines, but few people associate in with Persian food. The ties, in fact, are age-old. This book weaves together history, poetry, a look at modern viniculture, recipes and wine pairings to celebrate the rightful relationship of wine and food on the Persian table.

From Persia to Napa: Wine at the Persian Table

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Najmieh Batmanglij

Burke Owens

Beverages & Wine

Mage Publishers

Iran's national epic, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, has traditionally been regarded by both Persians and Westerners as a poem celebrating the the central role of monarchy in Persian history. In this groundbreaking book, Dick Davis argues that the poem is far more than a patriotic chronicle of kingly deeds. Rather, it is a subtle and highly ambiguous discussion of authority, and far from being a celebration of monarchy, its most famous episodes and heroes amount to a radical critique of the institution. Davis demonstrates that the public world of kingly authority is shadowed in the poem by a series of tragic father-son relationships, and that in both the royal and familial spheres, authority figures are invariably presented as morally inferior to those whom they govern. The Shahnameh's complex aesthetic structure and its tragic resolution of problems of authority and hierarchy make it an artistic artifact able to take its rightful place beside the major masterpieces of world literature.

Epic and Sedition: A Case of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh

History & Criticism

A giant of world literature, an eloquent princess, a dissolute satirist these are the three voices translated from fourteenth-century Persian by Dick Davis in Faces of Love. Together, they represent one of the most remarkable literary flowerings of any era. All three--Hafez, Jahan Malek Khatun, and Obayd-e Zakani--lived in Shiraz, a provincial capital in south-central Iran, and all drew support from arts-loving rulers at a time better known for invasions and political violence. Love was a frequent subject of their work: spiritual as well as secular, in varieties embracing every aspect of the human heart. They could hardly have been more different. Hafez--destined to win fame throughout the world--wrote lyrical poetry that was subtle, elusive, and rich in ambiguity. Jahan largely forgotten until recent decades was a privileged princess who could evoke passion, longing and heartbreak with uncanny power. (As Davis says: To have this extraordinary poet's fascinating and often very beautiful poems emerge from six hundred years of virtual oblivion seems almost miraculous. ) Obayd a satirist and truth-teller celebrated every pleasure of the flesh in language of astonishing and occasionally obscene honesty. In his introduction, Davis himself a gifted poet as well as an acclaimed translator and scholar of Persian literature describes the turbulent world of the three poets and recounts what is known of their lives. His scene-setting includes explanations of poetic conventions of the day: the rules of rhyming and meter, the stylized relationship between author and subject, and the way language sometimes hovers between male and female or between sacred and secular meanings. Detailed explanatory notes follow the poems, along with some personal reflections on the challenge of trying to catch the poetic genius of a culture distant in space and time. Dick Davis does it brilliantly: Faces of Love is a bridge that carries us to another age. • 175 English metrical verse translations of the fourteenth-century Persian poems of Hafez, Jahan Khatun, and Obayd-e Zakani. • Poet/scholar Dick Davis considered the finest living translator of Persian poetry. • The poems of Hafez, acclaimed as the greatest Persian poet, translated for the first time ever in forms that mirror the technical requirements of Persian poetry while functioning as English poems in their own right. • Rediscovery after almost 600 years of a great Persian woman poet, Princess Jahan Khatun. • Detailed, brilliant explanatory notes about the poems. • Indexes of the first lines of the poems in English and the original Persian.

Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz

I gaze into the mirror of my heart, / And though it's me who looks, it's you I see. So speaks one of the many distinctive voices in this new anthology of verse by women poets writing in Persian, most of whom have never been translated into English before; this is especially true of the pre-modern poets, such as the unnamed author of the lines above, known simply as the "daughter of Salar" or "the woman from Esfahan." 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. 
In the nineteenth century we begin to see political poems, often very angry ones, by women demanding both the independence of Middle-Eastern countries from Western governments and women s emancipation.Perhaps the most personal and intensely emotional poems are those of the last hundred years, in which we see local sensibilities rooted in a millennium of literary and social tradition responding to, and embracing or rejecting, the myriad multi-cultural strands that make up the modern world. 
The Mirror of My Heart 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.

The Mirror Of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women

We know, because of the rhyme, that Nezami pronounced his heroine's name as Layli in Persian with the double "ee" sound as in "sweet," rather than the Arabic Layla, which is more commonly used for the name in English. 
For its subtlety, inventiveness, and dramatic force, the verse of the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami has been compared to that of Shakespeare, and in the same way that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has become the archetypal Western love story, so Nezami's Layli and Majnun occupies an equally uncontested place as the iconic love story of the Middle East. 
The works have many similarities besides their central status in their respective cultures: in both, the lovers are thwarted by their families' opposition; in both, the heroine's family chooses another husband for her; in both, the vehemence of the lovers emotion wreaks social havoc and leads to their deaths. But where Romeo and Juliet's love is characterized by its precipitous speed, that of Layli and Majnun lasts a lifetime, and where Shakespeare gives us a blaze of incandescent adolescent passion, Nezami weaves a tale of prolonged absence, ascetic denial, and spiritual longing, as well as of man's paradoxical relationship with the wilderness as the place where the amenities of civilization are replaced by the soul's solitary confrontation with its own essential needs and nature. 
Because of its emphasis on asceticism and absence, Nezami's masterpiece has often been interpreted as an allegory of Sufi aspiration, and much of the richness of his telling of the tale lies in the way that it blends the psychology of erotic longing with that of spiritual self-denial, so that the poem can be read simultaneously as a tale of tragically thwarted lovers and as a mystical renunciation of the physical world and of everyday human society. 
Dick Davis is an accomplished poet and scholar; he is also the finest translator of Persian poetry. With Layli and Majnun, he brings Nezami's 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 Nezami's life and work, and the astonishing virtuosity of his poetic style, that help set the stage for the reader's enjoyment of this tour de force of Persian literature.

Layli and Majnun

Nezami Ganjavi

Product Description 
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.\nOne 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. 
 Review 
For the English edition of The Mirror of My Heart: "As well as being an admired poet in his own right, Dick Davis is widely regarded as our leading translator from Persian. Every page of 
The Mirror of My Heart shows why, whether through the limpid beauty of the poems themselves or in his command of a diction that ranges from the elegant to the slangy. . . In every respect, 
The Mirror of My Heart is outstanding. Reading it one discovers a whole tradition of love poetry, epigram and elegy, movingly brought into English.. . .Most important now, this anthology reminds us how much we all share the same joys, the same sorrows." --Michael Dirda -- 
The Washington Post

The Mirror of My Heart (Bilingual Edition): A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women

Jahan Malek Khatun

Forugh Farrokhzad

Rabe`eh Balkhi

Mahsati

Makhfi

Mastureh Kurdi

Tahereh

Alam Taj

Parvin Etesami

Simin Behbahani

Fatemeh Shams

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