There’s a feeling, I think, in English poetry that you have to be original. That feeling isn’t really there in Persian poetry until the very modern period. Then it is. But before then, there’s a kind of sense that there’s this vast treasury of possibilities in poetry which everybody has used—and you can use them too.

Dick Davis is an award-winning poet and translator, famous for his translations of medieval Persian poetry. He has translated Attar’s The Conference of the Birds and Nezami’s Layli and Majnun (both covered on The Spouter-Inn), as well as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and his most recent translation is The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women.

He joins Chris and Suzanne to talk about reading and translating Persian poetry, how his work in translation has influenced his own poetry, and the specific challenges in translating Layli and Majnun.

Show Notes.

Dick Davis’s translations include Layli and Majnun, The Conference of the Birds, and others listed below.

Our episodes on Layli and Majnun and Conference of the Birds.

Fakhraddin Gorgani: Vis and Ramin (trans. Dick Davis).

The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (trans. Dick Davis): hardcover bilingual edition by Mage and English-only paperback by Penguin

Jahan Khatun.

Hafez.

Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (trans. Dick Davis): originally published by Mage, paperback reprint by Penguin, bilingual edition by Mage.

Mughal empire.

Our bonus episodes with Emily Wilson and Sassan Tabatabai.

Nezami: Khosrow and Shirin.

“Seek a Poet who your way do's bend, / And chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend” (Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscomon, in An Essay on Translated Verse).

Chapman’s Homer.

John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

Nizami’s Khamsa.

On Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

Ferdowsi: Shahnameh (trans. Dick Davis): magnificent hardcover in three volumes, illustrated, published by Mage, paperback single volume by Penguin.

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