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Faces of Love
(Translated By Dick Davis)
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Description for Faces of Love
paperback. Presents a diverse selection of some of the best poems and shows us the spiritual and secular aspects of love, in varieties embracing every aspect of the human heart. Translator(s): Davis, Dick. Num Pages: 368 pages, black & white illustrations, maps. BIC Classification: DCF. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 146 x 193 x 25. Weight in Grams: 342. Very good clean copy. Light spotting on page edges, remains very good
Acclaimed translator Dick Davis breathes new life into the timeless works of three masters of fourteenth-century Persian literature.
Together, Hafez, a giant of world literature; Jahan Malek Khatun, an eloquent princess; and Obayd-e Zakani, a dissolute satirist, represent one of the most remarkable literary flowerings of any era. All three lived in the famed city of Shiraz, a provincial capital of south-central Iran, and all three drew support from arts-loving rulers during a time better known for its violence than its creative brilliance. Here Dick Davis, an award-winning poet widely considered 'our finest translator of Persian poetry' (The Times ... Read moreLiterary Supplement), presents a diverse selection of some of the best poems by these world-renowned authors and shows us the spiritual and secular aspects of love, in varieties embracing every aspect of the human heart.
A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title for 2013
Dick Davis is a translator, a poet, and a scholar of Persian literature who has published more than twenty books. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Ohio State University. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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Product Details
Publisher
Penguin Classics
Condition
Used, Very Good
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About (Translated By Dick Davis)
Dick Davis is an English-American poet and translator. Before the Islamic Revolution, Davis lived in Iran and taught English at the University of Tehran. Davis is now a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is considered to be one of the world's foremost translators of Persian literature.
Reviews for Faces of Love
Davis [is] widely acknowledged as the leading translator of Persian literature in our time...Faces of Love has made the Persian originals into real and moving English poems
Washington Post
Davis has done something I'd thought impossible: given us an Englished Hafez whose verses retain an intimation of what all the fuss is about...this anthology is a revelation
... Read moreThe Chicago Tribune
Radiant...Davis expertly elucidates the conventions these poets worked within and played against
A. E. Stallings
The Times Literary Supplement - Books of the Year
Dick Davis's love affair with Persian literature has resulted in another marvelous offspring. Faces of Love reveals to us the mysterious connections between three vastly different fourteenth-century Persian poets. Through their eyes, Davis brings us that other Iran of poetry, lyrical beauty, diversity, and sensuality; only a lover and a poet could so passionately and meticulously capture the true spirit of these magnificent poems that transcend the boundaries of space and time
Azar Nafisi, author of 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' For me, the most remarkable poetic translation project in the last twenty years has been Dick Davis' ambitious recreations of classical Persian literature. In book after book, Davis has memorably translated one of the world's great literatures into real English-language poetry. Finally, Davis has brought us new versions of Hafez and the great Shiraz poets. What can I say about this new book except: Yes! at last we meet one of the greatest lyric poets in history fully alive in English
Dana Gioia, former chairman of the NEA and author of 'Pity the Beautiful: Poems' In this heady volume of wine, roses, nightingales, and forbidden trysts, Dick Davis shows us three faces of medieval Persian love poetry: the elusively mystical, the searingly personal, and the gleefully profane. For those of us unfamiliar with this world, the excitement is something akin to stumbling across a new Pindar, Sappho, and Catullus in a single volume - that is, if they were contemporaries and flourished in the same small town. This book is equally valuable for its wide-ranging introduction and pellucid and musical translations (quotable as English poems in their own right) - it would be worthwhile for either, but is a gem for both. Perhaps the most thrilling surprise contained here, however, is the debut in English (if not the West) of Jahan Malek Khatun, an intellectual princess whose bold and moving poems of heartbreak (often daring in their exploration of gender roles) and exile are a revelation. Her pen name means 'the world' and indeed we feel that, in bringing these poems into our language, scholar, poet, and translator Dick Davis has opened a new world for us. One couldn't write a better description of this volume than one of her own epigrams: Shiraz when spring is here - what pleasure equals this? With streams to sit by, wine to drink, and lips to kiss, With mingled sounds of drums and lutes and harps and flutes; Then, with a nice young lover near, Shiraz is bliss
A.E. Stallings, MacArthur Fellow and author of 'Olives' Probably the most difficult task of all for a Persianist is translating 14th-century poet Hafez. Poet, translator, scholar of Persian literature, Davis has succeeded in this challenge admirably. The most admired of all Persian poets, Hafez is a wizard with words, always alluring, seldom quite within reach. Here Davis also provides translations of poems of Jahan Malek Khatun, a less-known female poet, and of Obayd-e Zakani, a scandalous 'lavatorial' poet (both also 14th century). The translations of all three poets are superb, and they open up a new world even for those who know Persian well. Davis has supplied a long introduction in which he explains how Persian lyric poems (ghazals) work, both in formal terms and in terms of what ghazals speak of and why. The formal structure of a ghazal is not easily reproduced in English, but Davis has managed, better than anyone else so far, to give a rendering that makes these translations come alive and sing. He has also translated Obeyd-e Zakani's "Mush-o-gurbeh" ("Mouse and Cat"), a well-known narrative poem with clear political undertones, in a charming fashion. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.
W. L. Hanaway, emeritus, University of Pennsylvania, CHOICE Show Less
