Love in Another Language

Collected Poems and Selected Translations

Dick Davis

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781784105082
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Love in Another Language Dick Davis is shown to be the outstanding formal poet of his generation, a master of rhyme and metre, a poet worthy of keeping company with the best lyric writers in our tradition. His Collected Poems draws on eight previous publications and includes a section of new work. Davis has also established himself as 'the leading translator of Persian literature in our time' ( Washington Post ) and this volume includes a selection of his celebrated translations.
Davis's original poems evoke the experiences of travel and of living in a culture in which one is a stranger, where empathy is at once difficult and necessary. His translations can be read as a record of his attempts at such empathy, in poetic terms, across centuries and cultures.

Selected Translations

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

The translations included here are from Persian, and are taken from the following books: The Conference of the Birds (1984), Borrowed Ware: Medieval Persian Epigrams (1996, 1997), The Shahnameh: the Persian Book of Kings (2006, 2007, 2016), Vis and Ramin (2008, 2009), Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (2012, 2013). The poets whose work is represented in the following pages lived during the medieval period, the earliest in the 10th century, the latest in the 14th. In order to give some notion of what reading these poems in Persian is like, I have tried in making these translations to keep as closely as I could to the Persian forms, as their formal elements constitute a large part of their effect. For example, all Persian narrative poems are in couplets, and I have translated them into couplets in English; the lyric forms are more complicated and harder to bring off in English, but again I have tried to reproduce, as far as I could, at least some formal effects of the originals. The extracts from The Conference of the Birds were translated in conjunction with my wife, Afkham Darbandi; I must take sole responsibility for the other translations here, although Afkham often made suggestions when I consulted her about tricky or ambiguous moments, and I almost always accepted them.

From Farid ud-din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, mid 13th century

Farid ud-din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds is one of the best-known Sufi (mystical) poems in Persian. The poem is an allegory of the mystic quest in which the birds of the world, representing human souls, journey to find their king, the mythical Simorgh. The birds are led by the hoopoe, who functions as their spiritual guide, and tells them anecdotes and tales to describe the way and to encourage them along it. The birds traverse seven valleys, denoting stages of the mystical journey; these are, The Quest, Love, Insight, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and the last, Poverty and Nothingness. Here is the description of the last valley, together with one of the anecdotes the hoopoe tells his avian audience in order to explain its nature.

The Valley of Poverty and Nothingness

Next comes that valley words cannot express,

The Vale of Poverty and Nothingness:

Here you are lame and deaf, the mind has gone,

You enter an obscure oblivion.

When sunlight penetrates the atmosphere

A hundred thousand shadows disappear,

And when the sea arises...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prefatory Note
• IN THE DISTANCE (1975)
• SEEING THE WORLD (1980)
• THE COVENANT (1984)
• LARES (1986)
• DEVICES AND DESIRES (1989)
• A KIND OF LOVE (1991)
• TOUCHWOOD (1996)
• BELONGING (2002)
• A TRICK OF SUNLIGHT (2006)
• NEW POEMS
• SELECTED TRANSLATIONS
• NOTES ON THE POEMS
• INDEX OF TITLES
• About the Author
• By Dick Davis
• Copyright