Persian Book of Kings Translated Into French

Date: 12 February 2020 - 22:24

News ID: ۷۶۰۸۵

TEHRAN (IBNA) -- The complete version of ‘Shahnameh’ (The Persian Book of Kings) has been ‎translated into French by Pierre Lecoq with a preface by Iranian-French scholar Nahal ‎Tajadod and released by Les Belles Lettres Publishing. ‎
Lecoq (1939) a Belgian Iranologist and a professor at Sorbonne Université has drawn on a version revised by Iranian scholar Seed Nafisi with a look at other versions including Moscow version, Jules Mohl version and Iranian Khaleghi Motlagh version.
The significant point of this version of ‘Shahnameh’ by Abul-Ghasem Ferdowsi is that Lecoq has tried to translate the book in the original meter of its verses, although in the introduction on the book, he writes that translating poems is a sort of betrayal as poems are rhythmic and musical.
‘Shahnemeh’ is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 50,000 "distichs” or couplets (two-line verses it’s one of the world’s longest epic poems. It tells mainly the mythical and to some extent the historical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Arab conquest of Iran in the 7th century.
The Persian masterpiece has already been translated into several languages including translations into French by Louis-Mathieu Langlès, then Jules Mohl who worked on it for 40 years but died before finishing the work.
Nahal Tajadod has already contributed to the translation of the Rumi and has written a fictionalized biography of the great master of Sufism.