American Scholar’s Book on ‘Thousand Years of Persian Poetry’ Released

Date: 12 September 2020 - 21:39

News ID: ۸۲۷۲۱

TEHRAN (IBNA) -- English book, ‘The Mirror Of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by ‎Women’ (2019) by American literary scholar and poet Dick Davis has been published by ‎Mage Publishers in Washington, D.C. ‎
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.”
‘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.