Walt Whitman (1819–1892), the father of American free verse, and Nima Yushij (1897–1960), the father of Persian New Poetry, each played a central role in his respective poetic tradition. Whitman’s free verse and Yushij’s New Poetry are the results of translating the discourse of democracy to a literary discourse. In this way, there are multipl…[Read more]

The book is a popular Polish-language monograph study in the life and works of the American novelist and painter William Wharton (Albert du Aime, 1925-2008). William Wharton gained international fame and popularity with his first awarded novel ‘Birdy’ (1979), his popularity was furthered strengthened by such books as ‘Dad’ and ‘Midnight Clear’,…[Read more]

Through the case of Emerson’s appropriation of Persian poetry this volume provides a thought-provoking example of how the literary founding father of a nation is cosmopolitan and receptive of foreign cultures in what might seem a purely “nationalistic” agenda. It will appeal to those in the field of Persian literature, comparative liter…[Read more]

An commentary upon the poet Spencer Reese, and more specifically, upon Reece’s “addresses” in his book “The Clerk’s Tale: Poems” (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) in light of Barbara Johnson’s work on the “apostrophe” in her book chapter “Toys R Us,” in her book “Persons and Things” (Harvard University Press, 2008), and also in light of Graham Harman’s…[Read more]

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the second centennial of Ākhūndzade’s birth, three Azerbaijani texts in translation by the Molière of Azerbaijan. The texts—one poem, one letter, and one prose text—reflect Ākhūndzāde’s sharp, sometimes vitriolic, take on Rūmī ’s teaching (a dangerous, incomprehensible word jumble), most poetry and po…[Read more]

First translated into Persian in 1949, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the most popular works of American fiction in Iran. Although the anti-US policy of the post-1979 political system has tried to erase the manifestations of the previous period’s American influence, Iranian interest in Huckleberry Finn has been inc…[Read more]

نوگرایی شعری در کشورهای مختلف با پذیرش والت ویتمن، پدر شعر آزاد امریکا همراه بوده‌است. روندی مشابه در شعر فارسی نیز مشاهده می‌شود. آشنایی فارسی‌زبانان با ویتمن به زمانی برمی‌گردد که شعر فارسی در آستانة تحول بود. نخست یوسف اعتصام‌الملک در سال ۱۳۰۱ بخش کوتاهی از شعر ویتمن را ترجمه و در مجلة بهار منتشر کرد. بعدها پروین اعتصامی در شعر «جولای خ…[Read more]

Are you tripping over your own feet, incapable of advancing even a single metre, when it comes to understanding the technicalities of the feet and metres of pre-modern Islamicate poetry? Then you should probably not consult Nevāʾī’s Meter of Meters, since you are better off with the works of a Wheeler Thackston or a Finn Thiesen… If, howe…[Read more]

پروین اعتصامی (۱۲۸۵ـ ۱۳۲۰)، شاعر نامدار معاصر، در شعرهایش از منابع متعددی بهره برده‌است؛ اما نکته­ جالب توجه این است که او در تمام این برداشت‌های ادبی، اشعار خود را کاملاً از آثار پیشین متمایز می‌کند. پروین عناصری را که از آثار دیگران وام گرفته ­است‌ هنرمندانه با عناصر شعر خود و سنت ادبی فارسی درمی‌آمیزد و آن را از آن خود می‌کند؛ به ­گ…[Read more]

This article examines the temporality of interlinear translation through a case study of the rendering of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry into Persian. We argue that, in its adherence to the word order of the original, the interlinear crib prioritizes the temporality of the instant (kairos) over the temporality of the linear sequence (chronos). Ka…[Read more]

This article examines the temporality of interlinear translation through a case study of the rendering of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry into Persian. We argue that, in its adherence to the word order of the original, the interlinear crib prioritizes the temporality of the instant (kairos) over the temporality of the linear sequence (chronos). Ka…[Read more]

In the summer of 2011, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887) debuted on the Iranian stage. The director and playwright Amir-Reza Koohestani (b. 1978) created a production that was faithful to the classic status of this text while also maximizing its resonance with a contemporary Iranian audience. I explore how Koohestani achieved this b…[Read more]

Parvin Iʿtisami (1907–1941), the first important twentieth-century woman poet of Iran, was well versed in classical Persian poetry. Her knowledge of English language and education at the American school for girls as well as her father’s translations from foreign literature contributed to her appreciation of modern ideas, including women’s rights…[Read more]

Purportedly in response to a request by his unnamed beloved one, the late 18th-century Ottoman poet Ḥasan-i Yāver wrote Poetry’s Artistry, a 441-verse mathnawī that offers some hands-on advice for trying one’s hand at poetry. As tashbīh, jinās, kināya, taḍādd, taḍmīn, ilmām, iltifāt, tardīd, ishtibāh, tawriya, īhām, takhmīs, tarkīb-band,…[Read more]

As Seyed-Gohrab rightly mentions in the introduction to this volume, “poets and writers are so essential in the turbulent history of twentieth-century Iran that any history of modern Iran neglecting the role of literature … would be seriously incomplete” (14). This volume, focusing on the second half of the twentieth century, provides a his…[Read more]

Through offering an ethnography of a group of educated, middle-class women who “had been attending weekly Qur’an and classical poetry classes for years” (xii), the volume shows that poetry and prayer are companions in the cultural history of Iran. It attempts to answer the question, “What does this companionship mean for forms of religio…[Read more]

As Seyed-Gohrab rightly mentions in the introduction to this volume, “poets and writers are so essential in the turbulent history of twentieth-century Iran that any history of modern Iran neglecting the role of literature … would be seriously incomplete” (14). This volume, focusing on the second half of the twentieth century, provides a his…[Read more]

Building on the author’s PhD thesis on “the British cultural and imaginative engagements with Persia in the nineteenth century” (vi), the volume charts “the diversity of perceptions associated with Persia in Victorian literary culture” (2). It focuses on poetry as the medium through which to survey the Victorian conception of Persia. It consists…[Read more]

This essay traces the development of the right-hand inscription (zuoyouming 座右銘) from its birth in the second century CE through its culmination as a complex literary subgenre in the tenth. Over the course of these eight centuries, right-hand inscriptions were used by some of the most prominent poets of their respective eras, including Cui Yuan…[Read more]

There seems to be a continuum between Fernando Pessoa’s metadrama of heteronyms and his strict-sense plays, but this is more hypothesis than theory, because Pessoa’s dramas—notwithstanding the editions of Teatro Estático (2017) and Fausto (2018)—are still largely unknown. Written between 1903–1908, the tragedy of Marino is the earliest of Pessoa’…[Read more]