![]() ![]() ![]() Hafez is so beloved in Iran that cabdrivers recite his lyrics by heart and families at holidays tell fortunes by opening to random lines of his poems-attesting to both their seductive beauty and their Sphinx-like ambiguity. Now Davis has succeeded at the enigmatic 14th-century poet Hafez, along with his contemporaries female poet Jahan Malek Khatun and dirty-minded Obayd, in Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. Teleport forward 60 years, and Dick Davis, white-haired, spectacled professor emeritus of Persian at the Ohio State University and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is still adding tile by colored tile to a busy mosaic of translation that former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia insists is the "most remarkable poetic translation project in the last 20 years." He began with epics the equal of The Iliad in Persian civilization-the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, and The Conference of the Birds, Attar's flight of Sufi fancy about various birds in search of the eternally elusive Bird of Birds. Instead of anxiety of influence, he experienced an opiated hit of influence. Yet he absorbed so much of what he later described as "the candied death-wish of FitzGerald" that he knew most by heart. ![]() "It was a kind of universal badge of culture," Davis jokes. If an English middle-class family owned just three books, along with the Bible and Shakespeare would be FitzGerald. Its presence was not so unusual, as those verses ("A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou") had set off a minor craze. It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit bharati "he carries, brings," bhrtih "a bringing, maintenance " Avestan baraiti "carries " Old Persian barantiy "they carry " Armenian berem "I carry " Greek pherein "to carry," pherne "dowry " Latin ferre "to bear, carry," fors (genitive fortis) "chance, luck," perhaps fur "a thief " Old Irish beru/ berim "I catch, I bring forth," beirid "to carry " Old Welsh beryt "to flow " Gothic bairan "to carry " Old English and Old High German beran, Old Norse bera "barrow " Old Church Slavonic birati "to take " Russian brat' "to take," bremya "a burden," beremennaya "pregnant.When Dick Davis, the preeminent translator of Persian poetry of our time, was a boy in Portsmouth, England, in the 1950s, he found on his parents' bookshelf a copy of Edward FitzGerald's swooning Victorian translations of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It forms all or part of: Aberdeen amphora anaphora aquifer auriferous bairn barrow (n.1) "frame for carrying a load " bear (v.) bearing Berenice bier birth bring burden (n.1) "a load " carboniferous Christopher chromatophore circumference confer conference conifer cumber cumbersome defer (v.2) "yield " differ difference differentiate efferent esophagus euphoria ferret fertile Foraminifera forbear (v.) fossiliferous furtive indifferent infer Inverness Lucifer metaphor odoriferous offer opprobrium overbear paraphernalia periphery pestiferous pheromone phoresy phosphorus Porifera prefer proffer proliferation pyrophoric refer reference semaphore somniferous splendiferous suffer transfer vociferate vociferous. Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to carry," also "to bear children." ![]()
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