|
||||||||
Better Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Obeyd-e Zakani: Ethics of The Aristocrats and Other Satirical Works by Nezam al-Din Obeyd-e Zakani
$30.00
|
The Conference of Birds (Penguin Classics) by Farid al-Din Attar  (19)
$10.20
|
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz (28)
$18.15
|
PICS OF THE EPICS...Persian scholar's [brilliant] heroic couplets: "You are both good and evil now to me,/You are my sickness and its remedy,/You're all that's bitter to me, all that's sweet,/You're pleasure and disaster, cold and heat." --Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post
That the course of true love never runs smoothly is the grand theme of Gorgani s immense eleventh-century Persian verse romance that, given its age and the presumed far greater sophistication of twenty-first-century people, should be unreadably and temperamentally archaic. Yet, as translator Davis points out in a long, keenly interesting historical-critical introduction, those who enjoy florid romantic operas (early-nineteenth-century bel canto works, he suggests) or the lovesick blues of so much American country music, and give Gorgani a chance, may find themselves on familiar ground. The story is that of a love triangle, the sides of which are a king, the queen promised him before she was born, and her lover, the king s youngest brother. Over the course of 10 years, the lovers are parted, forcibly and voluntarily, and reunited time after time. When they are together, they rapturously hail their happiness; when parted, they wallow in misery; when planning reunification and actually reuniting, they trade elaborate recriminations before falling into one another s arms. Davis has rendered the couplets of Gorgani into end-rhymed iambic pentameters so fluently and precisely (slant rhymes are astonishingly few) that the passion of the poem s sensuous rhetoric sweeps the reader along in defiance of the relative lack of action. A masterpiece of both its author's and its translator's arts. --Booklist, Ray Olson
Product Description
Vis and Ramin (Mage Publishers; $45; 576 pages) is one of the world's great love stories. It was the first major Persian romance, written between 1050 and 1055 in rhyming couplets. This remarkable work has now been superbly translated into heroic couplets (the closest metrical equivalent of the Persian) by the poet and scholar Dick Davis.
Vis and Ramin had immense influence on later Persian poetry and is very probably also the source for the tale of Tristan and Isolde, which first appeared in Europe about a century later.
The plot, complex yet powerfully dramatic, revolves around royal marital customs unfamiliar to us today. Shahru, the married queen of Mah, refuses an offer of marriage from King Mobad of Marv but promises that if she bears a daughter she will give the child to him as a bride. She duly bears a daughter, Vis, who is brought up by a nurse in the company of Mobad s younger brother Ramin. By the time Vis reaches the age of marriage, Shahru has forgotten her promise and instead weds her daughter to Vis s older brother, Viru. The next day Mobad s brother Zard arrives to demand the bride, and fighting breaks out, during which Vis s father is killed. Mobad then bribes Shahru to hand Vis over to him. Mobad s brother Ramin escorts Vis to her new husband and falls in love with her on the way. Vis has no love for Mobad and turns to her old nurse for help. . . .
Told in language that is lush, sensual and highly inventive, Vis and Ramin is a masterpiece of psychological perceptiveness and characterization: Shahru is worldly and venal, the nurse resourceful and amoral (she will immediately remind Western readers of the nurse in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), Vis high-spirited and determined, Ramin impetuous and volatile. And the hopeless psychological situation of Vis s husband, Mobad, flickers wearily from patience to self-assertion to fury and back again.
The origins of Vis and Ramin, are obscure. The story dates from the time of the Parthians (who ruled Persia from the third century bce to the third century ce), and certainly existed in oral and perhaps written form before the eleventh century Persian poet Fakhraddin Gorgani composed the version that has come down to us.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|
