A Millenium of Classical Persian Poetry: A Guide to the Reading and Understanding of Persian Poetry from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century.

• Author: Davis, Dick

This is a very useful, generally admirable and somewhat irritating book. It is useful in that it meets a real need. Hitherto no anthology of Persian classical poetry, aimed specifically at an anglophone audience, with notes and an introduction in English, and including a sufficient number of the best-known Persian poems by the literature's major authors, has been easily available. This book is such an anthology and in its basic structure and utility could hardly be bettered. Though any potential editor of such a book would be able to produce his own list of poems he felt could not be omitted, suffice it to say that this anthology is sufficiently representative, and that it does not leave out many of the obvious chestnuts - as indeed it should not since it is offered as a work for students beginning to explore the literature. Thus Rudaki's "Bu-ye ju-ye mulian," Ferdowsi's account of the death of Sohrab, Farrokhi's elegy on the death of Mahmud, Khaqani's madayin qasideh, the opening lines of Mowlavi's mathnavi as well as his ghazal "Benmai rokh ...," Obayd-e Zakani's "Mush o gorbeh," Hafez's "Yusef-e gomgashteh" and his "Salha del talab ..." ghazals, as well as Hatef's tarjih band are all here as it is right they should be. The only really surprising absence is that of any extract from Gorgani's one surviving poem, Vis o Ramin, which had such a major influence on Nezami, and thence on subsequent secular verse narrative, as truly to deserve the epithet seminal; besides which the poem has a straightforward rhetorical and narrative simplicity, rare enough in Persian verse to be of value in itself and perhaps especially attractive for the beginning student at which the anthology is aimed. For the later periods, and for the poetry produced by poets working in India, the editor has allowed himself to be a little more adventurous - partly perhaps because there is less consensus as to which the indispensable poems are - but here too his choices are generally unexceptionable. Some difficulties of grammar and vocabulary are explained in footnotes, and there is a very useful glossary at the end of the book.

A particularly admirable part of the introduction to the book is the description of the various kinds of figures and topoi common in Persian poetry, and often rare or non-existent in English poetry. That much of the poetry, particularly from the thirteenth century on, is "pervaded by mysticism" is mentioned as "a major difficulty" for "the novice...