The Layered Heart: Essays on Persian Poetry. A Celebration in Honor of Dick Davis.

• Author: Cross, Cameron

The Layered Heart: Essays on Persian Poetry. A Celebration in Honor of Dick Davis. Edited by A. A. SEYED-GHORAB. Washington, DC: MAGE PUBLISHERS, 2019. Pp. x + 662, illus. $75.

It is difficult to overstate the impact that Dick Davis has had on the study of Persian literature, both as a scholar and especially as a translator. Not only has Davis brought perennial classics of Persian literature to a contemporary reading public on a scale far beyond that of most scholarly translations, he has also acquainted that public with new works as well, often from long-neglected genres and voices; The Mirror of My Heart (2019), an anthology of poems written by women, is just the latest example of these efforts.

The Layered Heart, edited by Ali-Asghar Seyed-Ghorab, is a celebration of and tribute to this lifelong work. With contributions by twenty scholars of Persian literature and Iranian history, as well as an introduction by the late Ehsan Yarshater, the volume is a hefty one, weighing in at some 625 pages of material. Such breadth precludes a thorough evaluation and critique of each individual essay, and so for this review, I will instead offer some general comments about the volume as a whole, followed by a survey of its contents. From this orientation, the reader should be able to pick up the book with a good sense of where to go and what to expect.

As a collection The Layered Heart is quite the smorgasbord--a fitting homage to Davis's diverse range of interests. Some essays are long, some are short; some lay out extensive arguments, while others offer a report of ongoing research; translations and anecdotes also mill about the gathering. This variety can also be felt in matters of style, format, and editing. Each contribution employs its preferred method of citation and transliteration, giving the volume a certain unevenness. In addition, some pieces suffer from frequent typos, omitted words (an entire block-quote passage seems to be missing on p. 317), erroneous citations, and even some odd formatting problems, such as shifting font size (p. 142), colored text (pp. 112-14), and "invisible" typographical characters (pp. 131, 140). I also found the language of some of the essays quite convoluted at times, such that further editorial intervention would have been helpful. Nevertheless, there is much here to whet a wide range of scholarly appetites.

The distribution of articles largely adheres to the major areas of Davis's activity as a scholar and translator: the first six essays, under the heading of "Love, Wine & Romance," are a tribute to his pioneering study of the early Persian romance (Panthea's Children, 2002) and his accomplished rendition of the eleventh-century poem VTs-o-Ramin into iambic pentameter (2008). The following ten articles are dedicated to FerdowsT's Shdhndmeh, of which, again, Davis composed a ground-breaking analysis (Epic and Sedition, 1992) and then translated into English prosimetrum (1998-2016)--a monumental feat to which we are all indebted...