Alison
>>I can see what Edmund means by nodding towards Marvell; it's not just the
ethical inquiry, but a certain sensuality present in the translation, at
least, which I can't say I quite see in Pope.<<
I suppose I am not thinking of Pope in terms of anything other than a formal
sense, the way the couplet is suited to a poetry that makes an explicit
argument. Saadi is perhaps more subtle than Pope, but he is very much about
making an argument, not so much in the samples I have on line, but in much
of the rest of the book, and certainly in the parts of the Bustan that I
have worked on so far. Still, I will have to go look at Marvell now.
>>With different intent, it has, in English translation at least, the same
kind of elegance of Haibun.<<
Who is Haibun?
>>Then I started wondering what traditions we have in English of this
prose/poem style. I could only think of the prose of the King James Bible
and Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but it is early in the morning
and my thoughts aren't exactly sharp and scintillating...<<
I don't think we have a genre quite like the one Saadi wrote in the Gulistan
in English. True, there is mixed genre writing in English, but Saadi's genre
has in Persian a name that I cannot remember now, and it has very specific
features in terms of form and content, that I also do not yet have committed
to memory, that differentiate it significantly--I remember thinking when I
was reading about it--from stuff in English.
I have, obviously, a lot of learning/research to do about all this, and I am
thinking that, when I am done with the translations, there is a long essay
about this stuff waiting to be written.
Rich Newman
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