Another book within the same vein--though without the cooperative venture
and the American interlocutor--is Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women's
Poetry, Edited by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, translated by Marjolin De Jager. It
is a collection of about 130 or 140 landays, which is the name of an Afghani
oral verse form, the specifics of I do not now remember and have not time to
look up. The introduction is fascinating on the differences between the ways
men and women poets use the form. The men, predictably, use it to talk about
"higher" subjects--religion, philosophy and such--while the women use it to
talk about their lives, but it's more than talk; there is a
sexual-political/quasi-feminist deeply subversive subtext to the landays
produced by the women, which, as I remember, like the poems of the Mayan
women in the Times article, are often sung as part of daily life or rituals,
like marriage and such.
It's a book worth checking out, and I should say that it makes some very
interesting reading when placed against the poetry of Korean kisaeng, which
were translated and collected in a book put out by Boa Editions, the title
of which I have now forgotten. Lots of similarities across time and space,
even in the different ways that men and women use the poetic forms that were
available to them. I was going to teach a course around that last semester,
but it didn't fill. Maybe it will become the premise for an essay of some
sort.
Anyway, both books are worth checking out.
Richard
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