![]() I went to demonstrations, and I never felt in any danger. The revolutionary crowds were actually very sympathetic to Westerners. At first he and his wife "expected things to blow over," says Davis. Abbas/MagnumĮight years into his romance with both his wife and the Persian language, after living full time in Tehran, the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79 drew a bright red line between past and future. Since fleeing Iran in 1979, Davis has not returned for fear of spoiling his happy memories. "A doctor said to me, 'You see that nurse? She saved your life,'" recalls Davis. A year later, he met his wife, Afkham Darbandi, an Iranian who arranged for a blood transfusion when he arrived in a hospital emergency room. ![]() In 1970, Davis arrived in Iran to teach at the University of Tehran. Forster, who filled his head with the glories of Persia's Mogul culture. The author of eight of his own books of poems (in unfashionable meter and rhyme), in "A Letter to Omar" he asks, "Was it for you I answered that advertisement?" The want ad, for an English instructor in Tehran, caught Davis's eye after Cambridge, where as an undergrad he befriended the aged novelist E.M. Not only Davis's career track, but his entire life, as he tells the tale, has a hint of FitzGerald's kismet-"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,/Moves on"-until he found his way to Iran and its ancient language. ![]() Davis reminds us by folding in these two other court poets that Shiraz in Hafez's lifetime was a poetry genius cluster.ĭavis and his wife, Afkham Darbandi, met in Iran when he went to a hospital. Hafez is so beloved in Iran that cabdrivers recite his lyrics by heart and families at holidays tell fortunes by opening to random lines of his poems-attesting to both their seductive beauty and their Sphinx-like ambiguity. Now Davis has succeeded at the enigmatic 14th-century poet Hafez, along with his contemporaries female poet Jahan Malek Khatun and dirty-minded Obayd, in Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. ![]() Teleport forward 60 years, and Dick Davis, white-haired, spectacled professor emeritus of Persian at the Ohio State University and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is still adding tile by colored tile to a busy mosaic of translation that former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia insists is the "most remarkable poetic translation project in the last 20 years." He began with epics the equal of The Iliad in Persian civilization-the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, and The Conference of the Birds, Attar's flight of Sufi fancy about various birds in search of the eternally elusive Bird of Birds. Instead of anxiety of influence, he experienced an opiated hit of influence. Yet he absorbed so much of what he later described as "the candied death-wish of FitzGerald" that he knew most by heart. "It was a kind of universal badge of culture," Davis jokes. If an English middle-class family owned just three books, along with the Bible and Shakespeare would be FitzGerald. Its presence was not so unusual, as those verses ("A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou") had set off a minor craze. When Dick Davis, the preeminent translator of Persian poetry of our time, was a boy in Portsmouth, England, in the 1950s, he found on his parents' bookshelf a copy of Edward FitzGerald's swooning Victorian translations of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
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