His father and uncle both led mercenary soldiers in the service of one rajah or another in Northern India. Unfortunately for Ghalib, they both died when he was young, and he had to find a way to support himself.HE FOUND HIS CALLING as a court poet, in and out of favor. When the Sepoy Mutiny took place around him, he addressed a letter to Queen Victoria, offering his services — for a price — to her.THE INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP to God took many ironic forms. As he lived next to a mosque, he said he was God's neighbor. His love affair with God was the occasion of many poems of unrequited love, of the cruel mistress. Such an erotic connection to the divine may seem alien to Western minds, but Ghalib was not alone in this personal relationship; he merely took it to its height.THE GHAZAL FORMAT of poetry is composed of a short series of two rhyming lines (not kept in the translation), each one a complete thought in itself. The resulting poem has a theme, but not continuity — much like a stand-up comic's delivery of short jokes on a topic. Ghalib was a master at double-entendres and shades of meaning; this translation aims for simplicity rather than to be overloaded with baggage.

    Awkward young Huru's adventures begin when her brother abandons her during a journey from Istanbul to Baghdad. By the end, when she trades her musical talent for something more valuable, Huru has spent time disguised as a boy and has married a woman; she has seen Persia, Turkey and Syria and traveled through time; she has married a sultan, borne his son and survived--with help from the spirit world--by her wits and her talent for playing her stone lyre. Along the way, she encounters many renowned figures, including Shahrazad, the witty and driven writer, and Lady Zubaida, a successful and independent businesswoman married to the infamous ruler Harun-er-Rashid. Through these anecdotes, the reader catches sometimes magical glimpses of a different world and a tumultuous era. But the novel's density and jarring mix of formal, archaic rhythms with modern language discourage a reader's total immersion.

    He recounts the perilous journey of the world’s birds to the faraway peaks of Mount Qaf in search of the mysterious Simorgh, their king. Attar’s beguiling anecdotes and humor intermingle the sublime with the mundane, the spiritual with the worldly, while his poem models the soul’s escape from the mind’s rational embrace.Sholeh Wolpé re-creates for modern readers the beauty and timeless wisdom of the original Persian, in contemporary English verse and poetic prose.

    A ruba'i is a two-line stanza with two parts (or hemistichs) per line, hence the word rubáiyát (derived from the Arabic language root for "four"), meaning "quatrains". (Courtesy: Wikipedia)(less)

    Yet the literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound together not by borders and nationalities, but by a common experience of Western imperialism. Keenly aware of the collected scars left by a legacy of colonial rule, the acclaimed writer Reza Aslan, with a team of four regional editors and seventy-seven translators, cogently demonstrates with Tablet and Pen how literature can, in fact, be used to form identity and serve as an extraordinary chronicle of the disrupted histories of the region.Acting with Words Without Borders, which fosters international exchange through translation and publication of the world’s finest literature, Aslan has purposefully situated this volume in the twentieth century, beyond the familiar confines of the Ottoman past, believing that the writers who have emerged in the last hundred years have not received their full due. This monumental collection, therefore, of nearly two hundred pieces, including short stories, novels, memoirs, essays and works of drama—many of them presented in English for the first time—features translated works from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish. Organized chronologically, the volume spans a century of literature—from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, from the great Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis to the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai—connected by the extraordinarily rich tradition of resplendent cultures that have been all too often ignored by the Western canon.By shifting America’s perception of the Middle Eastern world away from religion and politics, Tablet and Pen evokes the splendors of a region through the voices of its writers and poets, whose literature tells an urgent and liberating story. With a wealth of contextual information that places the writing within the historical, political, and cultural breadth of the region, Tablet Pen is transcendent, a book to be devoured as a single sustained narrative, from the first page to the last. Creating a vital bridge between two estranged cultures, "this is that rare anthology: cohesive, affecting, and informing" (Publishers Weekly).

    This prodigious narrative, composed by the poet Ferdowsi between the years 980 and 1010, tells the story of pre- Islamic Iran, beginning in the mythic time of Creation and continuing forward to the Arab invasion in the seventh century. As a window on the world, "Shahnameh" belongs in the company of such literary masterpieces as Dante's "Divine Comedy," the plays of Shakespeare, the epics of Homer- classics whose reach and range bring whole cultures into view. In its pages are unforgettable moments of national triumph and failure, human courage and cruelty, blissful love and bitter grief.In tracing the roots of Iran, "Shahnameh" initially draws on the depths of legend and then carries its story into historical times, when ancient Persia was swept into an expanding Islamic empire. Now Dick Davis, the greatest modern translator of Persian poetry, has revisited that poem, turning the finest stories of Ferdowsi's original into an elegant combination of prose and verse. For the first time in English, in the most complete form possible, readers can experience "Shahnameh" in the same way that Iranian storytellers have lovingly conveyed it in Persian for the past thousand years.

    Repeatedly mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, Adonis is a leading figure in twentieth-century Arabic poetry.Restless and relentless, Adonis explores the pain and otherness of exile, a state so complete that absence replaces identity and becomes the exile's only presence. Exile can take many forms for the Arabic poet, who must practice his craft as an outsider, separated not only from the nation of his birth but from his own language; in the present as in the past, that exile can mean censorship, banishment, or death. Through these poems, Adonis gives an exquisite voice to the silence of absence.

    It portrays Kabbani's style - direct, spontaneous, musical, using the language of everyday life. He was a campaigner for women's rights, and his verses praise the beauty of the female body, and of love.

    Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpice details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. And as the author gradually drifts into frenzy and madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat's bleak vision of the human condition. The Blind Owl, which has been translated into many foreign languages, has often been compared to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.

    In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”

    A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, it introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s.

    Recognising genuis, the judge decides to spare him and gives him instead a small, blank book, encouraging him to confine his thoughts to it alone. Thus begins the seamless blend of fact and fiction that is Samarkand. Vividly re-creating the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, Amin Maalouf spans continents and centuries with breathtaking vision: the dusky exoticism of 11th-century Persia, with its poetesses and assassins; the same country's struggles nine hundred years later, seen through the eyes of an American academic obsessed with finding the original manuscript; and the fated maiden voyage of the Titanic, whose tragedy led to the Rubaiyaat's final resting place - all are brought to life with keen assurance by this gifted and award-winning writer.

    رواية***الشمس ما علمتنى و القمر جاحد

    A teenage boy makes the mistake of falling in love with the much-protected daughter of his uncle, mischievously nicknamed after his hero Napoleon Bonaparte, the curmudgeonly self-appointed patriarch of a large and extended Iranian family in 1940s Tehran.

    He is a living legend whose lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren. He has assimilated some of the world's oldest literary traditions at the same time that he has struggled to open new possibilities for poetry. This collection spans Darwish's entire career, nearly four decades, revealing an impressive range of expression and form. A splendid team of translators has collaborated with the poet on these new translations, which capture Darwish's distinctive voice and spirit.