This volume is a collection of essays on classical Persian literature, focusing on Persian rhetorical devices, especially imagery and metaphors. The various contributions discuss the origin and the development of debate poetry, the transmission of Persian and Arabic tales to the works of Europeans medieval authors such as Boccaccio and Chaucer, but also the development of Aristotelian poetics and epistemology in Persian philosophical tradition. Furthermore, the baroque style of the Shiʿite author Ḥusayn Vāʾiẓ Kāshifī, the use of wine metaphors by mystics such as Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Ḥāfiẓ’s original use of candle metaphors, the translation of Khayyām’s metaphors into English, and the importance of a single metaphor in the epic Barzū-nāma are discussed. Contributors include: F. Abdullaeva, G.R. van den Berg, J. Landau, F.D. Lewis, N. Pourjavady, Ch. van Ruymbeke, A. Sedighi and S. Sharma

This volume contains ten chapters on Persian metaphors, tropes, rhetorical figures, and poetic forms and genres, by some of the world's foremost scholars in the field of classical Persian poetry.

Annemarie Schimmel, one of the world's foremost authorities on Persian literature, provides a comprehensive introduction to the complicated and highly sophisticated system of rhetoric and imagery used by the poets of Iran, Ottoman Turkey, and Muslim India. She shows that these images have been used and refined over the centuries and reflect the changing conditions in the Muslim world. According to Schimmel, Persian poetry does not aim to be spontaneous in spirit or highly personal in form. Instead it is rooted in conventions and rules of prosody, rhymes, and verbal instrumentation. Ideally, every verse should be like a precious stone--perfectly formed and multifaceted--and convey the dynamic relationship between everyday reality and the transcendental. Persian poetry, Schimmel explains, is more similar to medieval European verse than Western poetry as it has been written since the Romantic period. The characteristic verse form is the ghazal--a set of rhyming couplets--which serves as a vehicle for shrouding in conventional tropes the poet's real intentions. Because Persian poetry is neither narrative nor dramatic in its overall form, its strength lies in an "architectonic" design; each precisely expressed image is carefully fitted into a pattern of linked figures of speech. Schimmel shows that at its heart Persian poetry transforms the world into a web of symbols embedded in Islamic culture.

This is the first comprehensive and comparative study of compositional and stylistic techniques in medieval Arabic and Persian lyric poetry. Ranging over some seven countries, it deals with works by over thirty poets in the Islamic world from Spain to present-day Afghanistan, and examines how this rich poetic traditions exhibits both continuity and development in the use of a wide variety of compositional strategies. Discussing such topics as principles of structural organisation, the use of rhetorical figures, metaphor and images, and providing detailed analyses of a large number of poetic texts, it shows how structural and semantic features interacted to bring coherence and meaning to the individual poem. It also examines works by the indigenous critics of poetry in both Arabic and Persian, and demonstrates the critics' awareness of, and interest in, the techniques which poets employed to construct poems which were both eloquent and meaningful. Comparisons are also made with classical and medieval poetics in the west. The book will be of interest not merely to specialists in the relevant fields, but also to all those interested in pre-modern poetry and poetics.

Persian Literature and Modernity recasts the history of modern literature in Iran by elucidating the bonds between the classical tradition and modernity and exploring textual, generic and discursive formations through heterodoxical investigations. This is first done through the rehabilitation of concepts embedded in tradition, including the munāzirah (debate), Ahrīman (the demonic), tajarrud (radical aloneness) and nāriz̤āyatī (discontent). Following this are broader structural and processual treatments, including the emergence of the genre of the social novel, the international dimension of Persian and Persianate canon formation, and the development of salvage ethnography and anthropological discourse in Iran. Covering literary experiments from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, the chapters in this volume make a case for stepping outside the bounds of orthodox literary scholarship in Iranian studies with its associated political and orientalist determinants in order to provide a more nuanced conception of literary modernity in Iran. Offering an alternative reading of modernity in Persian literature, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students interested in the history of modern Iran and Persian Literature.

Focuses on the poems rather than on their authors. Surveys the development of Persian mystical poetry, dealing first with the relation between Sufism and literature and then with the four main genres of the tradition: the epigram, the homiletic poem, love poetry and symbolic narrative.

The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation offers a detailed overview of the field of Persian literature in translation, discusses the development of the field, gives critical expression to research on Persian literature in translation, and brings together cutting-edge theoretical and practical research. The book is divided into the following three parts: (I) Translation of Classical Persian Literature, (II) Translation of Modern Persian Literature, and (III) Persian Literary Translation in Practice. The chapters of the book are authored by internationally renowned scholars in the field, and the volume is an essential reference for scholars and their advanced students as well as for those researching in related areas and for independent translators of Persian literature.