Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende,
Shal neither been ywriten nor ysonge
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende.
O, rolled shal I been on many a tonge;
Thurghout the world my belle shal be ronge;
And wommen most wol hate me of alle.
Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle!

(Alas! Until the end of the world, no good word will be written or sung about me, because these books will utterly shame me. Oh, I will be rolled on many a tongue, throughout the world my bell will be rung — and women will hate me most of all. Alas, that such a thing should happen to me!)

Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde tells a love story — if by “love” you mean romantic obsession, coercion, and worse — all set during the Trojan War. Chris and Suzanne talk about how this book explores the interiority of its characters, how it depicts independence and politics, and how it explores the way narratives unfold within systems of tropes and traditions.

Show Notes.

Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (in the original and in a modernization).

Other works by Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales; The Riverside Chaucer (i.e., his complete works).

Our episode on the Iliad.

(The Spouter-Inn will in fact turn five years old in January.)

Boccaccio: Il Filostrato.

Our episodes on Paradiso, Consolation of Philosophy, and the Metamorphoses.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

There’s a feeling, I think, in English poetry that you have to be original. That feeling isn’t really there in Persian poetry until the very modern period. Then it is. But before then, there’s a kind of sense that there’s this vast treasury of possibilities in poetry which everybody has used—and you can use them too.

Dick Davis is an award-winning poet and translator, famous for his translations of medieval Persian poetry. He has translated Attar’s The Conference of the Birds and Nezami’s Layli and Majnun (both covered on The Spouter-Inn), as well as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and his most recent translation is The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women.

He joins Chris and Suzanne to talk about reading and translating Persian poetry, how his work in translation has influenced his own poetry, and the specific challenges in translating Layli and Majnun.

Show Notes.

Dick Davis’s translations include Layli and Majnun, The Conference of the Birds, and others listed below.

Our episodes on Layli and Majnun and Conference of the Birds.

Fakhraddin Gorgani: Vis and Ramin (trans. Dick Davis).

The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (trans. Dick Davis): hardcover bilingual edition by Mage and English-only paperback by Penguin

Jahan Khatun.

Hafez.

Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (trans. Dick Davis): originally published by Mage, paperback reprint by Penguin, bilingual edition by Mage.

Mughal empire.

Our bonus episodes with Emily Wilson and Sassan Tabatabai.

Nezami: Khosrow and Shirin.

“Seek a Poet who your way do's bend, / And chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend” (Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscomon, in An Essay on Translated Verse).

Chapman’s Homer.

John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

Nizami’s Khamsa.

On Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

Ferdowsi: Shahnameh (trans. Dick Davis): magnificent hardcover in three volumes, illustrated, published by Mage, paperback single volume by Penguin.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon to help us research and record the show, and you can hang out with us on a friendly little Discord.

Her voice was sweet and liquid, like a stream
That lulls all other streams to sleep and dream;
Her eyes like doe’s eyes, whose dark gaze would make
A lion lie down dazed, and half awake.
She seemed an alphabet of loveliness,
Curved letters were the curling of each tress,
Straight letters were her stature, and her lips
Were like a letter formed as an ellipse,
And all the letters made her like that bowl
That shows the world as an enchanted whole.

The story of Layli and Manjun — sometimes written as Layla and Majnun — was most famously recorded in a book-length poem by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi. Chris and Suzanne consider what the poem has to say about love, mental illness, and fan culture.

SHOW NOTES.

Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun, trans. Dick Davis. [Bookshop.]

Our episode on Conference of the Birds.

Maria Rosa Menocal: Shards of Love: Exile and the Origin of the Lyric.

Our episode on Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus.

Manuscript images of Layli and Majnun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

And images of Majnun at the Ka’aba with a door knocker: 1, 2.

Our episode on Blind Owl.

The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit.

Next: Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. (Bookshop. Also a helpful online modernized and annotated version.)

You can support us through our network, Megaphonic, on Patreon.