This excellent clutch of scholarly essays on classical Arabic and Persian poetry gives the non-specialist a chance to listen in on the experts and benefit from their working translations along the way. The real fun of the book is in the way it shows how poetry operated in a fundamentally different way for the audience of these works than it does for us now. Just translating the words gives you some idea of the software, but it’s the socio-cultural hardware that brings them, with the help of thes More...