Love in Another Language

In Love in Another Language Dick Davis is shown to be the outstanding formal poet of his generation, a master of rhyme and metre, a poet worthy of keeping company with the best lyric writers in our tradition. His Collected Poems draws on eight previous publications and includes a section of new work. Davis has also established himself as 'the leading translator of Persian literature in our time' (Washington Post) and this volume includes a selection of his celebrated translations. Davis's original poems evoke the experiences of travel and of living in a culture in which one is a stranger, where empathy is at once difficult and necessary. His translations can be read as a record of his attempts at such empathy, in poetic terms, across centuries and cultures.

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945, and educated at the universities of Cambridge (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature) and Manchester (Ph.D. in Medieval Persian Literature). He lived in Iran for eight years from 1970 to 1978, and also for some time in both Italy and Greece. He was Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University from 2002 until 2012. As well as academic works, he has produced more than twenty books as author, translator or editor; these include translations from Italian and Persian, and a number of books of his own poetry. He is generally recognized as the finest living translator of Persian literature: his translations include Attar's The Conference of the Birds (with Afkham Darbandi), a collection of medieval epigrams (Borrowed Ware), Pezeshkzad's novel My Uncle Napoleon, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, Gorgani's Vis and Ramin, and most recently, Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz.