Shahnameh
by Ferdowsi · first published 2017
12mentions
3recommended by
11HN commenters
2015–2026first – last mentioned
27% recommend64% neutral9% critical
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if you are into audio books, this will be nice. it is narrated by Francis Ford Coppola! https://www.amazon.com/Shahnameh-Epic-Persian-Kings/dp/B078J...
on “Rare Persian manuscripts dating back to 13th century now online” ↗…by the two brothers Warner: "Between 1905 and 1925, the brothers Arthur and Edmond Warner published a translation of the complete work in nine volumes, now out of print." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh I read classical Persian, I've read most of the Shahnameh in Persian and taught parts of it to English-speakers, and have been amazed by the art of the Warner's work and the depth of their understanding.
on “Rare Persian manuscripts dating back to 13th century now online” ↗The Shahnameh is a good start. IIRC there's a high quality bilingual (English and Persian) version of it, with drawings and all. If you prefer it in podcast version, Mazandercast [1] spends a few minutes of each episode…
on “Persian legends and their Western counterparts (2020)” ↗…Westworld quickly bought and read it. It wasn’t good: interesting premise argued in a just so way without much substantive evidence. > The books I am currently reading … Dick Davis’s translation of the Shahnameh Shahnameh had and continues to have enormous cultural influence not just in Iran but in all neighboring cultures, perhaps akin to the Bible in Western tradition. Davis’s new translation converts the…
on “Philip Pullman: ‘I had to grow up before I could cope with Middlemarch’” ↗…a modern English reader, a 10th century or newer Persian text is accessible to modern Persian readers. These are not ancient books only academics can understand and care about. You can find copies of Shahnameh and Hafez in many Iranian households, but some of the lesser-known ones are indeed rare.
on “Rare Persian manuscripts dating back to 13th century now online” ↗Reminds me of the last lines of the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) from Ferdowsi: I've reached the end of this great history And all the land will talk of me: I shall not die, these seeds I've sown will save My name and reputation from the grave,…
on “The Grandest Art of the Ancients” ↗Hafez's poems are not fiction. They don't have a plot, they are just pure expressions of emotions. I am curious to know if Ferdowsi ever talks about feelings in Shahnameh [0]. I cannot remember any such instances, but I have only ever read small parts of it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
on “Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? (2017)” ↗Ferdowsi's Shahnameh epic played a vital role in keeping the the Persian language alive throughout the Arabic conquest.
on “Rare Persian manuscripts dating back to 13th century now online” ↗This is true of some languages which have a high rate of change, such as English, but much less true of others. As a native Persian speaker for example, I can read the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) of Ferdowsi, which was written around 980 (very much contemporary of Beowulf), and understand about 95% of it. Nearly every literate Iranian would be able to read it without an issue,…
on “On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV” ↗…near future: a generic model of the brain is fine-tuned on responses from a specific human. The generic model itself is made by averaging over many scanned connectomes. The other part of the book is VR Shahnameh which, honestly, was a bit too boring. He also has a whole bunch of short stories on the same topic. Some assume reader is already familiar with concept of sideloading, as it's explained in the passing:…
on “MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm” ↗Most European people know about Odysseus, but few have read Homer, even in translation. I one met a visiting Iranian academic just after I'd learned about the Shahnameh. I'd also read the opinion of a French scholar who thought its language was, for a modern Iranian, like Montaigne for a modern French. The Iranian woman told me that very few people in Iran actually read…
on “How far back in time can you understand English?” ↗> The Iranian woman told me that very few people in Iran actually read the book. It's very long, and hard to grasp for untrained readers. She makes a fair point. Reading and fully understanding Shahnameh is not straightforward. The difficulty does not primarily stem from drastic linguistic change, although the language has evolved and been somewhat simplified over time, but rather from the nature of Persian…
on “How far back in time can you understand English?” ↗