Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations

Featured in the TLS Books of the Year 2018 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.

About the Author :
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. Dick Davis has also contributed an appreciation of Matthew Mead’s poetry to The Autumn-Born in Autumn.

Review :
'It is marvelous to find a poet whose poetry lives through its metre. His handling of it is masterful, and you are never aware of the effort. And the language is exact but relentless, like the perceptions ... Davis is one of the best poets around.' Thom Gunn '...throughout Love in Another Language, a strange perfusion of elements is at work, at once familiar and exotic; there are bizarre depths, weird echoes, beneath the seemingly traditional and seemingly quite "English surfaces of the poems... Dick Davis's collected poems of over forty-three years constitute what the great Persian poet Nizami called a "makhzan-i-asrar", a treasure-house of mysteries and perfected marvels.' Eric Ormsby, the TLS 'Original poetry and translated Persian verse weave together into a single life, translation as border and as invitation.' A.E. Stallings, The TLS