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 Majnun — 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.

Language is so personal and internal. It exists in your head. You can close your eyes and plug your ears and not engage with the outside world at all, and yet you still have language going on. So I think one of the things that attracts people to [etymology] is, it’s discussing something that they feel they have a part in.

Mark Sundaram is a medievalist and linguist who specializes in the history of the English language. He’s the co-host of the podcast The Endless Knot and the main force behind the Alliterative YouTube channel. Mark has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto and teaches at Laurentian University.

Aven McMaster is a Classicist who studies Latin poetry and Roman social history. She is the co-host of the podcast The Endless Knot Podcast and does production work on the Alliterative channel videos. Aven has a PhD in Classics from the University of Toronto and taught at Thorneloe University at Laurentian.

They join Chris and Suzanne to talk all about etymologies, dictionaries, and etymological dictionaries. What pleasures are found in reading the dictionary? Why are some people so compelled by etymologies? How do etymologies and puns inform classical poetry?

Show Notes.

The Endless Knot on Twitter.

John Ayto: Dictionary of Word Origins.

The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.

Paul Anthony Jones (Haggard Hawks on Twitter): Why Is This A Question?

On Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

Ernest Weekley: The Romance of Words.

Alliterative’s video on nation.

The etymology of feisty.

Ernest Klein: A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.

Anatoly Liberman: Word Origins and How We Know Them.

The Oxford Etymologist.

Calvert Watkins: The American Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

Support The Spouter-Inn and our network, Megaphonic, if you can. Thanks!

The word “amicus” — meaning “friend” — comes from a derivation, as if it were “animi custos”, or “guardian of the soul”. And this is well put! The term for someone tormented by carnal desire is “amator turpitudinis”, a lover of wickedness. But “friend”, “amicus”, is from the word “hamus”, a hook — in other words, the chain of charity, since hooks hold on.

The Etymologies , by the seventh-century polymath and theologian Isidore of Seville, is a massive medieval encyclopedia, with sections devoted to topics from grammar to farming, mathematics to war. And throughout the book, Isidore attempts to understand the world through etymology—that is, by poking and prodding at words until they reveal their histories and the other words that they’re made of. Chris and Suzanne revel in Isidore’s ear for the materiality of language, as well as his encyclopedic impulse to gather and organize everything.

Show Notes.

Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies. [Bookshop.] [The text in Latin.]

The only other book by Isidore available in English translation seems to be On the Nature of Things.

Our episodes on the Hereford Mappa Mundi, The Aeneid, Beyond a Boundary, Gertrude Stein, and Georges Perec.

Petrus Riga’s Aurora does not seem to be available in English translation.

The Latin text of the opening quote:

> Amicus, per derivationem, quasi animi custos. Dictus autem proprie: amator turpitudinis, quia amore torquetur libidinis: amicus ab hamo, id est, a catena caritatis; unde et hami quod teneant.

Suzanne wrote about encyclopedism (and Moby-Dick, naturally) for LitHub.

The Glossa Ordinaria.

The First Grammatical Treatise.

Virgilius Maro Grammaticus.

Next: Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun. [Bookshop.]

Support The Spouter-Inn through our network, Megaphonic if you can. Thank you!

“Now I know,” she said, “that other, more serious cause of your sickness: you have forgotten what you are. So I really understand why you are ill and how to cure you. For because you are wandering, forgetful of your true self, you grieve that you are an exile and stripped of your goods; since indeed you do not know the goal and end of all things, you think that evil and wicked men are fortunate and powerful; since indeed you have forgotten what sort of governance the world is guided by, you think these fluctuations of fortune uncontrolled. All these are quite enough to cause not merely sickness but even death. But I thank the author of all health that you have not yet wholly lost your true nature.”

The Consolation of Philosophy by the sixth-century Roman author Boethius has a little of everything: poetry and prose, autobiography and philosophy; bright and lively writing and… maybe some boring bits, especially in the last two sections. But it was written by a man who found himself thrown in jail and condemned to death; who can blame him for trying to use philosophy—or, a dialogue with the personification of Philosophy herself—to make sense of his life? Chris and Suzanne discuss how this complex poem intersects with a lot of other literary works, and argue about the uneasy marriage of philosophy and poetry.

Show Notes.

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy. [Bookshop.]

Our episodes on The Symposium, Augustine’s Confessions, The Book of the City of Ladies, Paradiso, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

The Wikipedia page for The Consolation of Philosophy has a nice medieval depiction of Fortune’s wheel.

Rainer Maria Rilke: Archaic Torso of Apollo. (The original German text. See also Mark Doty talking about this poem.)

Next: Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies. [Bookshop.]

Support The Spouter-Inn and our network on Patreon — it helps us make the show, and it gives you access to our friendly Discord!

I come to my garden, my sister, my bride;
I gather my myrrh with my spice,
I eat my honeycomb with my honey,
I drink my wine with my milk.

Eat, friends, drink,
And be drunk with love.

The Song of Songs is a work of lyric poetry which is notably and undeniably erotic in focus. And yet it has also been a key religious text within both Judaism and Christianity, and has been read and commented upon for thousands of years within those contexts. Chris and Suzanne read this poetry both within and without these traditions of interpretations — and also luxuriate in its intensity (and spiciness).

Show Notes.

The Song of Songs is part of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible, and is available in many translations. Chris was primarily looking at the Jewish Publication Society translation; Suzanne at the Revised Standard Version.

Our episodes on Walt Whitman, the allegorical Conference of the Birds, and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Bernard of Clairvaux: Commentary on the Song of Songs.

Alain of Lille’s commentary, Elucidatio in Cantica Canticorum, doesn’t seem to be easily available in English, but here’s the Latin.

Rupert of Deutz’s Commentaria in Cantica Canticorum also doesn’t seem to have been translated into English.

Next: Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy.

are you mockers of me
you grabbing old men
are you laughers at me
though I’m not yet gone
O springs of the rivers of Thebes
O reaches of the plains of Thebes
bear me witness
no one sheds a tear for me
as I go to my strange new grave
no one knows what kind of laws they are that sentence me
nor what kind of tomb it is I go to
I’m a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren’t I
not at home with the dead nor with the living

Sophocles’s play Antigone asks many questions about our relationship to the law, to the state, to our families, and to the dead. The new king in town, Creon, wants his nephew Polynices’s body to go unburied, as he died an enemy of the state. Polynices’s sister Antigone says she will bury the body herself, because that is the right and necessary thing to do. Things escalate.

Chris and Suzanne revisit this work and its world—how it depicts the gods and the dead, and how we might read the struggles of a king trying to rule and a young woman trying to do right by her brother. They also explore two different translations by the poet and classicist Anne Carson.

Show Notes.

Sophocles: Antigone. [Bookshop.]

Anne Carson: Antigonick and its less fancy edition.

Also by Anne Carson: Autobiography of Red; Nox; Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides; and many more.

Elizabeth Wyckloff’s translation of Antigone.

Euripides: Hippolytus, translated by Sean Gurd, recreates the Greek (lack of) punctuation.

Our episode on the Iliad.

And our episode on To the Lighthouse.

Walter Benjamin: The Task of the Translator.

Will Aitken: Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance.

Next: Song of Songs.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thanks!

‘My friend, whom I loved so dear,
   who with me went through every danger,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved so dear,
   who with me went through every danger:

‘the doom of mortals overtook him.
   Six days I wept for him and seven nights.
I did not surrender his body for burial,
   until a maggot dropped from his nostril.

‘Then I was afraid that I too would die,
   I grew fearful of death, and so wander the wild.
‘What became of my friend was too much to bear,
   so on a far road I wander the wild;
what became of my friend Enkidu was too much to bear,
   so on a far path I wander the wild.

‘How can I keep silent? How can I stay quiet?
   My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has turned to clay.
   Shall I not be like him and also lie down,
never to rise again, through all eternity?’

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a very old poem. The Standard Babylonian version of it was redacted over three thousand years ago by an editor and poet named Sîn-lēqi-unninni, but much of the material he compiled was even older than that. The poem describes Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, two-thirds divine and one-third human, who is so superior to everyone else that the gods must create a companion for him. That companion is Enkidu, a bestial man who must be carefully brought into civilization. Their relationship — and the questions that arise after the gods condemn Enkidu to an early death — are still compelling several thousand years later. Chris and Suzanne explore this fragmentary monument of ancient literature, and think about what choices a translator (and a reader!) have to make when engaging with it.

Show Notes.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, as translated by Andrew George, N.K. Sandars, Sophus Helle, and David Ferry. [Many others are available!]

Our episode on The Iliad.

On cuneiform writing.

In a very different context, Chris has talked about Gilgamesh on a podcast before.

Michael Schmidt: Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem, an accessible book-length overview of the poem.

Next: Sophocles: Antigone. [Bookshop.]

And our 2023 reading list, if you want to read ahead! (Some books may change. We are fickle.)

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thanks!

In classical narrative poetry, there’s these formulaic repetitions that come up, right? And then we have these very weird formulaic repetitions that come up in Blind Owl. And I think the function is completely the opposite in the classical works and in this modern work. [In classical poetic narratives, repetitions] keep the reader kind of grounded. It’s that same familiar signpost that keeps you on the right track. When we get to Blind Owl, when we get these very odd repetitions … it unhinges the reader, right? It makes you feel like you’re in some weird dream and you can’t get up.

Sassan Tabatabai is a poet, translator, and scholar of Medieval Persian literature. He is Master Lecturer in World Languages and Literatures and the Core Curriculum, and Coordinator of the Persian Language Program at Boston University. His translations of Persian poetry have appeared in numerous journals, and he is the author of Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His Poetry, Sufi Haiku, and Uzunburun: Poems. He is also the translator of the novel Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, published by Penguin Classics. His forthcoming books, both scheduled for release in spring 2023 are Ferry to Malta: Poems and Translations, and a Persian translation of the poetry of David Ferry.

He joins Suzanne and Chris to talk about the challenges in translating prose and poetry, and to further explore the influences and the intricacies of Sadeq Hedayat’s novel Blind Owl.

Show Notes.

Sassan Tabatabai on Twitter.

Sassan Tabatabai’s books and translations: Blind Owl. Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His Poetry. Sufi Haiku. Uzunburun: Poems. Also some translations of Rumi.

Our episodes on Blind Owl, The Conference of the Birds, and Frankenstein.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thank you!

I had thought about death and the decomposition of all the particles in my body many times—to the extent that it didn’t frighten me—in fact, my true wish was to be completely annihilated. The only thing that frightened me was that the atoms in my body would mix with the atoms in the bodies of the vulgar. This was an insufferable thought. Sometimes I wished that after death I would have long arms and extended fingers with which I could gather all my own atoms and hold them with both hands so that the atoms that belong to me would not enter the bodies of the vulgar.

Sadeq Hedayat’s novel Blind Owl is brief, curious, and often disquieting. It tells the tale of a man who paints pen-case covers, who paints the same image again and again—and old man sitting beneath a cypress tree, an alluring young woman offering him a water lily, a stream running between them. And he is haunted by this image, and especially by the woman in this image—who may also be his wife, his cousin, his mother? The setting of the novel keeps shifting, the props in the novel keep reappearing, and the characters all seem like hazy echoes of the two figures in the painting. Chris and Suzanne try to stay grounded as they discuss this marvellous gem of Iranian modernism.

Content warning: The book contains some potentially disturbing imagery, and so does our discussion.

Thank you to Michael Collins for helping us edit this episode.

Show Notes.

Next: Sadeq Hedayat: Blind Owl. [Bookshop.] (We read the translation by Sassan Tabatabai.)

Not enough of Hedayat’s other work is available in English, but see also Three Drops of Blood (a collection of short stories) and The Fable of Creation (a play).

Previous episodes that we mention: Invisible Man. Persepolis. Symposium. Paradiso. Frankenstein.

An example of a nineteenth-century painted pen case from Iran.

Lingam puja.

Edgar Allan Poe: Berenice.

Junji Ito: Frankenstein and The Enigma of Amigara Fault.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thank you.