poetry

At dawn a shout     awoke us in      that watering hole… you crazed         carousing             drunk! Get up and grab that bottle    let’s finish what we started             before fate starts to finish us. Trans Juan Cole from Whinfield 1 (Khayyam uses a lot of bawdy language, which embarrassed the Victorians. I think it sounds contemporary, like a […]

In these one,     two,        three days       a lifetime has passed, like cascading waters     or a desert squall. But regret for two days     never comes to mind:        the one that hasn’t arrived             and the one that long since passed – Omar Khayyam Trans. by Juan Cole from Whinfield 26 Revised. For the […]

Ryan Croken on translating the mystical poet Rumi, and on how Muslims are translated and mistranslated in America. Jalal al-Din Rumi was born in Afghanistan, wrote mainly in Persian, and lived much of his life in Konya, in what is now Turkey. He has some mixed Persian/ Arabic and Persian/ Greek verses, as well. Coleman […]

The below is reprinted from From February 27, 2008, because the [non-] issue is coming back up. At Cincinnati, Bill Cunningham, according to the LAT, who “introduced presidential candidate John McCain at a rally here today accused Barack Obama of sympathizing with ‘world leaders who want to kill us’ and invoked Obama’s middle name — […]