East-West Poetry

East-West Poetry PDF Author: Martin Bidney
Publisher: Global Academic Publishing
ISBN: 1586842757
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Poetry that responds to the Qur’an and to the tradition it created. Written for the general reader and the specialist, Muslim and non-Muslim, East-West Poetry responds to the Qur’an, scriptural heart of Islam, and to the tradition it created. An introduction relates the Qur’an to Hebrew and Christian biblical writing and to Rumi, who illumined the Qur’an with Sufi mystic wisdom; and we sample earlier Western poetic celebrations of Islamic culture. “Rarely has a book been so timely as this one. It is an East-West collection that comes at just the right moment in our cultural history, now that America is reawakening to the plenitude of its varied traditions. The double role of the book’s author as researcher and poet benefits the reader of the 140 Islam-related lyrics offered here.” — Katharina Mommsen “Martin Bidney has [brought] the Christian Gospel and the Muslim Qur’an together with the Torah to form a luminous torch of love and understanding.” — Khalil Semaan

East-West Poetry

East-West Poetry PDF Author: Martin Bidney
Publisher: Global Academic Publishing
ISBN: 1586842757
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
Poetry that responds to the Qur’an and to the tradition it created. Written for the general reader and the specialist, Muslim and non-Muslim, East-West Poetry responds to the Qur’an, scriptural heart of Islam, and to the tradition it created. An introduction relates the Qur’an to Hebrew and Christian biblical writing and to Rumi, who illumined the Qur’an with Sufi mystic wisdom; and we sample earlier Western poetic celebrations of Islamic culture. “Rarely has a book been so timely as this one. It is an East-West collection that comes at just the right moment in our cultural history, now that America is reawakening to the plenitude of its varied traditions. The double role of the book’s author as researcher and poet benefits the reader of the 140 Islam-related lyrics offered here.” — Katharina Mommsen “Martin Bidney has [brought] the Christian Gospel and the Muslim Qur’an together with the Torah to form a luminous torch of love and understanding.” — Khalil Semaan

Rumi - Past and Present, East and West

Rumi - Past and Present, East and West PDF Author: Franklin D. Lewis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1780747373
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
The definitive study of the world's bestselling poet Drawing on a vast array of sources, from writings of the poet himself to the latest scholarly literature, this new anniversary edition of the award-winning work examines the background, the legacy, and the continuing significance of Jalâl al-Din Rumi, today’s bestselling poet in the United States. With new translations of over fifty of Rumi’s poems and including never before seen prose, this landmark study celebrates the astounding appeal of Rumi, still as strong as ever, 800 years after his birth.

Love Poems from God

Love Poems from God PDF Author: Various
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142196120
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
In this luminous collection, Daniel Ladinsky interprets the work of twelve of the world’s finest spiritual writers, six from the East and six from the West. Ladinsky reveals his talent for culling the essence of classic poetry for a modern audience. Ladinsky’s poems are not translations in a literal sense. Rather than capture the form of a particular classical work, Ladinsky crafts poems that release the spirit of these timeless writers. Rumi’s joyous, ecstatic love poems; St. Francis’s loving observations of nature through the eyes of Catholicism; Kabir’s wild, freeing humor that synthesizes Hindu, Muslim, and Christian beliefs; St. Teresa’s sensual verse; and the mystical, healing words of Sufi poet Hafiz—these along with inspiring works by Rabia, Meister Eckhart, St. Thomas Aquinas, Mira, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Tukaram are all “love poems by God” from writers considered “conduits of the divine.” Together, they form a spiritual treasure to cherish always.

West-Eastern Divan

West-Eastern Divan PDF Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publisher: Gingko Library
ISBN: 1909942413
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
In 1814, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read the poems of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz in a newly published translation by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. For Goethe, the book was a revelation. He felt a deep connection with Hafiz and Persian poetic traditions, and was immediately inspired to create his own West-Eastern Divan as a lyrical conversation between the poetry and history of his native Germany and that of Persia. The resulting collection engages with the idea of the other and unearths lyrical connections between cultures. The West-Eastern Divan is one of the world’s great works of literature, an inspired masterpiece, and a poetic linking of European and Persian traditions. This new bilingual edition expertly presents the wit, intelligence, humor, and technical mastery of the poetry in Goethe’s Divan. In order to preserve the work’s original power, Eric Ormsby has created this translation in clear contemporary prose rather than in rhymed verse, which tends to obscure the works sharpness. This edition is also accompanied by explanatory notes of the verse in German and in English and a translation of Goethe’s own commentary, the “Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan.” This edition not only bring this classic collection to English-language readers, but also, at a time of renewed Western unease about the other, to open up the rich cultural world of Islam.

East-West Exchange and Late Modernism

East-West Exchange and Late Modernism PDF Author: Zhaoming Qian
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813940680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In East-West Exchange and Late Modernism, Zhaoming Qian examines the nature and extent of Asian influence on some of the literary masterpieces of Western late modernism. Focusing on the poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, Qian relates captivating stories about their interactions with Chinese artists and scholars and shows how these cross-cultural encounters helped ignite a return to their early experimental modes. Qian’s sinuous readings of the three modernists’ last books of verse—Williams’s Pictures from Brueghel (1962), Moore’s Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), and Pound’s Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1969)—expand our understanding of late modernism by bringing into focus its heightened attention to meaning in space, its obsession with imaginative sensibility, and its increased respect for harmony between humanity and nature.

East-West Literary Imagination

East-West Literary Imagination PDF Author: Yoshinobu Hakutani
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826273947
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac. Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges.

The East Face of Helicon : West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth

The East Face of Helicon : West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth PDF Author: M. L. West
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191591041
Category : Comparative literature
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
Over the last sixty years scholars have increasingly become aware of links connecting early Greek poetry with the literatures of the ancient Near East. Martin West's new book far surpasses previous studies in comprehensiveness, demonstrating these links with massive and detailed documentation and showing they are much more fundamental and pervasive than has hitherto been acknowledged. - ;Ever since Neolithic times Greek lands lay open to cultural imports from western Asia: agriculture, metal-working, writing, religious institutions, artistic fashions, musical instruments, and much more. Over the last sixty years scholars have increasingly become aware of links connecting early Greek poetry with the literatures of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Canaan, and Israel. Martin West's new book far surpasses previous studies in comprehensiveness, demonstrating these links with massive and detailed documentation and showing that they are much more fundamental and pervasive than has hitherto been acknowledged. His survey embraces Hesiod, the Homeric epics, the lyric poets, and Aeschylus, and concludes with an illuminating discussion of possible avenues of transmission between the orient and Greece. He believes that an age has dawned in which Hellenists will no more be able to ignore Near Eastern literature than Latinists can ignore Greek. -

Vilnius Diary

Vilnius Diary PDF Author: Anna Halberstadt
Publisher: Box Turtle Press/Attitude Art, Incorporated
ISBN: 9781893654150
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Poetry. Jewish Studies. With the concentrated precision of poetry, VILNIUS DIARY has also the richness of a novel and the intimacy of a memoir. Memory, loss, and immigration are captured in poignant images. Each poem inhabits a dual time and space. Never simply a lament, Halberstadt weaves together the sacred and the wildly profane, lighting the great darkness with wit and laughter. "Anna Halberstadt''s VILNIUS DIARY kept me reading late into the night. With the concentrated precision of poetry, it has also the richness of a novel and the intimacy of memoir. One poem leads to the next with addictive power, moving from her childhood in Lithuania to her later life in New York by way of Moscow, Vienna, and Rome. Memory, loss, and immigration are captured in poignant images: the print of cat''s paws in the dust of an attic in Vilnius, a knitted cap clutched in white-knuckled hands at the Moscow airport, buildings in Rome ''peeling and bruised like old hand-made shoes,'' a grandfather''s grave buried in beer cans in the vandalized Jewish cemetery of Kaunas, pigeons huddling on a New York street ''like small-time drug pushers.'' There''s an occasional lyrical burst of feeling for the natural world, as in ''the enormous palace of the evening sky.'' Throughout, the poet returns again and again to Vilnius: ''provincial, sleepy, magical,'' ''Atlantis of disappeared life,'' its cobblestones stained with the blood of pogroms. The reader, like the writer, will fall under its spell, haunted by the terrible magic of the city. ''VILNIUS DIARY'' is impossible to forget."—Elizabeth Dalton "''The need to forget gradually / turned into a need to remember,'' Anna Halberstadt writes in this moving autobiographical collection of poems, which keeps returning to her Jewish childhood in Lithuania, her interim time in Russia, her first hardscrabble years in New York. VILNIUS DIARY is a fine book of days—scrupulously remembered, refreshingly truthful, deeply astonished."—Edward Hirsch "History''s a glowing lamp held slightly aloft in Anna Halberstadt''s hand. She guides us wisely, richly, and satirically across continents, tough choices and the gorgeous pithy details of otherwise overwhelming tragedies and truths. I love this book—across all of it and poem by poem because it''s like a kind of careful shopping, she weighs and feels each thing and remembers to read her own heart too and the hearts of all the lost and known friends, the cousins and lovers and parents and strangers—waiting in rooms and getting on trains, acting, vanishing, all of it, all of them. This beautiful book lives most perfectly in the throbbing heart of our time."—Eileen Myles "This is a brilliant collection that immerses the reader from the first lines, sweeping us away... Anna Halberstadt''s VILNIUS DIARY begins its poetic journey from behind the Iron Curtain only five years after the Holocaust. The poet''s elegiac tone mourns and celebrates the Vilnius of her youth and like Sebald''s Austerlitz images seem to flow effortlessly in an unending succession to evoke the drowned world of the past... In image after incantatory image the poet tells us of her immigration from Russia; in Rome ''persimmons like orange lanterns / hanging on naked branches;'' the wrenching up of roots and replanting them in the unfamiliar soil of America, a nine-year-old-son and two aging parents in tow... Each poem inhabits a dual time and place... The genius of VILNIUS DIARY lies in its refusal to be circumscribed. Never simply a lament, Halberstadt weaves together the sacred and the wildly profane, lighting the great darkness with wit and laughter. This is the poet who calls God a bastard but recognizes divinity in a beehive, the poet who mourns a family tree cut off during the Shoah, yet wickedly observes changing women''s fashions. Literate in three languages, she gives us VILNIUS DIARY in English. . . . The collection not unlike the immigrant''s initiation into a Viennese supermarket—''beautiful fruit in precious wrappers / Warhol cans of tomato soup / phallic bananas without a scratch or blemish.''"—Stephanie Dickinson "Anna Halberstadt is a posthumous daughter of Jewish Vilne, also called Vilnius (in Lithuanian) and Wilno (in Polish). ''I forget words not in one, but three languages,'' she says wryly: her poems are permeated by hues of Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian. Sometimes they are sprinkled by entire sentences in Lithuanian. For Anna Halberstadt, as for many of its former inhabitants, Vilnius became a city of ''disappeared people, disappeared voices.'' Always in transition, she catches the ever- changing context of her life in a series of exact and fascinating images bringing to mind the poetry of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, as well as the fiction of Isaac Babel. Partly reminiscences, partly diary entries, partly meditations, Anna Halberstadt''s poems remain pure and tragic works of art."—Tomas Venclova "Anna Halberstadt''s VILNIUS DIARY is a book of journeys in actuality and memory... Here are some lines that indicate the bitterness the poet, who is a therapist, has overcome: ''Fall in love again / for a new love / always remembers and reflects the previous one / in a crooked mirror. / Eventually differences will blur, / eventually you will feel / you love all of them / past and present / or don''t care for any / what the hell...''"—Michael Graves

Contemporary East European Poetry

Contemporary East European Poetry PDF Author: Emery Edward George
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195086368
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
An anthology featuring 160 poets writing in 15 languages. By the standards of Western Europe, the subjects are heavy on social and political issues, which only reflects the difference between the two Europes.

Allegoresis

Allegoresis PDF Author: Longxi Zhang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501711296
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Why is it that a text, particularly a canonical text, is often said to contain a meaning different from what it literally says? How did allegorical readings arise and develop? By looking at such examples as Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Song of Songs and traditional Chinese commentaries on the Confucian classic Book of Poetry, Zhang Longxi discusses allegorical readings from a broad perspective that bridges the usual East/West cultural divide and examines their social and political implications. His approach is wide-ranging, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary, exploring allegoresis with regard to religion, philosophy, and literature. In his inquiry into allegory and allegorical interpretation, Zhang examines the idea of a self-explanatory text of the Bible as conceived by Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther; discusses the importance of the literal basis of textual interpretation; and takes up the question of moral responsibility and political allegiance. Zhang, who regards utopia as an allegory of social and political ideas, explores how utopian visions vary in their Chinese and Western expressions, in the process commenting on contemporary literary theory and political readings of literature past and present.