Summary
The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women
prepared and translated by: Dick Davis
(the book is in English)
The Mirror of My Heart is a unique and enchanting collection of eighty-three Persian women poets, many of whom wrote anonymously or were punished for their outspokenness.
One of the first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe'eh, who lived more than a thousand years ago) and from then until today there have been female poets who wrote in the Persian language in almost every generation. Before the twentieth century, they usually came from the extremes of society—many were princesses, some entertainers, but many were wives and daughters who wrote simply for their own amusement, and they were active in many different countries—Iran, India, Afghanistan, and the areas of Central Asia that are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.
From Rabe'eh in the tenth century to Fatemeh Ekhtesari in the twenty-first, the poets featured in The Mirror of My Heart write across the millennium about universal themes such as marriage, children, political climate, death and emancipation, recreating life from hundreds of years ago that is strikingly similar to ours today and providing insight into their experiences as women through different periods of Persian history.
The volume is presented and translated by Dick Davis, a scholar and translator of Persian literature, as well as a gifted poet.
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