On The Margins

Friday January 30, 2009

[ Art (هنر) ] Modern Rendition of a Classical Theme

I blogged about it here.

2009-01-30 09:03:10.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art music persian poetry

Wednesday January 17, 2007

[ Culture ] 800 Years Later at Stanford, 1400 Years Later in San Jose

A colleague sent me a reminder that Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi (1207–73)'s 800th birthday celebration at Stanford University will be held on Saturday January 27^th, 2007. Mahmoud Zolfonoun will perform some muscial pieces, several Mawlana scholars will hold a panel discussion, and Robert Bly will be reading some translations of Mawlana.

To some readers, I've promised my first podcast will be a reading of the first few verses from Mawlana's Masnavi in the original Persian, followed by my own rough English translations. (Note that I'm by no means a Masnavi scholar. So, my reading and translation will only give you a very rough idea of  a very small corner of Mawlana's poetry. Masnavi, by itself, contains thousands of lines of poetry and Divan-e Shams, even more.)

The tickets for the Stanford event, including the catered dinner, are priced at $90 per person.

An English translation of Masnavi can be found here.

That same Saturday also coincides with the day of Ashura, the 10^th day of the lunar month of Muharram, marked by Muslims since some 1400 years ago as a day of commitment to justice.

This year, I hear there may be a local Ashura procession in downtown San Jose. See here for BBC's account of Ashura, and here, for another scholarly account of its 'recent' history. The BBC notes that "Ashura has been a day of fasting for Sunni Muslims since the days of the early Muslim community. It marks two historical events: the day Nuh (Noah) left the Ark, and the day that Musa (Moses) was saved from the Egyptians by Allah. Shi'a Muslims in particular use the day to commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet (pbuh), in 680 CE."

2007-01-17 22:24:25.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
persian poetry rumi stanford

Tuesday May 02, 2006

[ Philosophy ] Lecture on Zoroastrian Revelations

A colleague just pointed me to an upcoming lecture on Zoroastrian revelations and poetry.

Sponsored by the International and Comparative Studies Division at Stanford University, the lecture will be given by Professor Martin Schwartz of U.C. Berkeley.

I know Schwartz a bit through a seminar I took with him about a dozen years ago. (We had only three students in the seminar.)

Schwartz is very modest and a great professor in his field and he can have some very surprising stuff in his talks and public lectures. The best may be to take a seminar with him, if you can help it and are close to Berkeley. (I think this can be arranged through UC Extension for one of the official UC courses he teaches.)

The graduate seminar I took with Schwartz in Berkelely focused on a piece of Pahlavi text, some 1100 years old. We worked, specifically, on the first few pages of DeenKard, a Zoroastrian text of sacred knowledge collected by Zoroastrian scholars between 1400 to 1100 years ago. The text, if I remember correctly, while in middle Persian (Pahlavi) is written in Aramaic script.

We spent about a semester on 5 pages of DeenKard --- a time totally well spent and well deserved.

This was in spring of 1993 while I was doing graduate studies in logic and methodology of science at Berkeley. (L&MS was a gradudate group combining philosophy, math and computer science.)

Because I wanted to better understand scholarship on Deenkard, I took one year worth of intensive German in the summer of 1993.

I should also note that, concurrently with Schwartz' class, I was also taking a seminar in the philosophy department at Berkeley on "Ethics". In this philosophy course, we read about 2000 pages of western philosophical works on "ethics," and I can tell you with great confidence that I learned far more about ethics from those 5 pages of Pahlavi text in DeenKard than I did form 2000 pages moder philosophical works on ethics.

Here's the announcement for the May 11, 2006, lecture and a few paragraphs about Schwartz: " Revelations of Zarathushtra: Poetry of Mysteries, Mysteries of Poetry"

2006-05-02 10:43:26.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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