06/02/2003
A Poet Brings Persian Literature and Culture to Americans
Professor Dick Davis Teaches Persian Studies at Ohio State University
Dick Davis, poet and professor of Persian Studies at Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus, Ohio, says it was poetry that first attracted him to Persian history, culture, and language.
"I was fascinated by the poetry," Davis says. "Persian culture has one of the great poetries of the world."
Davis is talking about his own journey as a scholar, and about the flowering of the Persian studies program at Ohio State. Born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945, Davis left his native country and his university studies in the 1960s intending to become a poet. After teaching English in Europe and the U.S., Davis headed off to Iran, drawn by the descriptive letters of an archeologist friend there.
"I had a friend in Iran who was an archeologist, and he sent me these letters which were ecstatic, about what a wonderful place it was, how marvelous it was," Davis recalls. "So I thought, well, I'll try to get a job in Iran. So I went there on a two-year contract to teach English at Tehran University, knowing very little about the culture, knowing no Persian at all."
While in Tehran, he met Afkham Darbandi, who later became his wife. After their marriage, Davis stayed on teaching in Iran for eight years. Because the universities in Iran were closed after the 1979 revolution and there was no work for Davis, he and his wife left Iran for England, where Davis returned to graduate school to learn more about medieval Persian literature.
"I realized there was this enormous, virtually untranslated wonderful medieval poetic literature that I could get my hands on. I felt that that was what I wanted to do with my life," Davis says. Davis earned his PhD in medieval Persian at the University of Manchester in 1988. Later that year, he took a position teaching Persian Studies at Ohio State University.
Asked why this Midwestern university would invest so heavily in a world-class Persian studies program, Davis says Ohio State is working hard to position itself as a national research university. Persian and Middle Eastern Studies are an important part of that effort.
OSU's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures now boasts of three Persian specialists. The department offers instruction in Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and a number of ancient Semitic languages such as Babylonian, Ugaritic and Acadian. In addition, Davis says, there are scholars in other departments who use Persian in their research.
About half the students who take Persian studies at Ohio State tend to be "heritage students," that is, the children of Iranians who have settled in the United States, Davis explains. These students often grow up speaking Persian at home, but cannot read it very well, and they take courses in Persian language and culture to learn more about their parents' culture. Americans who have an academic interest in Persian culture and history, and Americans who have married into Persian culture, also take Persian Studies.
Davis says academic interest in Persian studies stems from the fact that Persia had the first world empire, and that Iran is still a major civilization in the Middle East. "For 1200 or 1300 years, Persia was the major power in Western Asia," Davis points out.
He notes that Persian culture influenced all art forms in that part of the world -- literature, poetry, textiles, carpets, paintings, calligraphy, music, architecture and gardens -- for more than a thousand years.
Today, in the 21st century, people are most apt to encounter Iranian culture in the form of films. "The Iranian cinema at the moment is certainly one of the most flourishing and innovative, and praised cinemas in the world," Davis says. Film festivals featuring Iranian films are held regularly across the U.S., including at Ohio State University.
But of all things Persian, it was poetry that captured Davis' heart. An award-winning poet writing in English, Davis has also won acclaim for his translations of Persian poetry into English. In addition to his translations of Persian poetry, Davis has published two volumes of a three-volume project translating the Persian national epic, the "Shahnameh," into English.
Davis calls the Shahnameh, written in the 10th century, "an extraordinary text, wonderfully written, great stories."
"The Shahnameh was made by Ferdowsi, who put together all these legends and versified them. And it's the most marvelous hodge-podge of stuff," Davis says. "It's got a whole mythology about the beginning of the world, which is quite separate from the Islamic mythology, it's completely Persian, not Arab at all. It's got a wonderful legendary section, which is all about heroes, like Homer or the Indian epics, and then it has a quasi-historical section, in which many of the people in the poem are actual people. We know that these people actually lived, but the stories about them are often very romanticized."
Davis explains that when Iran fell under the Muslim conquest in the seventh century, the ancient Persian culture seemed in danger of disappearing. Ferdowsi helped preserve that culture and enabled it to survive within an Islamic society, Davis says. "It's an incredible achievement. He brought across the pre-Islamic culture of Iran into the Islamic world. And Ferdowsi himself was a Muslim. He's not against Islam at all, it's just that he doesn't want to lose or forget what was there before."
Davis is currently working on the third volume of his translation of the major stories from the Shahnameh. He has also recently published a book on connections between medieval Persian Romances and Greek literature, called "Panthea's Children" (Bibliotheca Persica, New York, 2003).
"The Greeks and the Persians fought each other, and much of our notion of ancient history, and the civilizations that developed out of that history and so feed into our own, is based on that conflict," Davis says. "But there was never the kind of complete cultural separation that is often implied by such a view of history. On the contrary, there was a fairly constant cultural interchange between the two cultures, as the literatures demonstrate, and our own cultures have developed out of that intermingling."
In 2001, Davis received the first annual AIIS (American Institute of Iranian Studies) Prize for his translation of a Persian novel, "My Uncle Napoleon," by Iraj Pezeshkzad. He and his wife Afkham Darbandi also received the second annual AIIS Prize for their translation of the 12th century poet Attar's "The Conference of the Birds." In 2002, he received a Distinguished Scholar award at Ohio State. Reflecting on his life's journey, which has led him from Portsmouth, England to Tehran to Columbus, Ohio, he sees the award not only as a personal honor, but also as recognition of the importance of Persian studies at the university he now calls home.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
