71. Troilus and Criseyde.

Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende,
Shal neither been ywriten nor ysonge
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende.
O, rolled shal I been on many a tonge;
Thurghout the world my belle shal be ronge;
And wommen most wol hate me of alle.
Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle!

(Alas! Until the end of the world, no good word will be written or sung about me, because these books will utterly shame me. Oh, I will be rolled on many a tongue, throughout the world my bell will be rung — and women will hate me most of all. Alas, that such a thing should happen to me!)

Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde tells a love story — if by “love” you mean romantic obsession, coercion, and worse — all set during the Trojan War. Chris and Suzanne talk about how this book explores the interiority of its characters, how it depicts independence and politics, and how it explores the way narratives unfold within systems of tropes and traditions.

Show Notes.

Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (in the original and in a modernization).

Other works by Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales; The Riverside Chaucer (i.e., his complete works).

Our episode on the Iliad.

(The Spouter-Inn will in fact turn five years old in January.)

Boccaccio: Il Filostrato.

Our episodes on Paradiso, Consolation of Philosophy, and the Metamorphoses.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

70b. Bonus: Dick Davis on Translating Persian Poetry.

There’s a feeling, I think, in English poetry that you have to be original. That feeling isn’t really there in Persian poetry until the very modern period. Then it is. But before then, there’s a kind of sense that there’s this vast treasury of possibilities in poetry which everybody has used—and you can use them too.

Dick Davis is an award-winning poet and translator, famous for his translations of medieval Persian poetry. He has translated Attar’s The Conference of the Birds and Nezami’s Layli and Majnun (both covered on The Spouter-Inn), as well as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and his most recent translation is The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women.

He joins Chris and Suzanne to talk about reading and translating Persian poetry, how his work in translation has influenced his own poetry, and the specific challenges in translating Layli and Majnun.

Show Notes.

Dick Davis’s translations include Layli and Majnun, The Conference of the Birds, and others listed below.

Our episodes on Layli and Majnun and Conference of the Birds.

Fakhraddin Gorgani: Vis and Ramin (trans. Dick Davis).

The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (trans. Dick Davis): hardcover bilingual edition by Mage and English-only paperback by Penguin

Jahan Khatun.

Hafez.

Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (trans. Dick Davis): originally published by Mage, paperback reprint by Penguin, bilingual edition by Mage.

Mughal empire.

Our bonus episodes with Emily Wilson and Sassan Tabatabai.

Nezami: Khosrow and Shirin.

“Seek a Poet who your way do's bend, / And chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend” (Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscomon, in An Essay on Translated Verse).

Chapman’s Homer.

John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

Nizami’s Khamsa.

On Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

Ferdowsi: Shahnameh (trans. Dick Davis): magnificent hardcover in three volumes, illustrated, published by Mage, paperback single volume by Penguin.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon to help us research and record the show, and you can hang out with us on a friendly little Discord.

70. Layli and Majnun.

Her voice was sweet and liquid, like a stream
That lulls all other streams to sleep and dream;
Her eyes like doe’s eyes, whose dark gaze would make
A lion lie down dazed, and half awake.
She seemed an alphabet of loveliness,
Curved letters were the curling of each tress,
Straight letters were her stature, and her lips
Were like a letter formed as an ellipse,
And all the letters made her like that bowl
That shows the world as an enchanted whole.

The story of Layli and Manjun — sometimes written as Layla and Majnun — was most famously recorded in a book-length poem by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi. Chris and Suzanne consider what the poem has to say about love, mental illness, and fan culture.

Show Notes.

Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun, trans. Dick Davis. [Bookshop.]

Our episode on Conference of the Birds.

Maria Rosa Menocal: Shards of Love: Exile and the Origin of the Lyric.

Our episode on Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus.

Manuscript images of Layli and Majnun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

And images of Majnun at the Ka’aba with a door knocker: 1, 2.

Our episode on Blind Owl.

The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit.

Next: Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. (Bookshop. Also a helpful online modernized and annotated version.)

You can support us through our network, Megaphonic, on Patreon.

69b. Bonus: Mark Sundaram and Aven McMaster on Etymology.

Language is so personal and internal. It exists in your head. You can close your eyes and plug your ears and not engage with the outside world at all, and yet you still have language going on. So I think one of the things that attracts people to [etymology] is, it’s discussing something that they feel they have a part in.

Mark Sundaram is a medievalist and linguist who specializes in the history of the English language. He’s the co-host of the podcast The Endless Knot and the main force behind the Alliterative YouTube channel. Mark has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto and teaches at Laurentian University.

Aven McMaster is a Classicist who studies Latin poetry and Roman social history. She is the co-host of the podcast The Endless Knot Podcast and does production work on the Alliterative channel videos. Aven has a PhD in Classics from the University of Toronto and taught at Thorneloe University at Laurentian.

They join Chris and Suzanne to talk all about etymologies, dictionaries, and etymological dictionaries. What pleasures are found in reading the dictionary? Why are some people so compelled by etymologies? How do etymologies and puns inform classical poetry?

Show Notes.

The Endless Knot on Twitter.

John Ayto: Dictionary of Word Origins.

The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.

Paul Anthony Jones (Haggard Hawks on Twitter): Why Is This A Question?

On Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

Ernest Weekley: The Romance of Words.

Alliterative’s video on nation.

The etymology of feisty.

Ernest Klein: A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.

Anatoly Liberman: Word Origins and How We Know Them.

The Oxford Etymologist.

Calvert Watkins: The American Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

Support The Spouter-Inn and our network, Megaphonic, if you can. Thanks!

69. The Etymologies.

The word “amicus” — meaning “friend” — comes from a derivation, as if it were “animi custos”, or “guardian of the soul”. And this is well put! The term for someone tormented by carnal desire is “amator turpitudinis”, a lover of wickedness. But “friend”, “amicus”, is from the word “hamus”, a hook — in other words, the chain of charity, since hooks hold on.

The Etymologies, by the seventh-century polymath and theologian Isidore of Seville, is a massive medieval encyclopedia, with sections devoted to topics from grammar to farming, mathematics to war. And throughout the book, Isidore attempts to understand the world through etymology—that is, by poking and prodding at words until they reveal their histories and the other words that they’re made of. Chris and Suzanne revel in Isidore’s ear for the materiality of language, as well as his encyclopedic impulse to gather and organize everything.

Show Notes.

Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies. [Bookshop.] [The text in Latin.]

The only other book by Isidore available in English translation seems to be On the Nature of Things.

Our episodes on the Hereford Mappa Mundi, The Aeneid, Beyond a Boundary, Gertrude Stein, and Georges Perec.

Petrus Riga’s Aurora does not seem to be available in English translation.

The Latin text of the opening quote:

Amicus, per derivationem, quasi animi custos. Dictus autem proprie: amator turpitudinis, quia amore torquetur libidinis: amicus ab hamo, id est, a catena caritatis; unde et hami quod teneant.

Suzanne wrote about encyclopedism (and Moby-Dick, naturally) for LitHub.

The Glossa Ordinaria.

The First Grammatical Treatise.

Virgilius Maro Grammaticus.

Next: Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun. [Bookshop.]

Support The Spouter-Inn through our network, Megaphonic if you can. Thank you!