Daily Archives: July 17th, 2011
Ghazals
Poetic forms know no cultural or linguistic barriers. Thus there are not only rhymes and meters, but also odes and sonnets, elegies and story-poems in English and French, in German and Italian and more. Likewise, one can find ghazals in many languages: not just in Arabic and Persian where they originated, but in Turkish and …
Thoughts Provoked by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 -1400)
Many decades ago I had skimmed through some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in the modern intelligible version, for sure. I recall how that reading, with a version of medieval English on another page, made me aware of the way languages change with time. What we write today will be hardly understood by people five hundred …
