Pushing Boundaries

After a longer-than-planned hiatus, I'm very excited to say that Paradise Tossed has returned. As you can see, the blog has a new home and a new look. Though the design will continue to change in the next few weeks as we adapt it to the content we want to provide, what hasn't changed is the ultimate point of the site: to showcase the myriad ways poetry and technology converge.

Over the next few posts, you'll be introduced to the site's new writers. It occurred to me that this project will really only thrive when different perspectives play a part. My new collaborators will bring insights and experiences that I can't, and we'll all benefit from our differences. Now on to today's post:

I'm sure by now anyone reading this has heard of the unrest in Iran. Our hearts go out to Iran's protesters and to the families of those who have given their lives for such a noble cause. Thanks to today's social media, particularly Twitter, the people of Iran have been able to reach out to the world and keep all of us informed of their struggle.

The internet has become a place where the eyes of the world have turned to Iran and its culture. With this in mind, I thought it would be nice to showcase some sources of poetry written in Persian. Poetry is one of the primary ways in which a culture as a whole reaches out and gives the world an impression of the things that it values. Thanks to the online translation tools available today, this poetry is available to us immediately, rather than after a particular poem has been selected for translation "by hand".

Persian culture is so rich, and their poetic tradition reaches back to the ancient world. I don't often recommend Wikipedia for poetry resources, but in this case their article on Persian literature gives a nice summary of the literary world of Iran for those first learning about Iran's poetic traditions. The article also includes a number of great links to sources of Persian poetry across the internet, in both English and Persian (Farsi). Don't be afraid to use Google Translate on the sites written in Persian to get a fair English translation of the poems there.

The website Iranian.com also has an excellent poetry section that showcases both authors and individual poems. And one of my favorite webpages for Persian poetry showcases Iranian women poets and samples poems from the book Modern Persian Poetry by Mahmud Kianush.

The important thing, beyond visiting these sites in particular, is to know that these kinds of resources exist and are readily available to people all over the world. One of the best ways to understand a different culture is to examine their poetry, and in this political climate the poetic voice of Iran has never been more important.