Erin and Iran : Cultural Encounters between the Irish and the Iranians
- Boston, Massachusetts Ilex Foundation Washington, D.C. : Center for Hellenic Studies Trustees for Harvard University ; Cambridge, Massachusetts 2015
- xv, 208 pages ; 23 cm
- ILEX Foundation Series .
In Erin and Iran, ten essays by North American and European scholars discuss parallel themes in and interactions between Irish and Iranian cultures. In the first section three essays explore common elements in pre-Christian Irish and pre-Islamic Iranian mythologies, common elements that have often been pointed out by scholars of Indo-European mythology but rarely examined in detail. In the following section four essays address literary subjects, ranging from medieval romances such as Tristan and Isolde and Vis and Ramin to twentieth-century novels such as James Joyce's Ulysses and Simin Daneshvar's Savushun. In the last section three nineteenth-century travelogues are presented, two written by Irish travelers to Iran and one written by an Indo-Persian traveler to Ireland. Together, these studies constitute the first-ever collection of articles dealing with cultural encounters between the Irish and the Iranians
Introduction -- Joseph Falaky Nagy: The conqueror worm in Irish and Persian literature -- John McDonald: Building bulls and crafting cows: narratives of bovine fabrication from Iran, Ireland, and in-between -- Olga Davidson: Parallel heroic themes in the medieval Irish cattle raid of Cooley and the medieval Persian Book of kings -- Dick Davis: A trout in the milk: Vis and Ramin and Tristan and Isolde -- Oliver Scharbrodt: From Hafiz: Irish Orientalism, Persian poetry, and W.B. Yeats -- Todd Lawson: Joycean modernism in a nineteenth-century quatrain commentary: a comparison of the Bab's Qayyum al-Asma with Joyce's Ulysses -- M.R. Ghanoonparvar: Sharing poetic sensitivity and misery: encounters of Iranians with the Irish in travel writings and fiction translated by H.E. Chehabi -- An Indo-Persian in Ireland, anno 1799: Mirza Abu Taleb Khan -- David James: An Irish visitor to the court of the Shah of Persia in 1835: extract from the unpublished diary of Sir Francis Hopkins of Athboy -- Brendan Mcamara: An Irishwoman in Tehran, 1849-853: identity, religion, and empire.