#poetry #persian_poetry #padshah_khatun
"A member of the Mongol nobility that ruled Iran in the thirteenth century, Padshah Khatun was famous for her verses, her beauty, and her ruthlessness. She was married twice, first to Abaka Khan (the greatgrandson of Genghis Khan), who became the country’s ruler in 1282 and died shortly afterward, and then to the crown prince, her stepson Gaykhatu, whom the fifteenth-century historian Mirkhond characterized as being too “addicted to wine, women, and sodomy” to rule, which meant that Padshah Khatun became the de facto head of state."
- Dick Davis, The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women
______________________________
Possessed of untold sovereignty, beneath my veil
I am a woman whose good deeds will never fail;
Even for breezes that the morning wafts to me
It’s hard to pass the curtain of my chastity—
I keep my shadowed beauty from the sun, whose light
Illumines towns, bazaars, and every common sight.
Not every woman with two yards of veil can reign,
Not every crowned head’s worthy of a king’s domain—
I am descended from great kings, if earthly powers
Belong to anyone they are assuredly ours.
- Padshah Khatun
@figmentera
"A member of the Mongol nobility that ruled Iran in the thirteenth century, Padshah Khatun was famous for her verses, her beauty, and her ruthlessness. She was married twice, first to Abaka Khan (the greatgrandson of Genghis Khan), who became the country’s ruler in 1282 and died shortly afterward, and then to the crown prince, her stepson Gaykhatu, whom the fifteenth-century historian Mirkhond characterized as being too “addicted to wine, women, and sodomy” to rule, which meant that Padshah Khatun became the de facto head of state."
- Dick Davis, The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women
______________________________
Possessed of untold sovereignty, beneath my veil
I am a woman whose good deeds will never fail;
Even for breezes that the morning wafts to me
It’s hard to pass the curtain of my chastity—
I keep my shadowed beauty from the sun, whose light
Illumines towns, bazaars, and every common sight.
Not every woman with two yards of veil can reign,
Not every crowned head’s worthy of a king’s domain—
I am descended from great kings, if earthly powers
Belong to anyone they are assuredly ours.
- Padshah Khatun
@figmentera
🔥1
#poetry #persian_poetry #jahan_malek_khatun
Come here a moment, sit with me, don’t sleep tonight,
Consider well my heart’s unhappy plight, tonight;
And let your face’s presence lighten me, and give
The loveliness of moonlight to the night, tonight.
Be kind now to this stranger, and don’t imitate
Life as it leaves me in its headlong flight, tonight.
Be sweet to me now as your eyes are sweet, don’t twist
Away now like your curls, to left and right, tonight;
Don’t sweep me from you like the dust before your door;
Dowse all the flames of longing you ignite, tonight.
Why do you treat me with such cruelty now, my friend,
So that my tears obliterate my sight, tonight?
If, for a moment, I could see you in my dreams
I’d know the sum of all this world’s delight, tonight.
- Jahan Malek Khatun
@figmentera
Come here a moment, sit with me, don’t sleep tonight,
Consider well my heart’s unhappy plight, tonight;
And let your face’s presence lighten me, and give
The loveliness of moonlight to the night, tonight.
Be kind now to this stranger, and don’t imitate
Life as it leaves me in its headlong flight, tonight.
Be sweet to me now as your eyes are sweet, don’t twist
Away now like your curls, to left and right, tonight;
Don’t sweep me from you like the dust before your door;
Dowse all the flames of longing you ignite, tonight.
Why do you treat me with such cruelty now, my friend,
So that my tears obliterate my sight, tonight?
If, for a moment, I could see you in my dreams
I’d know the sum of all this world’s delight, tonight.
- Jahan Malek Khatun
@figmentera
#poetry #persian_poetry #forugh_farrokhzad
Lost
by Forugh Farrokhzad
Pity that after all my insanity,
I do not believe I’m well again,
for she has died in me, and I
have become idle, silent, and weary.
I keep asking the wretched mirror:
Tell me, who am I in your eyes?
But I can vividly see that I am not
even a shade of the woman I used to be.
Like a Hindu dancer I stamp coquettish feet,
but I am dancing on my own grave.
I illumine this sad ruin
with flames of my regrets.
I don’t ask how to get to the sunlit city,
for no doubt I’m in a grave’s abyss.
I possess a jewel but have in terror
concealed it in a marsh’s deeps.
I go, but I don’t ask myself what road,
which home, what destination?
I yield kisses but don’t even know
who stands as a god in my unglued heart.
Whoever she was, the look in my eyes
changed when she died in me,
as if the night’s two cold hands
drew my unsettled soul into its embrace.
Yes, this is me, but so what?
She who was in me is gone, gone.
I mumble furiously, insanely,
Who was she? Who?
@figmentera
Lost
by Forugh Farrokhzad
Pity that after all my insanity,
I do not believe I’m well again,
for she has died in me, and I
have become idle, silent, and weary.
I keep asking the wretched mirror:
Tell me, who am I in your eyes?
But I can vividly see that I am not
even a shade of the woman I used to be.
Like a Hindu dancer I stamp coquettish feet,
but I am dancing on my own grave.
I illumine this sad ruin
with flames of my regrets.
I don’t ask how to get to the sunlit city,
for no doubt I’m in a grave’s abyss.
I possess a jewel but have in terror
concealed it in a marsh’s deeps.
I go, but I don’t ask myself what road,
which home, what destination?
I yield kisses but don’t even know
who stands as a god in my unglued heart.
Whoever she was, the look in my eyes
changed when she died in me,
as if the night’s two cold hands
drew my unsettled soul into its embrace.
Yes, this is me, but so what?
She who was in me is gone, gone.
I mumble furiously, insanely,
Who was she? Who?
@figmentera
#poetry #persian_poetry #omar_khayyam
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour’d it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d—
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”
- Omar Khayyam
@figmentera
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour’d it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d—
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”
- Omar Khayyam
@figmentera
#philosophy #schopenhauer
Thus we hear that suicide is the most cowardly of acts, that only a madman would commit it, and similar insipidities; or the senseless assertion that suicide is ‘wrong’, though it is obvious there is nothing in the world a man has a more incontestable right to than his own life and person. Let us for once allow moral feelings to decide this question, and compare the impression made on us by the news that an acquaintance of ours has committed a crime, for instance a murder, an act of cruelty, a betrayal, a theft, with that produced by the news that he has voluntarily ended his life. While the former will evoke a lively indignation, anger, the demand for punishment or revenge, the latter will excite pity and sorrow, which are more likely to be accompanied by admiration for his courage than by moral disapproval. Who has not had acquaintances, friends, relatives who have departed this world voluntarily? – and is one supposed to think of them with repugnance, as if they were criminals? In my opinion it ought rather to be demanded of the clergy that they tell us by what authority they go to their pulpits or their desks and brand as a crime an action which many people we honour and love have performed and deny an honourable burial to those who have departed this world voluntarily – since they cannot point to a single biblical authority, nor produce a single sound philosophical argument; it being made clear that what one wants are reasons and not empty phrases or abuse.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
@figmentera
Thus we hear that suicide is the most cowardly of acts, that only a madman would commit it, and similar insipidities; or the senseless assertion that suicide is ‘wrong’, though it is obvious there is nothing in the world a man has a more incontestable right to than his own life and person. Let us for once allow moral feelings to decide this question, and compare the impression made on us by the news that an acquaintance of ours has committed a crime, for instance a murder, an act of cruelty, a betrayal, a theft, with that produced by the news that he has voluntarily ended his life. While the former will evoke a lively indignation, anger, the demand for punishment or revenge, the latter will excite pity and sorrow, which are more likely to be accompanied by admiration for his courage than by moral disapproval. Who has not had acquaintances, friends, relatives who have departed this world voluntarily? – and is one supposed to think of them with repugnance, as if they were criminals? In my opinion it ought rather to be demanded of the clergy that they tell us by what authority they go to their pulpits or their desks and brand as a crime an action which many people we honour and love have performed and deny an honourable burial to those who have departed this world voluntarily – since they cannot point to a single biblical authority, nor produce a single sound philosophical argument; it being made clear that what one wants are reasons and not empty phrases or abuse.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
@figmentera
🤔1
#philosophy #schopenhauer #dark_fun
Admin:
One short glance at his Essays on Women will reveal why Schopenhauer died unmarried and probably a virgin.
👇
—————————————————
1. One needs only to see the way she is built to realize that woman is not intended for great mental or for great physical labour. She expiates the guilt of life not through activity but through suffering, through the pains of childbirth, caring for the child and subjection to the man, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion. Great suffering, joy, exertion, is not for her: her life should how by more quietly, trivially, gently than the man's without being essentially happier or unhappier.
————————————————-
2. Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word big children, their whole lives long: a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the actual human being, ‘man’. One has only to watch a girl playing with a child, dancing and singing with it the whole day, and then ask oneself what, with the best will in the world, a man could do in her place.
—————————————————-
3. In the girl nature has had in view what could in theatrical terms be called a stage-effect: it has provided her with super-abundant beauty and charm for a few years at the expense of the whole remainder of her life, so that during these years she may so capture the imagination of a man that he is carried away into undertaking to support her honourably in some form or another for the rest of her life, a step he would seem hardly likely to take for purely rational considerations. Thus nature has equipped women, as it has all its creatures, with the tools and weapons she needs for securing her existence, and at just the time she needs them; in doing which nature has acted with its usual economy. For just as the female ant loses its wings after mating, since they are then superfluous, indeed harmful to the business of raising the family, so the woman usually loses her beauty after one or two childbeds, and probably for the same reason.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
@figmentera
Admin:
One short glance at his Essays on Women will reveal why Schopenhauer died unmarried and probably a virgin.
👇
—————————————————
1. One needs only to see the way she is built to realize that woman is not intended for great mental or for great physical labour. She expiates the guilt of life not through activity but through suffering, through the pains of childbirth, caring for the child and subjection to the man, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion. Great suffering, joy, exertion, is not for her: her life should how by more quietly, trivially, gently than the man's without being essentially happier or unhappier.
————————————————-
2. Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word big children, their whole lives long: a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the actual human being, ‘man’. One has only to watch a girl playing with a child, dancing and singing with it the whole day, and then ask oneself what, with the best will in the world, a man could do in her place.
—————————————————-
3. In the girl nature has had in view what could in theatrical terms be called a stage-effect: it has provided her with super-abundant beauty and charm for a few years at the expense of the whole remainder of her life, so that during these years she may so capture the imagination of a man that he is carried away into undertaking to support her honourably in some form or another for the rest of her life, a step he would seem hardly likely to take for purely rational considerations. Thus nature has equipped women, as it has all its creatures, with the tools and weapons she needs for securing her existence, and at just the time she needs them; in doing which nature has acted with its usual economy. For just as the female ant loses its wings after mating, since they are then superfluous, indeed harmful to the business of raising the family, so the woman usually loses her beauty after one or two childbeds, and probably for the same reason.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
@figmentera
#poetry #persian_poetry #forugh_farrokhzad
Rebellious God
by Forugh Farrokhzad
If I were God, I’d call on the angels one night
to release the round sun into the darkness’s furnace,
angrily command the world garden servants
to prune the yellow leaf moon from the night’s branch.
At midnight among the curtains of my divine palace,
I’d upturn the world with my furious fingers,
and with my hands, tired of their thousand-year stillness,
I’d stuff the mountains in the seas’ open mouths.
I’d unbind the feet of a thousand fevered stars,
scatter fire’s blood through the forests’ mute veins.
rend the curtains of smoke so that in the wind’s roar
fire’s daughter can throw herself drunk into the forest’s arms.
I’d blow into the night’s magic reed
until the rivers rise from thier beds like thirsty serpents,
and weary of a lifetime of sliding on a damp chest
pour into the dim marsh of the night sky.
Sweetly I’d call on the winds to release
the flower perfume boats on the rivers of night.
I’d open the graves so that myriad wandering souls
could once again seek life in the confines of bodies.
If I were God, I’d call on the angels one night
to boil the water of eternal life in Hell’s cauldron,
and with a burning torch chase out the virtuous herd
that grazes in the green pastures of an unchaste heaven.
Tired of being a prude, I’d seek Satan’s bed at midnight
and find refuge in the declivity of breaking laws.
I’d happily exchange the golden crown of divinity
for the dark, aching embrace of a sin.
@figmentera
Rebellious God
by Forugh Farrokhzad
If I were God, I’d call on the angels one night
to release the round sun into the darkness’s furnace,
angrily command the world garden servants
to prune the yellow leaf moon from the night’s branch.
At midnight among the curtains of my divine palace,
I’d upturn the world with my furious fingers,
and with my hands, tired of their thousand-year stillness,
I’d stuff the mountains in the seas’ open mouths.
I’d unbind the feet of a thousand fevered stars,
scatter fire’s blood through the forests’ mute veins.
rend the curtains of smoke so that in the wind’s roar
fire’s daughter can throw herself drunk into the forest’s arms.
I’d blow into the night’s magic reed
until the rivers rise from thier beds like thirsty serpents,
and weary of a lifetime of sliding on a damp chest
pour into the dim marsh of the night sky.
Sweetly I’d call on the winds to release
the flower perfume boats on the rivers of night.
I’d open the graves so that myriad wandering souls
could once again seek life in the confines of bodies.
If I were God, I’d call on the angels one night
to boil the water of eternal life in Hell’s cauldron,
and with a burning torch chase out the virtuous herd
that grazes in the green pastures of an unchaste heaven.
Tired of being a prude, I’d seek Satan’s bed at midnight
and find refuge in the declivity of breaking laws.
I’d happily exchange the golden crown of divinity
for the dark, aching embrace of a sin.
@figmentera
#poetry
Wesley Before One
by Wesley Kistler
before I was one I heard every sound
as a sound that had never been heard,
before I was one I saw every light
as a light separate from dark, color
hidden in a place I had not been.
Before I was one I used feet to waken
in water, to pedal through air,
hands a means to release the hunger in my heart.
From there I came to the bed where I cried
and called out sounds without tears.
People did not exist, nothing beyond
need and the place of a voice. I could not
ask and I could not refuse, there was
only light to reach to, stairs of limitless
height to lie beside. These are not memories
but tracks left on my eyes, marks on my lungs
and my continual turning toward
those arms of warmth where I know continuous warmth
@figmentera
Wesley Before One
by Wesley Kistler
before I was one I heard every sound
as a sound that had never been heard,
before I was one I saw every light
as a light separate from dark, color
hidden in a place I had not been.
Before I was one I used feet to waken
in water, to pedal through air,
hands a means to release the hunger in my heart.
From there I came to the bed where I cried
and called out sounds without tears.
People did not exist, nothing beyond
need and the place of a voice. I could not
ask and I could not refuse, there was
only light to reach to, stairs of limitless
height to lie beside. These are not memories
but tracks left on my eyes, marks on my lungs
and my continual turning toward
those arms of warmth where I know continuous warmth
@figmentera
The False Prophet, Sembene Ousmane.pdf
660.1 KB
#short_story #fiction #african_short_story
The False Prophet
by Sembene Ousmane
—————————————-
"Rage possessed him, and he ran off like a madman into the desert, his torn boubou flapping in the wind. He had just realized that there is no need to believe in Allah in order to be a thief!"
- Taken from the Text
@figmentera
The False Prophet
by Sembene Ousmane
—————————————-
"Rage possessed him, and he ran off like a madman into the desert, his torn boubou flapping in the wind. He had just realized that there is no need to believe in Allah in order to be a thief!"
- Taken from the Text
@figmentera
#poetry #persian_poetry #simin_Behbahani
For What?
by Simin Behbahani
For what? That I stay for two hundred years
looking at cruelty and corruption,
that I see each day through to its end
each night through till dawn,
that each dawn from behind the window
I see the mocking face of the sun
and look at another day
with immense disgust
before bitter tea has touched my lips
then once again the writhing squirming struggle . . .
that I go over the tale once again
of the book of Balkh’s poet67
a cage, the whole world a cage, a cage
I think of fleeing
of pulling my cloak round my body
my head scarf over my hair . . .
to the streets of nowhere.
In the midst of depravity and misery, in this smoke,
this sorrow for all that is and is not
I begin my complaint against oppression.
Although you’ve called me again
all our friends are suffering
shall I leave them in the midst of disaster?
For what? That I enjoy myself again
For what? That your good doctors
make me well again
and I take the risk, suitcase in hand
that I’m ready to travel again
that I come, and my heart is renewed
that I come with my eyes unclouded68
that I come and among your people
I once again make a stir with my poems
But I haven’t fallen into this snowy cloud
in such a way that I’ll get out again
I don’t imagine I’ll reach safety, that I’ll emerge
from this profound disaster.
My old friend, dear friend,
leave me in this dream of winter—
it’s possible, who knows,
that I can soothe my soul and body.
If a gentle spring breeze
bringing the green of new growth
should waft across my dried-up nerves
my body might bear fruit.
@figmentera
For What?
by Simin Behbahani
For what? That I stay for two hundred years
looking at cruelty and corruption,
that I see each day through to its end
each night through till dawn,
that each dawn from behind the window
I see the mocking face of the sun
and look at another day
with immense disgust
before bitter tea has touched my lips
then once again the writhing squirming struggle . . .
that I go over the tale once again
of the book of Balkh’s poet67
a cage, the whole world a cage, a cage
I think of fleeing
of pulling my cloak round my body
my head scarf over my hair . . .
to the streets of nowhere.
In the midst of depravity and misery, in this smoke,
this sorrow for all that is and is not
I begin my complaint against oppression.
Although you’ve called me again
all our friends are suffering
shall I leave them in the midst of disaster?
For what? That I enjoy myself again
For what? That your good doctors
make me well again
and I take the risk, suitcase in hand
that I’m ready to travel again
that I come, and my heart is renewed
that I come with my eyes unclouded68
that I come and among your people
I once again make a stir with my poems
But I haven’t fallen into this snowy cloud
in such a way that I’ll get out again
I don’t imagine I’ll reach safety, that I’ll emerge
from this profound disaster.
My old friend, dear friend,
leave me in this dream of winter—
it’s possible, who knows,
that I can soothe my soul and body.
If a gentle spring breeze
bringing the green of new growth
should waft across my dried-up nerves
my body might bear fruit.
@figmentera
👍1
Whatsistname (House of Day, House of Night), Tokarczuk, Olga.pdf
619.9 KB
#fiction #short_story #olga_tokarczuk
Whasitsname
from "House of Day, House of Night"
written by Olga Tokarczuk
——————————————-
"The next day he sheepishly hovered about outside the presbytery. Finally the priest came bowling along at high speed, sidestepping patches of melting snow on his way to the church. Whatsisname wasn't stupid, he didn't come straight out with it. 'What would you do, Father, if you were haunted by a ghost?' he asked. The priest gave him a look of surprise and then his gaze wandered up to the church roof, where some endless repairs were under way."
- Taken from the Text
@figmentera
Whasitsname
from "House of Day, House of Night"
written by Olga Tokarczuk
——————————————-
"The next day he sheepishly hovered about outside the presbytery. Finally the priest came bowling along at high speed, sidestepping patches of melting snow on his way to the church. Whatsisname wasn't stupid, he didn't come straight out with it. 'What would you do, Father, if you were haunted by a ghost?' he asked. The priest gave him a look of surprise and then his gaze wandered up to the church roof, where some endless repairs were under way."
- Taken from the Text
@figmentera