Two Poets, Eight Centuries, One Poetic Masterpiece

Save Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of those books that some scholars love to be snotty about. Literary critics of a certain stamp dismiss it as bad poetry, apparently on the grounds that people love it who don’t otherwise read poetry.* Persian linguists rightly point out that Fitzgerald’s translation…

Read More

This Isn’t a Blog Post.

It’s a link to a website I discovered when I was procrastinating on my Really Big Project.*  Global Middle Ages is the home site for a group of  projects that began with a teaching experiment at the University of Texas.  The charge was “to see the world whole in a large swathe of time—as a…

Read More

Holiday Rerun: The Other First Thanksgiving

Unless you live in the American Southwest, the grade school version of American history* typically leaps from Columbus and 1492 straight to 1620, when the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. There is a vague awareness that the Spanish and the French were “out there” doing something, but the story focuses on the development of the thirteen…

Read More