Sir William Jones Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Tongues (1772)
Sir William Jones Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Tongues (1772) Edited by Rudolf Beck with an introduction, footnotes and a bibliography Augsburg: Universität Augsburg, 2009 ___________________________________ Contents Introduction ii A note on this edition v Acknowledgements v Sir William Jones, Poems [1] Select Bibliography 95 ii Introduction1 1. Sir William Jones’s Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Tongues (1772) is the early work of an author who is otherwise known as a pioneer in oriental studies, in fields as diverse as liguistics, literature, history, archaeology, natural history, and the law. The volume contains two important essays by Jones, “On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations” and “On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative,” and a number of poems. Five of these are ori- ginal poems by Jones. With the exception of two juvenilia – “Arcadia, a Pastoral Poem” and “Caissa, Or, The Game of Chess” – their subject-matter is recognizably “oriental.” Besides, there are translations: a Turkish Ode by the Ottoman poet Mesihi, and “A Persian Song of Ha- fiz,” which was later to become popular with the Romantic poets and to inspire Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan, and was even reprinted in The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century English Verse of 1926. Interestingly, “A Persian Song of Hafiz” is juxtaposed with poems and extracts from poems by Petrarca, so that the reader might compare the manner of the Asiatick poets with that of the Italians, many of whom have written in the true spirit of the Easterns; some of the Persian songs have a striking resemblance to the sonnets of Pe- trarch (Preface, iv).
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