Language Overflow

A: What does "You are too generous to trifle with me." mean?

5:59 AM

The context I see is:'You are more than willing to treat me with honesty and respect than to speak indirectly or teasingly. What you said when you spoke to my aunt last night, has given me hope that you might consider me differently now; which I could scarcely have allowed myself to hope for befo...

Can any of you make sense of it?

It's been upvoted twice.

12 hours later…

5:59 PM

@M.A.R. I seem to recall you're Iranian ... know anything about the Shahnameh? Literature SE has an ongoing topic challenge about it this month.

6:10 PM

@Randal'Thor Oof, nice! What Iranian wouldn't know about Ferdowsi's Shahnameh!

(FTR, there are different Shahnames. Ferdowsi's is the most important, so it's just referred to as Shahname)

@M.A.R. :-D great! I wasn't sure how popular/well-known it is over there.

@Randal'Thor It's the most prominent epic in Persian

It's like Homer's Odyssey

I know that much, but literary/historical importance doesn't always translate to popularity in the modern day.

@M.A.R. One of the questions I'm planning to ask is how much and which parts of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh are originally his rather than lifted from older Shahnames.

Since Wikipedia says "The Shahnameh is a monument of poetry and historiography, being mainly the poetical recast of what Ferdowsi, his contemporaries, and his predecessors regarded as the account of Iran's ancient history. Many such accounts already existed in prose, an example being the Abu-Mansuri Shahnameh. A small portion of Ferdowsi's work, in passages scattered throughout the Shahnameh, is entirely of his own conception."

This question is very difficult to answer

My impression from what I've always read in textbooks about him are that of a compiler. He's compiled the stories and legends the Iranians of that time believed and told their grandchildren

The scientific/official language then was Arabic, so he was aiming to preserve Persian culture and Farsi language

IIRC a small part of Shahnameh is truly original. Most of it is a . . . legendarium brought to life in couplets

@M.A.R. Right, similar to the Grimm brothers compiling German folklore for example.

The impression I'm getting in reading it so far is much more like classical oral-tradition mythology than a novel or something deliberately written by one person.

6:23 PM

He initially begun the project by the request of the Ghaznavi Sultan

(I'm reading Helen Zimmern's translation, which I guess is also abridging a lot. The style of English is somewhat reminiscent of Morte d'Arthur, which helps the old-timey feel, although of course that's just a facet of translation.)

Even poets have to eat

But he disliked Turks very much. I dunno how much he despised Arabs, I don't seem to recall anything about that. But he only ever used Persian words in Shahname, no Arabic words

@Randal'Thor TBH I don't think any Persian work is translate-able to English.

@Randal'Thor LMAO that link is blocked

@M.A.R. Here's another link to the same translation.

I used a VPN

@M.A.R. Some things don't change ;-) Modern Iranians still don't seem to like Arabs very much.

6:27 PM

Hmm, reaffirmed. To this bilingual (tri- or tetra-, but let's forget that for now), even though the content seems to be translated fairly accurately at a glance, it doesn't feel the same.

@Randal'Thor Hmm, there seems to be some sort of animosity, but whatever you've heard of it is most probably a gross exaggeration. It seems like the West dislikes Iranian intervention in the Middle East, so I've heard the media covers Arabs that hate Iranians and Iranians that hate Arabs.

@M.A.R. Have you ever seen English translations of Rumi poems? Such a travesty, even more so than other Farsi literature according to what I've read.

I dunno if I can apply the word "propaganda", because that's often what countries that don't align with the west do, or evil regimes like Russia's. But besides a random drunk-like comment, there's no real hate between Iranians and Arabs AFAIK.

@M.A.R. What I've heard of it is from actual Iranians :-) I wouldn't trust western media on such things - most westerners probably think Iranians are Arabs.

Instead, compare, say, 1970s US. People are careless about what they're saying, they're not as careful as people in the western countries whether what they utter is racist or xenophobic

@Randal'Thor IME the actual Iranians often seem as misguided as westerners sometimes. Not saying your Iranian acquaintances are like that, but especially some young people I know know no more than to regurgitate BBC. Even on matters they should know more about. What I do know is Ahvaz is Arabic but nobody seems to hate Ahvaz people AFAIK.

Saudi Arabia is different, ofc. They hate our guts and we hate theirs.

@M.A.R. Oh, I know there's a lot less political correctness in the Middle East generally :-)

6:35 PM

@Randal'Thor We call him Molana. His work is extremely spiritual. He's the Terrence Malick of poets

Q: Why are the names Rumi and Mevlana respectively used for the famous poet?

@M.A.R. I have an open deadlineless offer of a bounty for a good well-supported answer to this:

This famous Persian poet and mystic was named Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī (جلال‌الدین محمد بلخى‎) or Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (جلال‌الدین محمد رومی), where Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad was his actual personal name while Balkhī and Rūmī were nisbas referring respectively to his birthplace and the plac...

You are requiring me to research and read

Not requiring anything, just advertising a little to someone who might be well placed to answer :-)

@Randal'Thor Americans probably take great interest in him because some dude did it first. But I dunno if he's the greatest Persian poet, or even if that title makes sense. Sana'i, also a great poet, brought spiritualism and sufi ideology to lyric poetry, and Molana raised it to perfection

You can try Hafez and Sa'adi next

And Nezami

Nezami is the master of . . . romance? Yeah probably romance

Or some more recent poets, like Nima

@M.A.R. That analogy doesn't mean anything to me, as I'm neither American nor a film aficionado.

Thanks for the recommendations. I knew about Hafez and Rumi/Molana, but not (or I forgot about) Sana'i, Sa'adi, Nezami, and Nima.

7:46 PM

@Randal'Thor Heh, sorry. I often complain that the world is bigger than America but I tend to default native speakers of English to being American. You were English?

2 hours later…

9:50 PM

@M.A.R. Andoran.

@EddieKal no u

@M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ