Location: Home > Languages > Classical, Early & Medieval > The Ocean in a Jar: the Rubayat of Baba Tahir Hamadani

The Ocean in a Jar: the Rubayat of Baba Tahir Hamadani

Author: Baba Tahir Hamadani
Creator: David Pendlebury
Publisher: Exposure Publishing
Category: Book

List Price: ~~Ł11.99~~
Buy New: Ł10.46
You Save: Ł1.53 (13%)

New (12) Used (4) from Ł10.46

Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

1 reviews
Sales Rank: 617169

Media: Paperback
Edition: First Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 132
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.4

ISBN: 1846852625
Dewey Decimal Number: 491
EAN: 9781846852626
ASIN: 1846852625

Publication Date: September 7, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new print-on-demand paperback delivered in the UK in 5-7 days.

Similar Items:

•	In Arabian Nights

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

Across time... across cultures... it's back! December 1, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

It has been suggested on BBC Radio 4 that reviews should be left to the professionals and that amateurs, especially on the internet, should be ignored. So please excuse me if this review lacks the Sunday magazine zip of the chosen few.

This is a beautifully translated, clearly written and fascinating book. Having read the quatrains for the first time, I immediately began asking myself the impertinent question `What is Baba Tahir's poetry about?' and was helped by a sympathetic and informative afterword. In fact, I probably would have given up without the afterword.

The translation was not poetically fluffy. It was brave and clear. The thoroughness and generosity of the information given with the book was striking. Unlike some translations the pages of the quatrains were not cluttered with annotations; but the context given by the translator in the afterword was so useful that by the second reading one felt a greater empathy and respect for the text.

The main emphasis of the quatrains seems to be on the heart. So, the quatrains could be read as `food for the heart'. In this scientific age it seems almost provocative to use a phrase like `food for the heart' but, there it is.

On the theme of the heart, it was not surprising to find two lines from a quatrain by Kalilullah Kahlili in the afterword:

My heart is, in all circumstances, my sustenance;
It is in this world of existence, my sovereign,
And when I am weary of the reign of reason,
God knows how grateful I am to my heart!

I feel grateful and fortunate to have found this book. Anyone who has read The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam (Omar Ali-Shah Translation), The Quatrains of Kahlilullah Khalili (Octagon Press), the first line of the Masnavi of Rumi (Octagon Press) or Sufi works translated by David Pendlebury will feel at home here.

To praise this work at all is a conceit. But, the least it deserves is five stars at Amazon!

As feeble self justification for my praise of this book, here is Baba Tahir's Quatrain 58 from The Ocean in a Jar translated by David Pendlebury:

From that first day when you created us,
what have you seen from us but sin?
O Lord, by the truth of your holy Saints,
pass me by: turn a blind eye to what you see.