Ivstinivs, whan you’ve finished Irwin’s companion to the Arabian nights, try his Night, Horses and the Desert, which is the best, most readable anthology of Classical Arabic literature I know. He doesn’t translate himself, but uses a wide variety of earlier translations into English.
So what am I reading?
Classics: L. Whibley’s Companion to Greek Studies (4th and last edition, 1931) which is a great storehouse of information on Greek culture and literature. Some info may now be disregarded, but the vast majority is solid. If you ever wanted to know how to fold your himation, this is your book! I’m also reading Dr. John Potter’s Historiae Graecae, an English overview of classical Greek culture and history, in a 1720-ish edition as a sort of base-line study of the classics, partly to get some perspective on how our views have changed. And lots of stuff onthe Greek theatre for my OU course.
Greek: I’m trying to slowly make my way through Michael Psellus’ Chronography in the rather nice Mondadori parallel Greek/Italian edition. And lots of Greek playwrights for my OU course, but in translation as my Greek’s not q. up to verse yet.
Italian: Oxford Book of Italian Verse, but just dipping in. It’s the first time I’ve read Leopardi, so the good times are rolling!
German: Re-reading Rilke, always a great pleasure. I don’t know of a greater poet.
What else? A friend lent me a copy of Seierstad’s Bokhandlaren i Kabul, which is rather interesting.
Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets is a lively over-view of English poetry, and has made me order John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which I’m to pick up tomorrow. In earlier English literature, I’m also reading Manderville’s Travels, which, I am astonished to find, are highly accurate (bar the addition of the odd dragon or two). And I keep ploughing on with Langland’s Piers Plowman, and will have to leave Gower till I finish.
I found a lovely verse translation of Nizami’s Laili va Majnun and finished it on the train to my parents’ this morning. It’s called The Loves of Laili and Majnun: a Poem from the original Persian of Nizami by James Atkinson (Esq, of the Honorable East India Company’s medical service). The David Nutt edition (1894) is a nice size to slip into the pocket - and cheaper than the more readily available first edition.
On an odder note, I’ve just started The European in India, or Anglo-Indian’s Vade-Mecum by E.C.P. Hull (1878, just reprinted by Asian Educational Services, New Delhi), which is, according to the subtitle, ‘a handbook of useful and practical information for those proceeding to or residing in the East Indies, relating to Outfits, Routes, Time of Departure, Indian Climate, Housekeeping, Servants, etc., etc.; also an account of Anglo-Indian social customs and Native character’. Very interesting, though I’ve hardly read a dozen pages yet.
On a more contemporary note, I’m reading The Speckled People, a book of memoirs by Hugo Hamilton, an author with a German mother and Irish father, on his childhood in Ireland after the War. Really worth reading.
Fiction? Pamuk’s Benim adim kirmizi (English: My Name is Red). Excellent historical novel of a philosophical sort. Recommended.
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You’re close enough to Schoenhofs to visit it! I would be destitute. I can never move anywhere near Cambridge, MA.