The Shah Nameh: of the Persian Poet Firdausi [Hardcover]  (Hardcover, Translator: James Atkinson, Editor: J. A. Atkinson)

About The Book: The Shahnameh or Shahnama is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 50,000 "distichs" or couplets (two-line verses), the Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems. It tells mainly the mythical and to some extent the historical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. Iran, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the greater region influenced by Persian culture such as Armenia, Dagestan, Georgia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan celebrate this national epic. The work is of central importance in Persian culture and Persian language, regarded as a literary masterpiece, and definitive of the ethno-national cultural identity of Iran. Ferdowsi started writing the Shahnameh in 977 and completed it on 8 March 1010.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. About The Translator: Dr. James Atkinson (1780­1852), a notable British orientalist, a scholar of the Persian language and literature, and the translator of Ferdowsi’s Rostam o Sohrab, Neẓami’s Layli o Majnun, the popular Persian romance of Ḥatem Tai, and others. Atkinson was born in Durham on 9 March 1780, and demonstrated early on an exceptional talent for Versification. He studied medicine in Edinburgh and London, and was appointed assistant surgeon in the Bengal establishment in 1805. He studied Persian in his free time and in 1810 began his verse translation of the story of Sohrab. Although these translations reveal the many pitfalls of pioneer work in the field, still they are a marked improvement over the cumbersome phraseology and elaborate diction of such late eighteenth-century translators of the Shah Nameh as Joseph Champion. This tendency in turn reflects the departure in English Romanticism from the neo-Classical attitude towards Oriental literatures in general and towards epic poetry and poetic translation in particular.The Rev. James Augustus Atkinson (1780-1852), Honorary Canon of Manchester, died on Saturday at the age of 80, and his elder son, the Rev. Christie Chetwynd Atkinson, D.D., rector of Ashton-on-Mersey, died at The Whims, Conway, aged 55. Canon J. A. Atkinson was the third son of James Atkinson, the well-known Persian scholar who in 1832 produced a translation of the "Shah Nameh" of Firdausi.