It's just curiosity. Do you know any East poet but Omar Khayyam? (By the way he's Tajik poet, not persian.) East poetry is oldest (X century) and there's so great poets and poems. I just wonder have you ever heard about them?
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It's just curiosity. Do you know any East poet but Omar Khayyam? (By the way he's Tajik poet, not persian.) East poetry is oldest (X century) and there's so great poets and poems. I just wonder have you ever heard about them?
How east are you talking about?
Rumi is another one...
caspian, I'm moving this from General Literature to the Poems, Poets and Poetry section. You may get better responses there.
Rabindranath Tagore is a great bengali poet [India]. His Gitanjali won the Nobel Prize,,
many of his lines are mesmerizing. He wrote in English too and most of his famous writings are available in english.
Mind Without Fear by Tagore,,
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Tagore is a modern poet but (1861-1941)
Ya there are old poems and poets scattered around in east. One of the problems is they are in their native languages, most of them never translated and never known to outer world. So one cannot recommend them for anyone outside the language. Like if you take India,we have so many languages and in my language malayalam, we had many great old poets. We do learn them when we are in schools but the poetry never goes out of our malayalam world.
Some of my favorite poems are by Hafiz. I only wish I didn't need to rely on a translator.
I have a Beghavad Ghita at home and i think the words in it are beautiful :)Quote:
Originally Posted by rocksea
Bhagavat Gita is a part of epic called Mahabharata.. Gita is mostly a divine talk between Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield where the Pandavas including them fought the great battle against their cousins, the Kauravas.
yea, mahabharata is awesome. i read the comic book (there was a comic version in my place) and saw the movie series as well. My fav part of the story, beside the war, was when the Pandavas lost the game agains the Kauravas, and as the price, there was this woman (i forgot her name) which must be undressed. But there's this god (and i forgot the name also) who do a little "magic" , so when one of the Kauravas pull her fabric, it keeps going and going,,as if the fabrics has no end..
:) the woman is draupati, also known as panchali as she was wife to the five pandavas (panch means five). the god is krishna who came to rescue her. the pandavas felt helpless to save their wife and krishna came to rescue by providing an infinite length of saree..
Indeed..you know i live i Indonesia, and in the story of Mahabharata and Ramayana are very well known here. And the stories were assimilated with local stories and traditions. we have a puppet show called "wayang" which tells the stories of Mahabharata and Ramayana.
But personally, i think Ramayana is not as terrific as Mahabharata :)
are you basically indonesian? you know, the indian subcontinent, sri lanka, indonesia all are connected in ramayana. bali is one significant point in the epic.
ya mahabharata is much more terrific as it involves so many siginificant characters and the story is much complicated if you want to know all the threads and links.. and you find it more and more interesting if you get into all these..
The Bhagavad Gita, as with every religious text, has inspired me greatly; book 6 of the Gita would have to prove as my favorite. Though I consider more Buddhist, I spend time every now and then at a large Hindu temple in my city with monks who have studied the text for decades.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rocksea
yes, I'm Indonesian by birth. :)
And please do advise me the links ..aprriciate tyour info :)