Two Appearances in Maryland: A poetry reading from “The Silence Of Men” and “Translation as Plagiarism as Cultural Transmission: How Benjamin Franklin Helped Bring Classical Iranian Literature Into English”

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I don’t know Mary­land geog­ra­phy well at all, but if you are any­where near either of the places where I will be appear­ing, it would be lovely to see you there.

Read­ing from The Silence Of Men

On Fri­day, May 15th, I will be read­ing from my book of poems The Silence Of Men at Coco’s But­ter Café, which is located at 7361 Assateague Dr., Unit 1040, Colum­bia, MD 20794 (direc­tions). From what I have been told, the café serves great choco­late and other desserts, great wine and lovely appe­tiz­ers. Here’s the rest of the rel­e­vant information:

Doors Open/Open mic signup: 7 PM
Open Mic Begins: 8 PM
Fea­ture Begins: around 9 PM
Cover: $10 gen­eral admission/$5 for open mic poets

Trans­la­tion as Pla­gia­rism as Cul­tural Trans­mis­sion: How Ben­jamin Franklin Helped Bring Clas­si­cal Iran­ian Lit­er­a­ture Into Amer­i­can English

On Sun­day, May 17, at a meet­ing of the Iranian-American Cul­tural Soci­ety of Mary­land, I will be giv­ing a talk and read­ing from my trans­la­tions of two mas­ter­pieces by the 13th cen­tury Iran­ian poet Saadi, Gulis­tan and Bus­tan. At the cen­ter of my talk is the story of a pla­gia­rism scan­dal involv­ing Ben­jamin Franklin that resulted from pub­li­ca­tion of a story that he claimed was a chap­ter of Gen­e­sis, but which had actu­ally been writ­ten by Saadi.

When: 1:30 – 3:00
Where: Tow­son Uni­ver­sity, 7800 York Build­ing, Room 121, Tow­son, MD 21252
Infor­ma­tion: (410) 258‑6651

Admis­sion is free.

3 thoughts on “Two Appearances in Maryland: A poetry reading from “The Silence Of Men” and “Translation as Plagiarism as Cultural Transmission: How Benjamin Franklin Helped Bring Classical Iranian Literature Into English””

  3. If you google a book called A Gram­mar of the Per­sian Lan­guage – it should come up in Google Books – and make sure you look at the 1869 edi­tion, there is a dis­cus­sion of this story some­where in, I believe, the appen­dix. Unfor­tu­nately, I do not have my sources handy here. Even­tu­ally, I will post more on this in more detail.