Learn Persian with Chaiian Conversation,

Hoffez's Eiber, Eberd, Salombehammiqi and welcome to part two of our discussion about Hoffa's beautiful poem,

Eber and Don Makon.

So in the first episode, we were joined by Mohamed Ali of Persian Poetics, and we went over the

overall message of the poem and got a good understanding of it as a whole, what different

words and phrases might mean and their significance

in the context of the poem. He read the poem in Persian, and I repeated an English translation.

But as we said in the last episode, the English translation of these poems are woefully lacking.

It is impossible to fully translate anything. And with poetry, where language needs to be so targeted and so precise, it's nearly impossible.

You can get an good overall idea of the meaning of something through a translation, but to truly understand it, to understand the nuance and the depth, you really have to understand the original

language. So with that in mind, in these subsequent episodes, I'm going to go over the poem again,

word by word, phrase by phrase. As we said in the last episode, the beauty of Hoffez's poetry

is that even though it was written centuries ago, we can still clearly understand

it. So these words are relevant in our conversation today. So by the end of this series, not only

will you understand this poem intimately, but you'll also understand these words and phrases

intimately as well, and learn how to use them in everyday conversation. So I wanted to start this

lesson by having us listen to my Aunt Farnas recite the entire poem. Farnas has a beautiful voice

for reciting poetry, so in each of these subsequent poetry lessons, we use her recitation as a

reference. I want you to listen to the poem, maybe with your eyes closed, and let the words

just wash over you. You're all at different stages of learning the Persian language. Some of you

are complete beginners to learning the language and others are more advanced. So some of you

might not understand a word in the poem yet, while others might find some of the words familiar.

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