BALL & POLO STICK OR BOOK OF ECSTASY BY ARIFI. Translation & Introduction Paul Smith. Written by Maulana Mahmud Arifi (1389 1449) one of the last great Sufi poets of the Classical Period of Persian Poetry the Halnama or Book of Ecstasy often referred to as The Ball & Polostick an allegory in which the ball and the polostick are personified as types of Sufi mystical love and all the images are from the game of polo or as it was known at the time in Persia as chaugan. Arifi composed it, as he states in the epilogue of the 513 couplets masnavi... in two weeks in 1439 when he was fifty. In their introduction to their excellent literal translation of this poem Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. and Hossein Ziai state The underlying theme of Arifis work is selfsacrificing love, a conceptualization that was derived from the Sufi ideal of love, this love not only by definition is unrequited but also demands the ultimate death of the lover. In terms of mystical speculative philosophy, the "death" of the lover is the annihilation of selfhood and selfawareness, or egoconsciousness, or, in other terms, the total absorption of the lovers own consciousness of self into that of the beloved. On the purely mystical level, this represents the annihilation of the individual soul, the lover, into the godhead, the beloved. This is the first translation in the poetic form of the masnavi. The Introduction contains chapters on The Life & Times of Arifi, The Game of Polo, Polo in Persian & Sufi Poetry,...

Binding: Paperback;184 pages; Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC - KDP; Classification: N/A; Weight: 498.3 g; Dimensions: N/A

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