Whispers of Oasis

A collaboration between an ethnographer, a bilingual poet, and an Anglo-Irish literature scholar, this multilingual volume includes 100 Likoos, a syllabic genre of oral poetry, in their original Roudbari, accompanied by English and Persian translations. Likoo is one of the oldest and most concise forms of oral poetry in the Iranian plateau. Composed in the languages of the people of Roudbar and Balochistan in southeast Iran, Likoos are a testament to the cultural diversity and linguistic richness of the region. Likoos echo the lives of people in Roudbar, the lives of those living in the oasis, surrounded by the desert. They depict life in the desert with all its hardships, challenges, and failures. Likoos are the poetry of short joys and continuous hardship, reflecting the brutality of life dominated by nomadic social relations. They are the voice of a lover who catches a glimpse of his beloved in the desert, the call of a camel driver in the lonely nights of the desert on a dry path, or the mourning over the death of a young person due to tribal violence. The publication of this work has been supported by a 2021 Persian Heritage Foundation grant for publication. Mahdi Ganjavi is a distinguished historian specializing in education, literature, print, and translation within the Middle East. A former Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy (SESP), he currently teaches at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. His work focuses on the transnational history of literature, education, translation, print and publication, the cultural Cold War and the politics of archive and historiography in contemporary Middle East. His scholarly writings have appeared in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Iranian Studies, and Review of the Middle East Studies. Ganjavi's translation of high modernist, eco-poetry and New York School English poetry to Persian is published in several literary magazines such as Neveshta and Namomken. He has also contributed a translation to Shades of Truth: Iranian Short Fiction of the Fifth Generation in Translation (Mannani, M & E. Dehnavi Eds., Mazda, 2019). Amin Fatemi is a teacher, translator, and Irish literature scholar. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and is currently finishing his PhD on the early work of Samuel Beckett and phenomenology at the University of Reading. He is the general editor of Longit¿din¿s, a multilingual magazine for creative writing, literary translation, and the arts. He has taught courses on Samuel Beckett's prose, English and Irish poetry, poetic meter, and James Joyce's Ulysses. His current research focuses on the Irish language and literature written in modern Irish. Mansour Alimoradi is a Persian-language poet from Roudbar. Alimoradi undertook an ethnological effort to record and translate the oral tradition of Roudbar into Persian. This effort is part of his wider contributions to the study of Roudbar's poetry, folk culture, and costumes.