Mourning across Centuries and Languages: A Poem’s Six-Hundred-Year Journey

Grief over the loss of a child is well known to be especially difficult and intractable. Across cultures, people have long turned to poetry in times of mourning. Years after the loss of his five-year old son, Ralph Waldo Emerson repeatedly translated an elegy written by a classical Persian, Muslim poet, Sa‘di, to mourn the loss of his child, as mediated by a nineteenth-century German translation of a sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkish commentary. What can we learn from the extraordinary journey this elegy makes across epochs, cultures, and languages about mourning, translation, and poetry’s capacity to help us grapple with grief through the words of another? 

Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His books include Poetry in a Global Age (2020), A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994). He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

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