Omar Khayyam's rendee deedam

Leyla: Alright. Well, Alan Eyre thank you so much for being on the podcast today. 

Alan: It is an honor.  

Leyla: Well, I went through our emails and here I got an e-mail. Do you know when you first emailed me? 

Alan:  Um, five years ago? 

Leyla: No, time flies. It was ten years ago. November 2014. So you were my first email. You sent me an email and you were like, damet garm, you're doing great work. And it was the first I forwarded it to my husband I forwarded it to my business partner and I was like, oh my gosh, we are on to something. First I thought it was fake and I looked you up and I have the emails, I have the receipt where I was like, he has 29,000 followers on Twitter and I think this is actually him. He's the State Department first Persian language State Department person.

Alan: Or the last, yeah, yeah. 

Leyla: I was so excited. It was my first, like celebrity email that I received. 

Alan: When that was damet garm ten years ago. So now it's damet garm mosā’af, Double. Now you're like this massive corporation cranking out great stuff.

 Leyla: I know I'm still I'm still here, but I feel like that was, you know, it was such a big like encouragement for me at the time because you wrote to me about how it was helping you to understand the culture a little bit. 

Alan: Oh it's fantastic. I still, there's still stuff you put out, and maybe I shouldn't say this, but I'm like, hey, I didn't know that. I've been doing this since 1984 and I don't know how to say this, yeah. 

Leyla: That's amazing but thank you so much for writing back then. And you know those small things that you do like mean a lot to a person. And here I am still ten years later, still. 

Alan: Fantastic. So thank you for filling a gap, you know. 

Leyla: I really appreciate it. But yeah, I want to I want to go back and for people that don't know you, can you introduce yourself and say what you do? Let’s start there. 

Alan: My name is Alan Eyre. What I do now is not much. I recently retired, But for most of my career, I was a government worker. Most of that time was with the State Department. And because I love all things Persian and have been able to speak for an American pretty good Persian for a long time, I got I was fortunate enough to be involved with a lot of Iran-related stuff at the State Department. I was the only diplomat who was part of the full time the team that did the U.S.- Iran, well actually not just U.S.- Iran, the P5+1 nuclear negotiations with Iran from 2010 to 2015. I was the subject matter expert for the U.S. delegation and then also they asked me to be the State Department's Persian language spokesperson. sokhangooyé Farsi zabaané vezārat amooré kharājeh, responsible for explaining U.S. positions and policies to Iranian audiences. Now for a couple of years, that just meant talking to expatriate Iranian media like BBC Persian or Voice of America or Radio Farda. But when President Rouhani became president and the pace of negotiations picked up in 2013, I also started getting access to Iranian media inside Iran, and so did that until we did the JCPOA.

Leyla: Wow. So very formative years in Iran- America relations. 

Alan: Yeah, it was, it was different. 

Leyla: Yeah. So what was, what was your interest in the Persian language? When did it start? When did you start learning Persian? 

Alan: Yeah, you know, it's funny because I was again, I'll be saying all to you, because you're such a good interviewer, I’ll be confessing all these things I really shouldn't confess. Hopefully, you're not recording this.

Leyla: We're recording. You're on record.

Alan: I know, I know. You know, I was a college student and I was studying English literature and English poetry. I loved poetry. I love cavalier poetry, which I don't know if you know, is 17th-century British poetry. Like, gather you rosebuds while you may take advantage of, you know, of life. And I was very into sort of Sufi mystic stuff, and I decided to try and learn Persian just because, you know, reading translations of poems is, I mean translations of poems aren't the same poem translated. They're different poems. Like if you read Fitzgerald's translations of Khayyam, they're beautiful, but they're not the original. Right?

Leyla: Right. 

Alan: Well, I just sort of, you know, I decided to give it a shot at that point, I was living in Los Angeles. Or “Tehrangeles”. This is back in the eighties, and I don't know why, but almost from the moment I started learning Persian, it just viscerally bothered me that there were words I didn't know. And, you know, there were phrases I didn't know. I wanted to be fluent immediately.

Leyla: Wow. 

Alan: So that just sort of fueled this desire just to learn Persian. You know, language is sort of like an organ of perception. And I like the way the world looked through Persian. So when I got to State Department much later, I was already pretty good at Persian. I was, you know, it's like, what do they say now? Man plans and God laughs, you know, it's like I never, it sort of happened. 

Leyla: So it was by way of poetry. 

Alan: Yeah, poetry and literature. Yeah, poetry. I love poetry. I still do. 

Leyla: Amazing. So do you remember your first, was it through Fitzgerald, or what was your first exposure to Iranian poetry?

Alan: Yeah, I would read the translations of Khayyam. And then, you know Molano Rumi pretty much those. A lot of the mystical stuff because again, who isn’t sort of mystical in their college years, you know? So it wasn't like I was a motivated student studying finance and wanting to get a job on Wall Street. I was just sort of, you know, hanging out and but I loved reading and I loved poetry and I loved literature. So, like, for example, I also loved and still do Walt Whitman. 

Leyla: Right. 

Alan: Who to my mind, has to be Persian, because Leaves of Grass is like a Persian poem. It's like this. It's different in a way. But that same sensibility, or at least that's what you know. So yeah. 

Leyla: Yeah. Are you a fan of Sohrab Sepehri? 

Alan: Okay, You know, I say I'm an Iran doost, but I'm not an Iran shenās. 

Leyla: Okay. 

Alan: I love Iran but I'm not an expert. I didn't go to graduate school or study, but I've read some of his poems. But mostly, you know, the ones I've read most are, you know, Hāfez, Saadi, Khayyam Rumi, I tried Ferdowsi but boy, it's got a lot of words. I just have no idea what they are. Whereas, you know, with those other poets I mentioned, you know, you know all the words and sort of plumbing the depths of the poem is hard. But with Ferdowsi, just the entry into the surface of the poem is tough because I don't know a lot of these words because they're pure Persian. 

Leyla: Right. Well, even your even these other poets that you said, you know, now there's still such a lack of resources to learn the Persian language. 

Alan: Yeah. 

Leyla: How did you do it back then? What was your journey? 

Alan: You know, again I started in the eighties. Once I joined State and I was working on Persian as as a job, it became a lot easier. Like, for example, I did two tours in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and there, there are so many Iranians. So I was speaking all the time, you know, a lot of what I did before then, I did a lot of reading because you don't need, obviously, someone else to read. I mean, getting through my first book in Persian took just an incredibly long time. And I don't have the book still. But, you know, I'm sure I looked up one word every sentence. You know, it got to the point where I had a Persian dictionary and I could open to the right page just by experience, I sort of knew where everything was. So they, you know, they say in Persian kāré neekoo karadan ast por kardan ast. To do something well, you have to do it often. But sometimes people ask me, they go, what's the secret to learning, you know, language? You must be so smart. And I'm like, I'm not smart at all. It's just a question of I loved it so I spent a lot of time doing it. And for languages at least, it's not like solving a geometric theorem where you, you know, you jump out of the bathtub naked and go eureka. It's just a question of the more hours you do, I think at least, the better you get.

Leyla: Right. And do you have a lot of Iranians around you now that you practice with and speak with? 

Alan: No, that's a shame. Since around 2016, my last job working on Iran for the State Department ended when the nuclear negotiations ended or about a year later, 2016. And then I did other stuff for the State Department till 2023, then I retired. I have some friends, but and my Persian is probably about 80% of what it was. But now I really don't, you know, spend a lot of time talking every day. Again, when I was working for the State Department, I spent hours every day reading Iranian media, you know, reading the news accounts or watching, you know, video. I talked to someone the other day actually in Persian. I went and had tea with someone and spoke in Persian for about 2 hours and I could do it. It was fine. It was you know, it was it was intelligible and everything, but it wasn't, you know, I was I was off a little bit off my game. 

Leyla: Yeah. No, it's definitely something you have to keep practicing or else you lose it for sure. 

Alan: But also, I tell you like when I started in 19- in the mid-eighties, because I graduated college in 81 or 82, 84, you know, again, this is old man talk, there was no Internet, I couldn't download stuff. You know, there was you know, there were a couple of bookstores you could go to and buy Persian books, you know, and in Los Angeles, there are a lot of Iranians you could talk to, but it's so much easier now to learn Persian, thanks to you and to others. And you know, it's just a question of will. It’s not a question of capability. 

Leyla: Absolutely. But, you know, when I first started this program, I've been working on it slowly. I told you I'm an architect and so that was my day job. And I slowly worked on this program. I always thought when I started, you know, podcasts were first just coming out, YouTube, all this stuff. I always thought, okay, some big corporation is going to come along pretty soon and I'll be like, you know, irrelevant. They'll like, do the job. You know, I was trying to fill a gap, but every year I keep like I just keep going and I'm like, where? Where is everyone? Like what’s going on? 

Alan: Looking over your shoulder. 

Leyla: Yeah. And it just hasn't. So what do you think it is about Persian that why is there such a lack of resources? 

Alan: A lot of it is the fact, again, at least from the government point of view, we don't have relations with them. For example, the State Department, you know, diplomats are as ambitious as everyone else, right? You want to learn a language partly to advance your career. If you speak Persian to the State Department, you can get posted in Tajikistan. And that's it. I mean, there's there's there's there's positions for Persian language speakers to follow Iran outside of Iran. But I can remember even back in the 1980s, there was a teacher very famous at UCLA called Nikki Keddie, she’s written a lot of good books on Iran. And someone told me she was telling her students that, you know, go study Turkish, because you know, where you know, where are you going to do fieldwork if you study Persian? You know, I'm good friends with a retired American diplomat, John Limbert, right. John Limbert was what we called one of the Iran-nosaurus. He was a U.S. diplomat who was actually based in Iran. He was one of the hostages also. But before that, he had he had been to the Peace Corps in Iran. He studied Iran and Persian literature under Richard Frye at Harvard, who was a legend. You know, he has a he has a doctorate in Persian studies. So this guy's a real adeeb. You know, he's the real deal. But they all left the State Department eventually, you know, they and so now they're people like me who are left who are, yeah, you know, I was really good in Persian, but I've never been to Iran. Right. Not once.

Leyla: Right. So you still have not been to Iran? 

Alan: Never. Never. 

Leyla: Wow. So then how did you like when you were doing this negotiations, I mean, there's so many cultural aspects to that like just Iranians and Americans speak so differently. So was that a big barrier in terms of like the tārof stuff and all that? Did that come up a lot?

 Alan: It it it helped. But I mean, first of all, I mean, the beginning of the negotiations, the Iranian side, none of them spoke English fluently enough to talk with us in English, but that didn't matter because we weren't talking bilaterally anyway. This is before Rouhani when Ahmadinejad was president. 

Leyla: Right. 

Alan: And then when Rouhani became president, he you know, he picked Mohammad Javad Zarif as his foreign minister. And there were two deputy foreign ministers who spoke English. And, you know, they speak English better than I do, you know. 

Leyla: Right. 

Alan: So there was no need for translation, you know, starting around 2013. And in terms of the cultural stuff, yeah, that helped. But, you know, the discord between Iran and the United States over the decades is not due to cultural misunderstanding. It's due to real strategic differences. So the cultural stuff helps and knowledge of Iran helps and Iranian history helps. But in and of itself, that's not I mean, it's almost like a necessary but not sufficient condition. You know, it's very good, obviously, to have people when you're dealing with Iran who know about Iran, expertise is, you know, is a good thing. But that doesn't deny the fact that there are, at least in terms of our bilateral relations with Iran, there are substantive strategic differences that have to be worked on. 

Leyla: Right. Right. Well, so I've invited you here to talk about Persian poetry, because you've always been a big proponent of Iranian poetry. And, you know, you recite I've seen recitations of yours and favorite poems that you have. So for years we've been talking about doing this and talking about a little bit of your favorite poems. So we have a series on our poetry series. So I started this series a few years ago after I was kind of burned out on teaching grammar and vocabulary. I was like, you know, we could just learn the language through poetry. So what I do in these lessons is I go over poems and, you know, you know this, like poems that are Persian poems are very interesting in that poems that were written hundreds of years ago use the exact same language that we use now. I don't know if it was the same. What was the poetry that you were talking about? The British poetry. 

Alan: Cavalier poetry. 

Leyla: Yeah, is it the same there? 

Alan: No, it’s different. Well, look at Chaucer. Totally different. No one speaks like that. 

Leyla: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 

Alan: Yeah or Shakespeare, you know. 

Leyla: Right, right, Shakespeare, yeah it’s like evolved a lot. 

Alan: Verily, I doth say it’s unto thee, it’s like nah. 

Leyla: Right? Exactly. But then Persian poetry a lot of these sentences we could just use right out of the gate. That's pretty interesting. So then we have this series called shabé shehr where we just take a few lines from poems. I told you to choose four lines of any poet that you want. 

Alan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Leyla: And you chose Khayyam. Yep. So should we get right into it? And this is actually very interesting. Like you said, it's so hard to translate a lot of these words, and you really need to learn them in the original language. And the very first word of this poem, you sent me a six page long article which I read, which was very interesting. And it's funny. The the long poem that we're doing right now is by Hafez, and it has rend very prominently featured. It's aybé rendān makon. So do not fault the rend. And we also we recorded this a couple of weeks ago. We also had a fun time trying to translate “rend”. So I asked you to find a translation. So I'm going to ask you to read the Persian and I'll read the translation line by line, and I'm going to read the translation that you sent, even though it is very lacking. And then we'll go through and we’ll translate it ourselves. 

Alan: That's good. And I, you know, when you ask me to do this, I went through I've been carrying this book around for a long, long time. And because, you know, Iranians have this incredible memory. 

Leyla: Right. 

Alan: And I remember once, 20 years ago, an Iranian says to me, “you want to hear a poem?” I’m like “yeah, sure.” And I just thought it would be three or four lines. And half an hour later, this guy stops talking. And I was like oh my God, I'm dying here. You know, because, you know, he was an older guy. And and, you know, at that age, they just memorize stuff. 

Leyla: Absolutely. 

Alan: To include poems. So anyway, I would write down poems in here, and the one I'm doing is one of the first ones I ever memorized myself. It’s only four lines. 

Leyla: Okay. 

Alan: And the authorship is disputed, but I think it's Khayyam. And it goes 

rendee deedam neshasté bar khengé zameen 

Leyla: A sage was seated on barren Earth. 

Alan: na kofr ō na eslām ō na donyā vō na deen

Leyla: Freed of guilt, desire, heresy or faith 

Alan: na hagh na hagheeghat na sharee'at na yagheen 

Leyla: With no gospel, heresy, belief or doubt. 

Alan: andar dō jahān kerā bovad zahré-yé een 

Leyla: Who in the two Earth has such courage? 

Alan: Bah bah. 

Leyla: Alright. 

Alan: That's a baller poem. 

Leyla: Yeah, so this is the first poem that you memorized. Why? Tell us that first and then. 

Alan: Because again, because of the the mystic connotations, you know, it's this whole and I sort of later I got into, I got into Buddhism and stoicism, and there's a sort of very interesting intersection between all three of these. But it's, you know, it's it's just the sense you get of this guy sitting who has just divested himself of all these beliefs that support people, you know, and is just existing again, without the, these props that so many of us use just to get through the day and to make sense of the world. And, you know, the final line, 

kerā bovad zahré-yé een 

Who has this courage? You know and again it's the whole, you know, again in Sufi and Tasawwuf you know, the process of purging yourself and of getting rid of things just so you become who you are. You know, that's a very I mean, there's lots of different strains in Persian poetry I like. There's a whole separate strain that Saadi has of sort of like a conduct manual like you read, you know, Golestan-e Saadi and he has, you know, and the benefits of contentment or on the benefits of silence. It's sort of like how to books. But there's also this separate strain of it's almost two part. One is, you know, just purge yourself of all these delusions, what the Buddhists call dharma and also, you know, like gather you rosebuds, enjoy the day, may khor, drink wine, you know, just live in the present. 

Leyla: Yes. Khayyam is very, very carpe diem. But yeah, let’s go over it. Let's start from the beginning and kind of go over it line by line. 

Alan: Okay. 

Leyla: See what we come up with. So the first line again. 

Alan: rendee deedam neshasté bar khengé zameen 

Leyla: Okay, so first of all, rendee deedam. So I saw a rend. 

Alan: Yeah. 

Leyla: So what is a rend? 

Alan: It depends depends when you ask because rend has this as you read the article, has this polarity, it can be like this debauched libertine, sort of like, you know, the like in the old highlight magazines, you've got kids. They had Goofus and Gallant and Gallant was the good kid and Goofus was just the kid you don't want your kid to be. Doing all the wrong things. And so one meaning of rend is that, you know, just someone who gives in to excess and drinking wine and hanging out and sloth and just sort of, you know, not really a motivated individual.

Leyla: I think my like gut translation of it is a rascal or a scoundrel, you know. 

Alan: Rogue I've heard also. 

Leyla: Rogue, oh that’s a good one. A rogue. Yeah. But like the article said that it had this negative connotation but then often in poetry it kind of switches around to this like, so right now we're looking at this person, this rend, and in this poem, it might take on a different meaning than like a negative, like scoundrel. 

Alan: Yeah, Yeah. And in this poem, it's the exact opposite. It just, you know, it flips. It's this person who's pure and sort of more khāless, more not refined, but just as yeah, more pure, I think more of a mystic, you know, it's sort of, again, the whole, the whole dichotomy. So much of the Persian poetry I love is between the surface of the inside, the zāher, and the bātan, you know, the inner and the outer. 

Leyla: Right. 

Alan: And, you know, this is someone who inside has achieved that purity despite the outward appearance of being a thug or rogue or libertine or whatever.

Leyla: Right. Although we haven't gotten there yet. So basically, the first line is just saying, I’ve seen this rend. 

Alan: Yeah, I saw this guy. And it's funny, for years I thought it was konak zameen. But actually it's khengé zameen. And kheng means two things. Kheng can mean like idiot. 

Leyla: Right? 

Alan: Khengé khodā. It's like, you know, this really not smart person, but it also can mean gray or white. So it's interesting. I'm not really clear what kheng means other than just, you know, it’s like bare Earth, you know. 

Leyla: Yeah. 

Alan: Or gray Earth.

Leyla: Unbarren Earth. 

neshasté bar khengé zameen Zameen. 

Alan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Leyla: yeah. 

Alan: And again he's not sitting in a chair, you know, he's outside, he's in nature, he's sitting on the ground. 

Leyla: Right. And I like that it's like rendee deedam. So it's like describing this thing that they saw in the past. It's just in passing. I saw this rend sitting. 

Alan: Yeah, it happens a lot. It happens a lot in Persian poetry. Like, well, there are a couple of great other like two or three separate poems where a guy sees an owl talking, you know. 

Leyla: Yeah. 

Alan: It's always like, I saw this and then the moral gets delivered, yeah. 

Leyla: Right. Okay, so then the next line. 

Alan: na kofr ō na eslām ō na donyā ō na deen 

Leyla: I love the way that rolls out like, and I love that na donyā õ na deen. Like it just rolls and rolls and rolls. 

Alan: It's like, yeah, exactly. 

Leyla: So na kofr. So what's kofr? 

Alan: Kofr, you know, kofr is the opposite of belief. Kofr is someone who denies, you know, the truth. 

Leyla: Okay. 

Alan: So kofr is like, you know, kāfer comes from that. You know, you look at the Arabic root kfr, k, f, r, kofr means like disbelief. Yeah. 

Leyla: Yeah. And then when you're, like, exasperated with something, you say, kofram darāmad. 

Alan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. 

Leyla: It’s an expression of exasperation. 

Alan: Yeah, yeah.

Leyla: So na kofr ō na eslām So eslām. 

Alan: Yeah, again, the opposite. He says it has neither of these two opposites. 

Leyla: Right, ō na donyā, not the Earth, ō na deen, not heaven nor Earth. 

Alan: Yeah. So, again, the two worlds of, you know, not this world or the next, you know, just breath. 

Leyla: Right. Okay. Next line. 

Alan: And again, it goes on to develop this theme, you know, the second or third line. 

na hagh na hagheeghat na sharee'at na yagheen 

So again. vāgheyat again is truth. That's like you know, it's the realization like that famous apostate who said an alhagh. I am the truth. So the hagh na hagheeghat same sort of thing like the reality, right? And na sharee'at which is the Sharia, which is sort of the body of knowledge that comes with Islam, at least that's my understanding. And here's the one I like the best. na yagheen. No certainty. 

Leyla: Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Alan:  Yeah. You know, it's like, wow. Yeah, yeah. Just divest of all those things. 

Leyla: Wow. Okay. And again, again another rolling I love how it just rolls. One on to the other. Just from the like lyrical perspective, it's really nice. 

Alan: Yeah. And again, all negative. Yeah. Yeah. It's because it's so many of these sort of religions or ways of views, ways of seeing things. You can only describe it by what it's not. So and then the fourth line, you know, in case you didn't figure it out, tells you 

andar dō jahān kerā bovad zahré-yé een 

And again, because I'm not an adeeb, I don't know why it's bovad. I think that must be some sort of subjunctive and classical Persian of the verb ‘to be’ and I know you’d know better than I would. But you know, you see bovad a lot in Persian poetry, you know, for a way of saying to be. So in the two worlds, who has this courage? Right. You know, which again it sort of shows perception in how you look at things can be an act of courage. It takes courage to divest yourself of all these things that that makes sense of the world to you. 

Leyla: What's the word ‘zahré’ mean? 

Alan: Zahré is courage. 

Leyla: Courage, okay. 

Alan: It has lots of different meanings, but in this it’s like courage. Like jorāt. 

Leyla: And what is the dō jahān? Is it like heaven and Earth? What is the two? 

Alan: I think so. Again, that must be a specific cosmology relating to beliefs back then, because I see dõ jahān a lot. I'm assuming it's this world and the next. But it would be interesting if, you know, of your many followers, one who's a real adeeb can tell us that. And again that shows you that the nice thing I like about Persian poetry is that you don't have to be like Abdolkarim Soroush, you know, an expert to get benefit. Here I am, a guy from the West you know raised you know, baby boom. And even though my Persian is not fantastic, I get stuff out of this poem and, you know, that's what good poetry does. Poetry is like you get you get something at every level. And the deeper you go, the more you get. 

Leyla: Right. Exactly. 

Alan: Especially Persian poetry. 

Leyla: Yes. And I think that it's one of those poems that I can see in different life situations. It suddenly just like hits you and you can understand it. And all that's happened in the poem. I love that the only action is that he’s seen a guy sitting on the ground. 

Alan: I know. I don't think we could make a movie of this poem. Yeah. I’m not betting on the film rights to this poem, you know, lying on the ground. 

Leyla: Yeah. But I do love it. I love the I love the rhyme and the rhythm. And I love that this, this imagery that it gives. 

Alan: Yeah, Khayyam is great. You know, these rubāiyats, these four lines. He has lots of these in each one. It's it's like all wheat, no chaff, you know, I mean it's just it's like the sonnet form in English poetry where just the constraints that are put upon you to write it force you to really have just load every line with precision and depth and meaning. 

Leyla: Right, right. And yeah, what we do in these lessons so I'll go over this, I'll have a second lesson where I'll go over this line by line, word by word, and teach kind of how to use these in present conversation. And again, it, it opens it up a lot to like more interpretation or people to bring their own experiences into these words. And again, like when you read this when we read this translation here, it's just so flat versus there's so much discussion we can have about each of these words in the Persian, which I love. 

Alan: And I'm sure when this airs I'll get emails or something saying, you idiot, Alan, you’ve totally overlooked this, this, this, this and this. You know, that's great. 

Leyla: Yeah, yeah, it’ll be nice. Well, well, we welcome those. And yeah, we ask the students to actually memorize these and recite it for us as well. So we get a lot of videos like that. But I like, you know, I feel like when you do memorize these poems, it does take on a different meaning as well, because it's kind of like it's kind of like Yo-Yo Ma playing his cello. He says that you learn these pieces decades ago. And as he changes like the piece changes. 

Alan: Exactly. 

Leyla: It just gets in his bones. And I feel that very much about these poems as well. 

Alan: Oh yeah, like that same that famous saying I forget who you can't stick your foot in the same river twice. Not only because the river changes, but you change. So yeah, you visit the same poem years later and yeah, it's a different poem. Because you're a different you. 

Leyla: Does Persian poetry come up for you in your like day to day life now? 

Alan: I like to still read it. I like to still go through this book. I mean, for a while I knew this, you know, meslé kafé dast, I had memorized all these poems. Now I've forgotten a lot of them, but I'm I'm sort of trying again. So yeah, it's again, it's you know, there was a practice in the old days of just rereading, you know, back before the whatever, before the publication explosion, the information explosion, people didn't have that many books. And so you reread books. You know, you had a couple of books that were classics and you reread them. It's the same with poetry. You know, you're not reading a poetry to find out who did it. You know, Mr.Green in the library with a knife. You know, It's because it has something, as I said, that that's what's so great about poetry, is that all the, all the detritus is stripped away, and it's nothing but meaning, you know. So yeah, I like I mean, I often pick up this book or I have lots of Persian poetry books. I also cheat. I have a lot of Persian poetry books where the English is also there, you know. Yeah, yeah. Or like what I'll do is I’ll, you know, these days with Google or YouTube, you know, I love listening to it to hear, you know, someone with a, you know, a better accent than mine read it. So yeah, it's it's, you know, Persian, especially Persian poetry, is you know, it's a gift that keeps on giving. You can keep coming back to it and keep deriving pleasure from it. 

Leyla: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing this one with us. I’m going to link to that article that you sent about the rend because I think that’s very important and applicable to a lot that we've learned. And then we'll have another episode where we go over these word by word, and maybe you and I can get together again and do another one of these from your book. 

Alan: That would be wonderful. I thank you for giving me the opportunity. And again, massive kudos to you for doing such a such an essential service to the Persian community and to the community of those people who want to learn Persian. 

Leyla: Same with you. Thank you for everything that you've done for the Iranian community and your words of encouragement from ten years ago. It meant so much. All right.