TEHRAN – Iranian and Turkish literati will gather in meetings in this spring to discuss the works of Persian poet Sadi and Turkish mystic and poet Yunus Emre.
Tehran’s Book City Institute and Turkey’s Yunus Emre Cultural Center in Tehran have jointly organized the meetings, which will be held in Sadi’s hometown of Shiraz and Tehran, and in Emre’s hometown of Eskisehir and Ankara, Book City Deputy Director Ali-Asghar Mohammadkhani said in a press release on Sunday.
Book City will host meetings on April 16 and 17. Another meeting will be held in Shiraz on April 21, which is National Sadi Day.
Several meetings will be held in Ankara and Eskisehir in late May.
“Both Sadi and Emre were influential in their national literature and there are similarities in their words and their places in the Iranian and Turkish societies,” Mohammadkhani said.
Emre (c. 1240–1321) has exercised immense influence on Turkish literature, from his times until the present.
Because Yunus Emre is, after Ahmet Yesevi and Sultan Walad, one of the first known poets to have composed works in the spoken Turkish of his own age and region rather than in Persian or Arabic, his diction remains very close to the popular speech of his contemporaries in Central and Western Anatolia.
Sheikh Muslih od-Din Sadi Shirazi (C. 1213-1291) is one of the greatest figures of classical Persian literature, famous worldwide for his Bustan (The Orchard) and Golestan (The Rose Garden).
SB/YAW
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